Under a relevant bill approved during a weekly cabinet meeting in Yerevan, starting from next January, President Vahagn Khachaturian and Prime Minister Nikol Pashinian would each make 2.6 million drams ($7,100) a month, while government ministers would have their salaries raised from almost 1 million drams to 2 million drams. The minimum monthly wages of parliamentarians would likewise rise from 832,000 drams to about 1.5 million.
The bill also calls for significant pay rises for senior law-enforcement and judicial officials. They would be more modest for a much larger number of civil servants. The planned measure, which will almost certainly be endorsed by the Armenian parliament, will require over 25 billion drams ($70 million) in additional public spending in 2027.
Pashinian portrayed it as a “reform” that will further discourage government corruption in the country. He similarly claimed in January that lavish bonuses paid to the senior state officials make them less prone to corrupt practices.
The claim followed an uproar sparked by the government’s decision last December to allocate 3.5 billion drams ($9.2 million) in extra pay for senior staff and other employees of 16 government agencies. Although the government refused to specify the amounts of money paid to each of them, multiple media outlets reported a huge disparity between the bonuses.
RFE/RL’s Armenian Service learned at the time that while the ministers, their deputies and department heads received sums comparable to their annual incomes, ordinary civil servants were rewarded with less than one month’s worth of their much smaller salaries. Opposition figures and civic activists decried the disparity, saying that the public funds should have been spent on the country’s urgent needs.
The government made clear on Thursday that the controversial bonus scheme will continue even after the pay rises.