This is a STRONG LIE: Romanos Petrosyan Responds to Narek Karapetyan

Romanos Petrosyan has responded to the claims made by Narek Karapetyan, presenting data on violations revealed at HEC.

The interim manager of HEC, Romanos Petrosyan, wrote on his Facebook page that this morning, while speaking with the media, former chairman of the board of HEC, Narek Karapetyan, made several quite STRONG LIE statements regarding HEC and mentioned that he would address the details in an upcoming interview format.

"At this moment, I will only present two significant points in response. STRONG LIE 1. He claims that there are currently supposed additional registrations at HEC and that they have made dismissals of 40-50 individuals in their period of six months, with a service investigation for 30 individuals, and there is no mention of any criminal legal assessment. FACT 1. During the approximately one year of interim management, the total number of dismissals at HEC has exceeded 1150 individuals, of which about 700 employees were dismissed due to various violations (mostly additional registrations/re-registrations). Approximately 30 criminal cases have been initiated based on revealed legal violations; there are numerous arrests and detention decisions.

STRONG LIE 2. He claims that additional registrations were made without the knowledge of HEC’s owners (which also includes the higher management), stating that supposedly, 'they re-registered from one entity to another, and HEC received no benefit from this…'. FACT 2. Additional registrations and re-registrations were generally carried out to artificially reduce the number of electricity losses existing in the network, which had significantly increased due to illegal connections (theft) and shadow sales. In other words, a person paid for electricity consumed by someone else—another citizen, state and community institutions, or business entities. The re-registrations were mainly made on the quantities of electricity produced by autonomous power producers (solar plants) redirected into the network to avoid payments to the citizens for that electricity and balance the 'stolen' volumes with that production.

Based on the above, we can claim that the monetization of the enormous quantities of electricity generated from all these manipulations (also known as fraud) has either remained on HEC's accounts in the best case or directly entered the pockets of various criminal circles (naturally, not coincidentally) in the worst case. According to that, a rhetorical question arises: how did it happen that during the very first weeks of interim management of HEC, we learned about dozens and more cases of additional registrations and re-registrations, immediately followed by dismissals, criminal proceedings, and arrests, while they—the owners—were unaware and uninformed about these abhorrent and criminal mechanisms during almost 10 years of management?

Below are around two dozen 'most eloquent' cases of additional registrations revealed during the interim management of HEC, based on which criminal proceedings have been initiated and there have been detainees:

• Military unit No. N of the RA Ministry of Defense
• Military emergency management of the RA National Security Service
• Building of the X city division of the RA National Security Service
• Military unit No. N of the RA Federal Security Service
• EGhegnadzor Polyclinic LLC
• EGhegnadzor Street Lighting CO
• Mashtots Street Lighting CO
• Armavir Water Supply Company
• Artashat Water Supply Company
• Shirak Water Supply Company
• Ghazanchi Pumping Station
• Teghenik Village Administration
• Halidzor Village Administration
• Khoi Medical Ambulance CO
• Sevan Community Administration
• Yeghegnadzor Community Administration
• Vardazhor Cultural House
• Shambi Secondary School
• Gandzak Kindergarten
• Vardasheni Secondary School
• Aparan No. 2 Primary School

P.S. This is how STRONG management looks like,” wrote Romanos Petrosyan.