Listen to Sheila’s personal reading of “Please Don’t Make Me Defend an Oligarch”.
I don’t know about you, but I’m no fan of oligarchs. And by oligarchs, I don’t mean entrepreneurs who become fabulously rich building successful businesses, creating jobs and taking risks. I mean people who amass obscene wealth through political connections, rigged privatizations, monopolies and other murky arrangements. In a country where so many people struggle to afford housing, healthcare and basic security, people who build vast fortunes on privileged access to public resources, and then use those fortunes to further bend politics to their own ends, should seriously offend us.
For anyone who has not spent the past few months closely following Armenian politics, three oligarchic heavyweights—Russian-Armenian billionaire Samvel Karapetyan, business tycoon Gagik Tsarukyan (also known as “Dodi Gago”), and former president Robert Kocharyan—each fronted a leading opposition force challenging incumbent Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan in June’s parliamentary election. To be sure, none of the three exactly screams “reasonable candidate for democratic leadership,” which presumably helps explain why they all lost. But by late August, all three had been arrested—Karapetyan before the vote, Tsarukyan and Kocharyan after it.
Before I explain why their arrests should trouble anyone who cares about Armenian democracy, let me be clear: these are not humble dissidents who accidentally acquired conglomerates. Karapetyan, believed to be the world’s richest Armenian, built his $4.1 billion fortune through businesses deeply entangled with Russian state power, came to control Armenia’s sole electricity distribution network, and is under investigation for aggravated money laundering in France. Tsarukyan parlayed government connections into a sprawling business empire, and a lavish lifestyle complete with a private zoo, all while carrying a 1979 conviction for gang rape and robbery, which was eventually overturned 22 years later, during Kocharyan’s presidency. Kocharyan himself won elections marred by fraud and spent his 1998-2008 presidency entrenching oligarchic rule and systemic corruption while his own family amassed an immensely lucrative portfolio of businesses. His tenure included a notorious incident in which his security detail beat a man to death for apparently greeting him too casually, and culminated in the March 2008 post-election crackdown, in which 10 people were killed and hundreds injured.
And the Russian factor cannot be ignored. This election unfolded as Armenia was moving away from Moscow and closer to the West, while all three opposition forces campaigned, to varying degrees, on improving relations with Russia. Kocharyan is openly pro-Russian and has previously advocated Armenia’s accession to the Russia-Belarus Union State. Karapetyan is a Russian citizen who built his fortune in Russia and was identified by Western officials as Moscow’s preferred candidate, although he denied any knowledge of Russian support and Russia rejected the allegation. Tsarukyan, for his part, has long maintained a personal relationship with Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko.
Against that backdrop, to say that these characters come across as unsympathetic would be a bit of an understatement. But that’s also precisely what makes them convenient targets. Their shady backgrounds make it easy to dismiss political revenge as overdue justice, and to reproach concerns about timing, due process, and selective enforcement as sympathy for oligarchs.
But I’m not asking anyone to feel sorry for them. Quite the opposite. Pashinyan came to power eight years ago promising to dismantle oligarchic privilege, a promise that resonated powerfully with the Armenian public, and with good reason. By October 2018, he even declared there were “no oligarchs in Armenia anymore,” and reaffirmed the oligarchy’s supposed demise on multiple occasions over the ensuing years (see e.g. May 2019, September 2019, November 2020, January 2020, April 2026).
So why, after years of declaring the oligarchy dead, has Pashinyan suddenly renewed his vow to eradicate the “criminal-oligarchic system”, while directing that campaign only at the three opponents he branded the “three-headed party of war”? There is the obvious answer: these three oligarchs, unlike those who stayed out of opposition politics, mobilized their wealth and influence against Pashinyan in projects broadly aligned with Russian interests while Moscow was trying to derail Armenia’s geopolitical turn. That presented a legitimate national-security concern, and the government had every right to take that threat seriously.
