Speaking at a news conference on Tuesday, Pashinian denied that the party violated Armenia’s campaign finance legislation enacted by his government.
In recent separate articles, the investigative publication Infocom.am and Civilnet reported that ahead of local elections held last year and in 2022 Civil Contract received lavish campaign donations on behalf of scores of mostly low-income individuals who claimed to be unaware of those contributions.
Armenia’s ruling party claimed to have raised 506.5 million drams ($1.25 million) in the run-up to last September’s municipal elections in Yerevan. Infocom revealed that the bulk of that sum was generated by donations ranging from 1 million to 2.5 million drams, the maximum amount of such contributions allowed by Armenian law. 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.
In local elections held in other parts of Armenia in 2022, Civil Contract received 170 million drams ($420,000) from 140 persons, the vast majority of them its own election candidates. Civilnet 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, and some said they are too busy to answer the question,” said the media outlet, which is the Armenian partner of the international Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project (OCCRP).
“In 26 cases, donations accounted for at least half of the donors' annual income and total savings … Four donations exceeded the maximum legal limit of 2.5 million drams set for a single individual donation,” it wrote.
Critics suggested that Civil Contract arranged these shady payments in order to circumvent the cap on political donations. Pashinian flatly denied this, saying that the payments made on behalf of third persons unaware of them constitute human or organizational “errors,” rather than a violation of Armenian law.
“Is the problem such that it passed the threshold of the Armenian Criminal code? Obviously not because law-enforcement bodies investigated that and found no evidence of any crime,” he told reporters.
“What happened is a crime under the current Criminal Code,” Vardine Grigorian, an election expert with the Vanadzor-based Helsinki Citizens’ Assembly, insisted on Wednesday. Grigorian said that Pashinian’s comments are a signal to law-enforcement authorities to cover it up.
The Office of the Prosecutor-General told RFE/RL’s Armenian Service last week that it has looked into the Infocom report and found no evidence of financial irregularities committed by Pashinian’s party. It has announced no such inquiry into the Civilnet investigation.