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The prosecutor’s office of Shirak marz announced in 2010 that a number of organizations’ executives took care of their own interests at the expense of the children. One of these organizations is the Children’s Home orphanage in Gyumri, which according to this news, the director of the Children’s Home SNCO, Ruzanna Avagyan, did not perform her service responsibilities accordingly, and took advantage of her position in contradiction to the organization’s interest. In addition, the prosecutor’s office stated, “In the signed supply contracts, without the inclusion of provisions regarding the revision of prices, from 2007 to 2008, the organization purchased 97 different food items from 2 food supply organizations with a price of 4,093,165 AMD higher than the market price, which resulted in financial damage to the state-funded orphanage.”

In other words, during the above mentioned years alone, Mrs. Avagyan allowed the embezzlement of 4.1 million AMD and perhaps we could assume that the tendency of embezzling such amounts could be traced back to the previous years as well. In fact, on January 25, 2010, according to RA criminal code article 308, part 1, a criminal case was opened (Case No. 67200710). During our visit to the orphanage, Mrs. Avagyan was not in her office; they stated that she went to Yerevan. The deputy director, with whom we spoke, justified himself by stating that he started working at the orphanage only from last September, and therefore, is not aware of either the embezzlements or the process of the criminal case. Also, the orphanage pediatrician, Margarita Harutunyan, who has been working there for the past six years, was not aware of the case.

In response to our inquiry, Shahen Tonoyan, the head of the public relations department of the RA general prosecutor’s office, stated that along with R. Avagyan’s case, a number of cases have been suspended in 2009 as a result of an act of general pardon by the RA National Assembly.

“Every general pardon has its own implementation period and other mechanisms have articles, in terms of deadlines... in fact, the 2009 general pardon solved a time problem and therefore that specific case got suspended,” Shahen Tonoyan told Panorama.am, when we reminded him that the criminal case was initiated in January 2010 .