But it does not dispose of the rule-of-law problem. Supporting closer relations with Russia is not itself a crime, and none of this proves that the three men were acting on Kremlin instructions. If there is concrete evidence of unlawful foreign financing, covert coordination, espionage, vote-buying or any other offence, the government should investigate and prosecute it as such. What the government cannot do is use the threat of Russian interference as a substitute for evidence or require the justice system to distinguish between oligarchs who accommodate the government and those who challenge it.
If Pashinyan still wants to eradicate a system he has repeatedly declared is already dead, perhaps we should ask what’s taking so long. But then we must also ask why the machinery of justice appears to roar to life only when an oligarch challenges him, and whether it operates with the same urgency when wealth and power remain safely aligned with his government. Because when prosecutions start tracking political opposition before criminal conduct, the question isn’t whether these men deserve our sympathy. It’s whether the state continues to deserve our trust.
Arrests on Cue
On June 7, Armenians returned Pashinyan and Civil Contract to power with 49.7% of the vote and 64 seats in parliament. According to the OSCE observation mission, the election offered voters a genuine choice, but it also took place amid a highly confrontational campaign, foreign interference aimed at unduly influencing voters in favor of the opposition, and numerous criminal proceedings against opposition candidates and activists. The mission’s leader stated that this concentration of arrests and prosecutions created perceptions of selective justice and caused many opposition supporters to refrain from actively campaigning.
During the campaign, Pashinyan made no effort to maintain distance between political combat and law enforcement. He openly called for all three of his main opponents to face criminal punishment and for assets linked to them to be transferred to the state, promises he repeated even more vehemently after winning the election.
On May 20, Pashinyan declared that Tsarukyan’s Ararat Cement plant “will become state-owned,” and days later said Tsarukyan would “live in a cage for decades.” The privatization under scrutiny had taken place 24 years earlier, in 2002, yet prosecutors only initiated criminal proceedings over it on May 7, just one day before the official campaign began. Although the factory’s shares had been part of an illicit-assets claim filed in 2023, prosecutors have not publicly explained what new evidence prompted that sudden escalation. Nor had any court at the time of Pashinyan’s declaration ordered the factory nationalized or Tsarukyan imprisoned. Pashinyan didn’t just call for an investigation. He publicly announced the outcomes he expected the justice system to produce.
Tsarukyan’s Prosperous Armenia Party received just under the 4% threshold required to enter parliament. Two days after the election, authorities prevented Tsarukyan from leaving Armenia and announced a separate tax-evasion prosecution against him. On July 6, less than a month later, authorities searched his home and more than 70 associated addresses and arrested him. He was placed in pretrial detention on allegations of large-scale fraud and money laundering involving approximately $21.7 million in goods imported from Iran between 2022 and 2024. Nine days later, the Anti-Corruption Court transferred his shares in Ararat Cement to state management. The underlying forfeiture case now seeks 75 properties, 42 vehicles, stakes in 38 companies and nearly $291 million from Tsarukyan. On July 30, the Court also placed his brandy factory under state management, and on August 6, authorities announced another extortion and money-laundering case arising from events allegedly dating to 2010.
Kocharyan’s treatment was similar. On May 14, during a Civil Contract campaign event, Pashinyan declared that the still-pending March 2008 case had already been “solved,” that it was “clear” Kocharyan had organized the crackdown, and that he “must answer for it.” In the days before the vote, Pashinyan repeatedly called for Kocharyan’s imprisonment, saying on June 3 that he would “end up in prison” and “must spend many years” there. He then declared at Civil Contract’s final campaign rally on June 5 that “immediately after the elections” Kocharyan “must be arrested and brought to justice.” At the same rally, he demanded that the courts return to the state more than $200 million in allegedly illicit property and funds sought from Kocharyan and his family in a separate forfeiture proceeding filed in 2023. At that point, no court had convicted Kocharyan over March 2008 or ordered those assets confiscated. As with Tsarukyan, Pashinyan was effectively passing judgment and sentence himself, demanding imprisonment and confiscation before the courts had ruled on either.
