The Armenian government’s State Revenue Committee (SRC) collected about 66.7 billion drams ($168 million) in various taxes from the company called Mobile Center. The figure represents a almost 45 percent increase from 2023.
Mobile Center paid more taxes than Armenia’s natural gas distribution network, national electric utility or any its fuel importers, telecommunication operators, tobacco firms and banks that have long been a key source of state revenue. Only the country’s largest mining company, the Zangezur Copper-Molybdenum Combine (ZCMC), paid more. The SRC put the total amount of its tax contributions in 2024 at almost 102 billion drams.
Mobile Center belongs to the family of Samvel Aleksanian, one of the country’s wealthiest entrepreneurs who has wide-ranging business interests. Like many other Armenian firms and individual businesspeople, it appears to have cashed in on Western bans on exports of various goods to Russia imposed after the Russian invasion of Ukraine.
Many such Western-made products, notably cars, cellphones and consumer electronics, have since been re-exported to Russia from Armenia. An Armenian electronics retailer, a company called Pretty Way, is fifth on the SRC’s latest list of the leading corporate taxpayers, having paid over 36 billion drams in taxes in 2024.
Armenia also became last year a conduit for exports of Russian gold and diamonds to world markets and the United Arab Emirates (UAE) in particular. All this explains why Russian-Armenian trade has skyrocketed since 2022, solidifying Russia’s status as the South Caucasus nation’s number one trading partner.