Pashinian pledged to nationalize the Electric Networks of Armenia (ENA) company on June 18 hours after Karapetian was arrested in Yerevan on coup charges following his strong criticism of Pashinian’s campaign against the Armenian Apostolic Church.
“It will happen quickly,” Pashinian wrote on Facebook before claiming that relevant legislation has already been “circulated” in Armenian parliament.
Senior pro-government parliamentarians effectively denied that, however. Their opposition colleagues warned, meanwhile, ENA’s nationalization would be illegal and deal a serious blow to Armenia’s business reputation.
Pashinian indicated a change of his tactic during the latest session of his cabinet. He said the Armenian government will first “take over the management of ENA” and then “discuss further scenarios in a calmer atmosphere.” It will “very quickly” push through the parliament a package of relevant legal amendments, he said.
Pashinian again claimed that the main reason for the unprecedent measure is to end power cuts periodically occurring in various parts of the country. He did not say whether the government has a plan to end the outages.
The ENA management denied last year responsibility for most of those outages. The company owned by Karapetian’s Moscow-based Tashir Group claims to have invested at least $700 million in the aging power distribution network and sharply cut its losses since buying it from a Russian energy giant in 2015.
Critics dismiss the official rationale for nationalizing ENA. They say that Pashinian is simply keen to punish Karapetian and does not care about consequences of the seizure for the Armenian energy sector and the country’s attractiveness to foreign investors.