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“I am skimming through the numbers of the costs of the Central bank and may state you are living a lavish life, a luxury lifestyle,” lawmaker Aram Manukyan said to Nerses Yeritsyan, the Chairman of the Central Bank of Armenia, during the discussion of the state draft budget for 2017 held on Monday in the National Assembly.

To MP Manukyan’s words, the Central Bank spends annually USD 20,000 on journals, another 20,00 for the literature. The Central Bank possesses 31 service vehicles, 820 employees with an average salary of AMD 600 thousand.

“That is great and I wish to see those numbers doubled, yet against the backdrop of a general financial situation, the war situation, 35 percent of the poverty rate you represent a heaven in the hell, a flower flourishing in a desert,” Manukyan said. “I guess you shouldn’t act that way amidst the all-around poverty and misery. There might be no explanations to this. You may refer to the hard job, I share that, however you should look around,” the lawmaker added.

The Chairman of the Central Bank argued that the culture of the Central Bank management “may become a criterion” for improvements in other spheres.

“The professional literature for us to improve our analytic skills, to make predictions for three years, costa several thousand USD, since the annual subscription is rather expensive. Refusing from that literature will make us backward and lose our competitiveness in comparison with other Central Banks,” Yeristsyan said, adding the expenditure of Armenia’s Central bank are rather modest as compared to those of similar states.

As to the amount of the salaries Yeritsyan referred to the law that provides the bank efficient employer average salary should be higher than the bank employer average salary.