Davit Papazian managed the Armenian National Interests Fund (ANIF) after it was set up by the government in 2019 in an effort to not only attract foreign investors but also promote Armenian exports and support local businesses. ANIF clearly failed in that mission, leading the government to liquidate it in August 2024.
A year before that decision, a corruption investigation was launched into the fund’s four-year activities. Papazian was charged last month with money laundering, abuse of power and forgery of documents. The Investigative Committee went on to issue an international arrest warrant for him.
The law-enforcement agency has still not released details of the accusations. It also indicted two other persons on August 15.
“Nikol Pashinian is attempting to turn us into scapegoats for his and his government’s shameful mistakes and failures, which derailed some of the projects created by ANIF’s founding team,” Papazian charged in a Facebook post.
“True to form, he is once again on course for a fiasco,” he wrote in English without elaborating.
In a separate and virtually identical Armenian-language post, Papazian also claimed that Pashinian has “unacceptably abused the trust of many of us.”
Pashinian commented on ANIF’s activities early this year, calling them a “disgrace.” But Yerevan Mayor Tigran Avinian, who headed the fund’s board of directors from 2019-2023, gave last week a more positive assessment of ANIF’s track record.
Papazian is believed to have left Armenia months before his indictment. He now lives in London, according to his Facebook profile.
ANIF’s former chief executive was appointed this spring to the governing board of the U.S. and Israeli-backed Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF) widely blamed for the reported deaths of at least 1,800 Palestinians in the besieged Gaza Strip. Last month, the London-based Arab Organization for Human Rights (AOHR) appealed to Armenian prosecutors to investigate Papazian’s role in GHF’s highly controversial food distribution in Gaza.