Kocharyan’s Armenia Alliance won 9.9% of the vote and entered parliament. A week after the election, he was barred from leaving Armenia and, a few days later, stripped of candidate immunity in connection with a transaction dating to 2004. On August 24, prosecutors brought a new set of criminal charges against him, including three counts of abuse of power, as well as two of bribery and four of money laundering. The next day, investigators searched more than 35 addresses and detained Kocharyan, his son and several others. Prosecutors allege that he used his presidency to transfer valuable state properties to himself and associates at heavily discounted prices, concealing their ownership through affiliated companies and sham transactions. On August 27, a court placed him in pretrial detention for two months.
Karapetyan’s confrontation with Pashinyan began nearly a year before the election. On June 17, 2025, he criticized the government’s escalating conflict with the Armenian Apostolic Church, and said that if Armenia’s political forces failed to resolve the situation, “then we will intervene in the campaign against the Church in our own way.” Pashinyan immediately responded with a flurry of furious social media posts, vowing to “deactivate” Karapetyan and stating: “Now I will interfere with you in my own way, you scoundrel… I hope the taste of the state will remain in your mouth.” Karapetyan’s home was searched that evening. He was arrested the following day and charged with publicly calling for the seizure of power and the violent overthrow of the government. At virtually the same time, Pashinyan announced that Karapetyan’s Electric Networks of Armenia (ENA) would be swiftly nationalized. Once again, the Prime Minister announced both criminal and economic legal consequences before any court had ruled on Karapetyan’s words or made findings against the company.
The pressure soon spread across Karapetyan’s financial and business affairs. The criminal charges against him were expanded in July and October 2025 to include tax evasion, embezzlement, money laundering and illegal corporate activity, all of which he denies. Within weeks of his arrest, parliament fast-tracked legislation allowing the state to take control of ENA, and in May 2026, the government set the formal expropriation process in motion. After six months in pretrial detention, Karapetyan was moved to house arrest and remained there throughout the election campaign. On May 27, Pashinyan declared that he should be unable to leave Armenia for at least another decade, and that he must be imprisoned as “a spy, an electricity thief, and a money launderer.”
At his final campaign rally, Pashinyan accused Karapetyan of defrauding the army by overbilling military units for electricity and declared that he “must face the strictest accountability.” Strong Armenia nevertheless finished second with 23.3% of the vote and secured 29 parliamentary seats, becoming the largest opposition force. During the campaign, authorities detained or arrested several of the party’s members and supporters: 14 people in April on suspicion of electoral bribery; seven in May for allegedly blocking a road, playing loud music and using violence to disrupt Civil Contract campaign events; and more than 40 in June in an alleged large-scale vote-buying scheme. The day before the vote, authorities also obtained arrest warrants for six Strong Armenia candidates in connection with alleged money laundering and material inducement. On July 9, the courts extended Karapetyan’s house arrest for another two months.
Bad Timing and Double Standards
Although Karapetyan is a newcomer to prosecution in Armenia, it would be wrong to suggest that either Kocharyan or Tsarukyan first came under legal scrutiny because of this election. Tsarukyan has already faced charges brought in 2020 over alleged vote-buying during the 2017 parliamentary election; he was acquitted of those charges in March 2026. Kocharyan’s long-running prosecution over the March 2008 crackdown began in 2018. After the original charge collapsed, the case was reopened under a different abuse-of-power charge in January 2026.
But that history does not make timing any less relevant. If evidence of fraud between 2022 and 2024 justified Tsarukyan’s arrest, why did more than 70 searches and his detention come only after he ran against Pashinyan—and after Pashinyan had publicly announced what should happen to him and his cement plant? If a transaction dating all the way back to 2004 justified stripping Kocharyan’s immunity days after the election, what new evidence had emerged? And why did a much broader corruption case against him suddenly reach maximum velocity only two months later? Timing alone does not prove political interference, but when raids, arrests and prosecutions follow an election in which the Prime Minister has already openly named the targets and announced the outcomes, it is entirely reasonable to ask whether law enforcement is following the evidence or following orders.
