It emerged on Friday that the company called Euroasphalt won a tender for the construction of a 27-kilometer rural road in northern Lori province which will cost the state roughly 3 billion drams ($7.4 million).
A government agency overseeing road construction in the country said Euroasphalt bid just 8,300 drams ($20) less than its closest competitor. The four other firms that took part in the tender set higher prices for the construction work, according to the agency.
Euroasphalt had an authorized capital of just over $100 when it was founded by two little-known individuals in March 2018. Karlen Simonian became its executive director three years later.
In 2021, Euroasphalt won three government contracts for rural road construction worth a total of 748 million drams. In one of those tenders, the financial margin of its victory was also tiny, raising suspicions that the company had illegally received insider information about the value of bids submitted by rival firms.
Speaking with journalists in September 2021, then Deputy Prime Minister Suren Papikian insisted that the biddings were fair and transparent.
For his part, Prime Minister Nikol Pashinian said that the speaker’s brother is only the chief executive of Euroasphalt and does not own it.
RFE/RL’s Armenian Service discovered, however, that one of Euroasphalt’s two officially registered addresses matches that of a Yerevan apartment where the Simonians’ mother currently lives. The other address could not be located.
Alen Simonian, who is a figure close to Pashinian, afterwards condemned media outlets for questioning the integrity of the tenders granted to his brother’s company.
The company appears to have expanded its operations in 2022, winning a total of nine government contracts so far this year.
The Armenian government has also signed many lucrative deals with companies linked to at least two other senior officials. One of them, Bagrat Badalian, is a deputy chief of Pashinian’s staff.
Badalian owns Channakhagits Institut, a road design firm that secured in 2020 and 2021 governments contracts worth a combined 677 million drams ($1.7 million). The Yerevan daily Hraparak reported on Thursday that it won nine more contracts worth 208 million drams in September 2022 alone.
Pashinian denied last December that Channakhagits enjoys privileged treatment by his government. He said that it is one of the most qualified firms of its kind in Armenia.
As an outspoken opposition politician, Pashinian had for years alleged corrupt practices in the administration of tenders won by individuals connected to Armenia’s former governments. He claimed to have eliminated “systemic corruption” in the country after coming to power in 2018.