The sum temporarily confiscated from criminal suspects last year was stolen on May 20 from a safe located on the sixth floor of a building in downtown Yerevan housing an Investigative Committee division that deals with smuggling and other economic crimes. A few days later, another law-enforcement body, the Anti-Corruption Committee (ACC), arrested a man who it said entered the building in the afternoon, emptied the safe and escaped the following morning.
According to the ACC, the apparently biggest theft of cash in Armenia’s history was organized by another man, Gor Tadevosian, the then acting head of an Investigative Committee division. Tadevosian was arrested on May 22.
The ACC said both men confessed to the crime which critics said highlighted the poor state of affairs within Armenia’s state apparatus. It claimed to have recovered the stolen money.
Tadevosian was fired right after his arrest. His lawyer, Arshak Ghazarian, told RFE/RL’s Armenian Service on Friday that a court in Yerevan agreed on Friday to order the investigators to release Tadevosian from prison and place him under arrest. It was not immediately clear whether prosecutors will appeal against the order.
Zhanna Aleksanian, a human rights activist, described the criminal case as a “murky story” and suggested that the Armenian authorities gave lenient treatment to Tadevosian because he worked for them.
“We don’t really know what happened in reality,” said Aleksanian. “I think they arrested him because [the massive theft] was scandalous. I don’t trust the law-enforcement bodies. It may well be that the short arrest [of Tadevosian] was within the logic of what I’m talking about.”
Aleksanian noted the contrast between Tadevosian’s release from jail and Armenian courts’ decisions to swiftly sanction the arrests last month of nearly two dozen opposition activists and other prominent critics of Prime Minister Nikol Pashinian made amid his campaign against the Armenian Apostolic Church. Three of those critics, including Archbishop Mikael Ajapahian and billionaire Samvel Karapetian, are held in detention for allegedly calling for a violent overthrow of the government. They reject the accusations as politically motivated.