Armenia’s Ministry of Nature Protection is under investigation for misappropriation of public funds after its subcontractors failed to carry out scheduled sanitary logging in certain areas of Lake Sevan.
On September 2, the Prosecutor’s Office announced on its official website that in 2006-2008 Wide Gate, and in 2009 Tree Gren and H. Eloyan & Sons Ltd companies committed abuses, as a result of which a large number of trees have been covered by water in hectares of territory submerged by rising Lake Sevan.
(Raising the level of the lake is part of an environmental rehabilitation program, which also requires that territories that go under water should first be subjected to special treatment to exclude future swamping of the lake.)
Wide Gate Ltd failed to clean a forest territory of about 35 hectares and fell short of some technical parameters in logging, cleaning, sorting and removal/transportation of a dense mass of 795.7 cubic meters of timber. The other two companies have failed to properly do the same kind of work on 86.5 and 331 cubic meters of the dense mass of forest cutting, respectively.
For this, state prosecutors particularly hold responsible the head of the Ministry of Nature Protection Bio-Resources Management Department Artashes Ziroyan and a group of Sevan National Park employees under Criminal Code articles dealing with abusing position, squandering and misappropriating public money. The criminal cases have been sent to the Head Investigation Department of the Police for investigation.
“Artashes Ziroyan is out of town and he is the only one who can give explanations,” Ministry spokesman Artsrun Pepanyan told ArmeniaNow seeking clarification of the matter.
He only said that, overall, 600 hectares of land were to have been cleaned in the period of 2006-2009, for which the state had allocated a total sum of 253 million drams (about $700,000).
ArmeniaNow attempts to get in touch with the Sevan National Park state-owned non-profit organization failed.
Environmentalists say they consider criminal cases a belated step, since it is already difficult to find out how much space has actually gone under water and how much has actually been cleaned.
“We visited different villages on the shore of Lake Sevan where many said that they had seen no worker cleaning those areas and that when they volunteered to clean the territories themselves at the cost of taking the wood materials for themselves as compensation. They got a rejection,” environmentalist Inga Zarafyan, head of Ecolur NGO, told ArmeniaNow.
She claims that holidaymakers who chose to stay at the village of Tsapatagh this year could not enjoy the lake at all.
English
Հայերեն
back to top 
Readers' comments
Post a comment
Comments are welcomed and encouraged. However, comments not pertaining to the topic or containing slander or offensive language will be deleted. You have to be registered to be able leave your comment. Sign in or Register now for free.