A prime minister may set general anti-corruption policy or refer suspected wrongdoing to the competent authorities. What he may not lawfully do is dictate that a particular person be arrested, prosecuted, convicted, imprisoned or stripped of property. Armenia’s Constitution assigns instigation of criminal prosecution to the Prosecutor’s Office, declares judges independent and impartial, and expressly prohibits interference with justice (see Articles 162, 164, 176). This means that not only must courts be free to decide cases without political pressure, but the public must also be able to see that they are free from it. So, when a president or prime minister demands that someone be arrested, imprisoned, or dispossessed, he is doing far more than expressing an opinion. He is using the authority of his office to tell the justice system who to pursue and how he expects those cases to end. That is incompatible with the presumption of innocence and deeply damaging to the appearance of judicial independence, even if no direct instruction can ever be proved.
Armenia spent far too long living under a system in which courts serve business elites and political power. The Velvet Revolution promised to change that, not merely to turn the same machinery against the former regime or whoever now opposes the government. Judicial independence cannot be selective, and neither can the rule of law. We recognize that danger immediately when despots like Paul Kagame or Recep Tayyip Erdoğan publicly demonize their critics or opponents as criminals, preemptively pronounce them guilty, and leave the courts to formalize the result. It does not become acceptable when a democratic leader does it. We should be concerned.
For those who still need convincing, consider Khachatur Sukiasyan, popularly known as “Grzo.” A 2009 U.S. Embassy cable identified him as an oligarch and described him as one of the business allies permitted to retain lucrative interests under a tacit “live and let live” arrangement with Armenia’s political leadership. His family’s SIL empire, established in the 1990s, grew to encompass insurance, retail, real estate, manufacturing and other businesses, while the Sukiasyan brothers gained control of Armeconombank. By 2021, Sukiasyan personally declared 37 properties (35 of them in central Yerevan), major corporate holdings, and roughly $11 million in cash. He also served as a member of parliament in Civil Contract’s faction from 2021 until 2026. If that doesn’t qualify as oligarchic wealth embedded in political power, I’m not sure what does.
And there are plenty of transactions worth examining. In June 2026, Hetq reported that a company owned by the Sukiasyan family acquired 1,844 square meters of municipal land in central Yerevan, including part of a sidewalk, for just 46 million AMD (roughly $96,000, well below market value), using a cadastral valuation dating from 2005. The deal was completed in 2021, when Sukiasyan was already a Civil Contract parliamentarian, after decades of municipal decisions that Hetq described as questionable. Prosecutors separately sought the return of SIL Plaza, arguing that Sukiasyan’s father had acquired the central-Yerevan property for only $5,655 and that its privatization was unlawful, although the courts dismissed the claim because it had been filed too late. Meanwhile, an airline half-owned by Sukiasyan’s brother received 28.6 million AMD (roughly $77,000) in public funds to transport a deputy prime minister’s delegation and separately flew Armenia’s president, although the cost of that trip was not disclosed.
None of this proves that Sukiasyan committed a crime, and I am not accusing him of one. But in case you missed it, Sukiasyan quietly declined to run on Civil Contract’s ticket in the 2026 parliamentary election, with his spokesperson offering no explanation—conveniently sparing the ruling party the hypocrisy of campaigning against oligarchy with one of Armenia’s original oligarchs still sitting in its own faction.
Still, leaving parliament is not the same thing as dismantling oligarchic power. And Sukiasyan is not the only old-system magnate whose business empire survived the revolution. Samvel Aleksanyan, better known as “Lfik Samo,” was a longtime Republican Party MP whose family’s business empire encompasses sugar and other food imports, the Yerevan City supermarket chain, food and beverage manufacturing and textiles. After authorities uncovered an alleged tax-evasion scheme involving the family’s Alex Holding company in 2018, it paid 5.2 billion AMD (roughly $11 million) in additional tax liabilities and continued doing business. Aleksanyan left politics after the Velvet Revolution and never returned.
Nothing suggests that the empires of Sukiasyan and Aleksanyan were built within a fundamentally cleaner political economy than those now under assault. Yet their treatment has been remarkably mild by comparison. They kept their businesses without sprawling asset reviews, 70 simultaneous searches, pretrial detention or a prime ministerial promise to dispossess them or take over their flagship assets. That does not mean they should be raided simply to make the treatment equal. It means the state should be able to identify neutral criteria that explain the difference.
