On January 10, President Serzh Sargsyan singed a decree setting up the Commission on Ethnics of High-Level Officials. The body will be tasked with analyzing and publishing declarations of incomes and assets submitted by 500 officials, identifying cases of the clash of interests and breaches of ethical norms, etc.

Armenia is one of the few countries where no rankings of wealthy people are drawn up -- perhaps because the vast majority of wealthy people are either government officers or members of parliament for whom doing business is prohibited by law.

According to the analysis of international financial institutions, it is big business that is a den of corruption and most shadow incomes in Armenia. According to the World Bank, the informal sector in Armenia’s economy accounts for 35-40 percent of the Gross Domestic Product. Armenia’s former prime minister, currently member of the opposition Armenian National Congress (ANC) Hrant Bagratyan says that the untaxed part of the market makes 55 percent. This means that the budget receives only half of all potential taxes.

However, no one can say exactly who and how much should pay in taxes, because no one counts the real incomes and estimates the property of citizens. There is particularly plenty of “shadow”, according to the International Monetary Fund (IMF), in the mining industry where owners, by the way, are mostly senior officials.

President Sargsyan met with members of the Commission on Tuesday and said that the Commission’s mission is “to increase social trust toward public institutions in our country, create a system of good governance, as well as make activities of the high-level officials more transparent and public.” The president said that any influence on the members of the Commission must be excluded and that its members “must be influenced only by the law and their personal moral standards.”

Whether the Commission can fulfill its mission will largely depend on the political will of the authorities. Armenia sees the start of a period of active preparations for the parliamentary elections due in May. The ANC claims more than half of the 131 members in the current National Assembly of Armenia have a business, which is prohibited by law. President Sargsyan, who heads the ruling Republican Party of Armenia (RPA), has repeatedly stated that oligarchs and representatives of big business must not enter the next parliament. The RPA leadership has already stated that many of the current MPs will not be on the party list during the elections.

Perhaps the Ethics Commission will ‘help’ the RPA leadership get rid of its MPs that represent criminalized business, as well as of potential competitors in the currently coalition member party, Prosperous Armenia, led by affluent businessman Gagik Tsarukyan.

The declaration of incomes for officials has been mandatory in Armenia already for several years, but no one oversees the reliability of these submitted declarations. It proceeded from such declarations submitted in the past that Armenia has one of the poorest public officials and members of parliament in the world. But the lifestyles of many of them, their businesses, especially monopolies, speak to the opposite. Perhaps the Ethics Commission will be able to shed some light on the “shadow” of the Armenian oligarchy.