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Before proceeding to the items on the agenda of the cabinet meeting on Thursday, Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan said that the government has already distributed 3 billion 670 million drams as part of measures to deal with the coronavirus crisis.

"Let me note that this number is less than 10% of what we planned; it will be completed in progress,” the PM said.

According to him, the data in the published e-window is updated daily, the database will be completed early next week and the support packages will be accessible to all eligible citizens.

The premier said that Armenian banks have granted a loan payment holiday in the amount of 9,3 billion drams to nearly 290,000 citizens. A payment holiday totaling to 15,4 billion drams has also been offered to 5,300 legal entities.

"I hope that this process will continue. I want to stress that all these decisions were made without administrative influence by the government. I attach great importance to this fact, because at the beginning of the crisis many partners and forces were trying to stir us into making an administrative decision that would oblige banks [to grant payment holidays], but we decided not to go along with that,” he said, adding that the banking system has followed the authorities' calls, which proves that it has confidence in government's anti-crisis policy.

According to Pashinyan, this is also evidenced by the fact that after the tensions for several days the foreign exchange market and the banking system are, in general, in a very calm state.

"On the contrary, bank deposits tend to grow in the recent days. Moreover, there are already cases in which citizens transfer dollar deposits into dram deposits, which is the clearest evidence of confidence in the anti-crisis policy being pursued by the government," Pashinyan said.

According to him, today the government is receiving too many proposals on what steps should be taken to handle the crisis.

"We are taking clear-cut steps forward. We will continue to adopt new anti-crisis measures. There is one such measure on today's agenda,” he said.