Instead, Armenia now appears to have divided its oligarchs into two categories: the politically acceptable and the politically disposable. Those who remain cooperative or quiet are allowed to become respectable businessmen, while those who challenge Pashinyan are suddenly unearthed as criminal oligarchs. Must an oligarch run against the Prime Minister before the justice system rediscovers him?
Not Just Oligarchs
This pattern becomes harder to dismiss when its targets are not quite so easy to dislike.
Take the Armenian Apostolic Church. Its leadership is hardly beyond criticism, and the Church has not always kept itself out of politics. Under the leadership of Karekin II, the Catholicos of All Armenians since 1999, the Church was closely aligned with the Kocharyan and Sargsyan governments, lending them legitimacy while receiving substantial institutional privileges in return. Relations cooled after Pashinyan came to power. Karekin even called for his resignation after the disastrous 2020 war, and Archbishop Bagrat Galstanyan later led mass protests against the government. The Church should know better than to behave like a political party. But that doesn’t give the government license to take over the Church.
And yet that is what Pashinyan has set out to do. In late May 2025, he launched an extraordinary social media tirade against the Church’s leadership, accusing senior clerics of corruption and moral hypocrisy and Karekin himself of fathering a child. He announced a council to “liberate” the Mother See, insisted that the state should have a decisive voice in choosing the next Catholicos and later accused Karekin and his brother of serving Russian foreign intelligence. By January 2026, Pashinyan had published a formal roadmap to remove him, install an interim leader, rewrite the Church’s governing charter and elect a successor. This was no longer criticism of a religious institution. It was an announced political project to replace the head of a constitutionally autonomous Church.
The prosecutions followed. After the Church removed Bishop Gevorg Saroyan, who had sided with clergy demanding Karekin’s resignation, a civil court ordered his temporary reinstatement. When the Church refused and later defrocked him, investigators opened a criminal case with remarkable speed. Six senior bishops were charged and placed under travel restrictions; on February 14, Karekin was likewise charged and barred from leaving Armenia. The case reached court in July, and Karekin and the six bishops went on trial in August for allegedly obstructing enforcement of the reinstatement order. They face up to two years in prison.
There may be legitimate legal questions about any employment, financial or property rights attached to Saroyan’s former position. But deciding who may serve as a bishop, including whether a bishop should be defrocked, is a matter that falls squarely within the Church’s canonical authority and discretion. Before Karekin was indicted, Pashinyan had already demanded his removal and announced his intention to replace the Church’s leadership. The government has since made that ambition official policy in its 2026-2031 program. That crosses an obvious constitutional boundary. The state may certainly investigate crimes committed by clergy; separation of church and state does not confer immunity from the law. But what the state cannot do is use criminal proceedings and administrative power to remake the Church’s hierarchy to its liking.
If there is concrete evidence that Karekin is a Russian agent, it should be presented and he should be charged with espionage. If there is evidence that he committed corruption, he should be charged with corruption. He has been charged with neither. Instead, after months of sweeping accusations, the state is prosecuting him over an internal ecclesiastical decision concerning the Church’s authority over its own clergy. Whatever the legal merits of the court-order case, when the government announces the result first and the machinery of justice begins supplying the means afterward, the appearance of political motivation is impossible to ignore.
Then there is Liparit Drmeyan, the former acting head of the Office of the Representative on International Legal Matters. When the government sought to take control of ENA, Karapetyan and his family initiated international arbitration, alleging that the attempted takeover violated the Armenia-Cyprus investment treaty. On July 22, 2025, an emergency arbitrator ordered Armenia to stop taking any further steps toward expropriating the company while the dispute was still being decided. Drmeyan’s office stated that the order was legally binding. Pashinyan publicly rejected that position, declaring that his government would not comply with the order, and warned that officials who disagreed should resign or he would remove them himself. Drmeyan was fired the very next day.
