Following a journalistic investigation jointly conducted with the international Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project (OCCRP), Civilnet.am suggested in March 2024 that the party led by Prime Minister Nikol Pashinian violated Armenia’s campaign finance rules enacted by itself. The independent publication reported, in particular, that many of its ostensible donors are unaware of large amounts of money contributed on their behalf to Civil Contract ahead of local elections held in various Armenian regions in 2022.
Pashinian’s party received 170 million drams ($440,000) from 140 persons, the vast majority of them its own election candidates. Civilnet.am randomly interviewed 31 such individuals and found that 15 of them categorically deny making any campaign donations.
“Others avoided answering or said they do not remember,” it said in an extensive article.
Critics suggested that Civil Contract arranged these shady payments to circumvent a legal cap on political donations. Pashinian flatly denied this. He claimed that the payments made on behalf of third persons unaware of them resulted from human or organizational “errors.”
Armenia’s state Commission on the Prevention of Corruption (CPC) was quick to appeal to prosecutors to look into the findings of the Civilnet/OCCRP investigation. The Office of the Prosecutor-General in turn instructed another law-enforcement agency, the Anti-Corruption Committee (ACC), to open a criminal case.
The ACC told RFE/RL’s Armenian Service this week that it closed the case late last year after finding no evidence of wrongdoing by Civil Contract. It refused to explain why the media report does not warrant criminal charges against any members of Pashinian’s party.
It also emerged that the CPC successfully challenged that decision in a Yerevan court that ordered law-enforcement authorities to reopen the probe early this year. Prosecutor-General Anna Vardapetian appealed against that ruling. Judicial proceedings regarding her appeal are still ongoing.
Armenia - The ruling Civil Contract party's mayoral candidate Tigran Avinian speaks during a campaign rally in Yerevan, September 5, 2023.
Another media outlet, Infocom.am, raised in January 2024 similar questions about lavish campaign donations received by the ruling party in the run-up to the September 2023 municipal elections in Yerevan. Civil Contract claimed to have raised 506.5 million drams ($1.3 million) for its election campaign.
The publication revealed that the bulk of that sum was generated by donations ranging from 1 million to 2.5 million drams, the maximum amount of a single campaign donation allowed by Armenian law. It said that their nominal contributors included presumably non-rich people linked to senior government officials and businesspeople as well as ordinary residents of Yerevan who could hardly afford such payments. Many of those residents claimed to be unaware of the hefty sums wired to Pashinian’s party on their behalf.
Prosecutors refused to order a formal criminal investigation into the Infocom report, saying that they found no evidence of financial irregularities committed by Civil Contract.
Pashinian pledged to separate business from politics when he swept to power during the 2018 “velvet revolution.” He said afterwards that his party will rely on modest donations from large numbers of supporters to finance its election campaigns. Almost 70 percent of the money officially raised by it for the Yerevan mayoral race came from 2.5 million-dram ($6,500) donations made by 140 persons.