Drmeyan later ran in the June 2026 election on Arman Tatoyan’s Wings of Unity ticket and, after they lost, represented the party in its Constitutional Court challenge to the conduct and results of the election. Just a few weeks later, Pashinyan publicly accused him of having served as a “Trojan horse” for Karapetyan and his family’s interests in ENA while working inside the government and called on anti-corruption and law-enforcement bodies to investigate his assets, finances and conduct. The Prosecutor General promptly accepted the Prime Minister’s verbal report for processing. Drmeyan denies the allegations and has sued Pashinyan for defamation.
Drmeyan is not an oligarch or supreme patriarch. He is a lawyer and former government official who took a legal position the Prime Minister didn’t like. But his position was correct. Under the applicable SCC Arbitration Rules, the emergency order was legally binding (see Appendix II, Article 9), and it was Drmeyan’s duty to advise the government accordingly. He then entered opposition politics which, although entirely within his civil rights, surely did little to improve his standing with the Prime Minister. What followed was accusation first, evidence later: Pashinyan branded him corrupt and called for an investigation to find the proof. Whatever that search may eventually produce, the spectacle of the head of government publicly naming him and the prosecution immediately springing into action sends its own message before any court reaches any conclusion.
The Chilling Effect
This is how a chilling effect takes hold. People remain technically free to speak and act but begin censoring themselves. After watching others pay a price for challenging those in power, they start calculating the personal and professional cost of doing the same.
It’s not difficult to see where this can lead. A public official with unwelcome advice learns to keep it to themselves. A civil servant who witnesses misconduct learns not to object. An ordinary citizen considering attending a protest stays home. A business owner keeps quiet about government policy rather than invite unwelcome official attention. A voter who might otherwise volunteer for an opposition campaign decides that casting a private ballot is safer, while someone considering entering opposition politics concludes that it’s not worth the risk. Not everyone will necessarily be deterred, and not every feared consequence will necessarily materialize. But the state doesn’t need to ban opposition parties if enough people come to believe that opposing the government is financially ruinous, professionally fatal or physically terrifying.
And then there are journalists and activists like me, who begin to weigh every criticism against the trouble it might bring. If raising concerns about these cases can itself be cast as hostility toward the state or service to some foreign agenda, perhaps the safest response is silence. For the first time since I began writing publicly about Armenia, I have to say that I’m a little apprehensive to publish something like this.
But I should also be honest about the fact that I voted for Pashinyan, and why. For all my concerns, I still believe he remains our best choice for keeping Armenia on the path toward genuine freedom, peace and democracy, including an Armenia in which I can continue to express myself openly and safely. Armenia has not fallen silent yet. The fact that I am writing this is itself evidence that criticism remains possible. That deserves credit. The goal is to keep it that way, and for now, we still can. But doing so requires that we keep those we elect to power in check. Freedom doesn’t protect itself, and the time to defend it is before troubling practices harden into habits. Democratic backsliding is much easier to prevent than to reverse.
None of this means that every prosecution is fabricated. It doesn’t mean that Russia has not attempted to interfere in Armenian politics; international observers found that it had. It doesn’t mean that the Church is politically neutral, or that members of the old elite are suddenly beyond reproach. And it certainly does not mean that corruption should go unpunished.
The answer is not to leave oligarchs untouched. It is to investigate credible allegations wherever they lead and apply the same standards to allies and opponents alike. Prosecute cases supported by evidence. Recover assets shown through fair proceedings to have been stolen from the public. Separate political rhetoric from prosecutorial decisions. Use detention only when necessary. And let independent courts, not campaign speeches, determine guilt.
I know these things take time. Armenia inherited an entire system of oligarchic rule and deeply entrenched corruption, with a justice system conditioned by decades of political control. No government could dismantle that legacy overnight, and eight years may still not be long enough to have built genuinely independent institutions. But that is exactly why the Prime Minister must exercise more restraint not to reinforce the very habits the Velvet Revolution promised to break.
I don’t want to defend an oligarch. I want an Armenia in which I don’t have to, where justice is so consistent, so transparent and so politically indifferent that even the prosecution of the most unsavory, despicable defendant commands public trust.
Sheila Paylan is an international human rights lawyer and former legal advisor to the United Nations. Now based in Yerevan, she regularly consults for a variety of international organizations, NGOs, think tanks, and governments.
