Court orders release of deputy Yerevan mayor arrested over misuse of Covid funds
The Yerevan Court of Appeals on Thursday ordered the release of Gevorg Simonyan, a deputy Yerevan mayor and a former deputy health minister who had been arrested as part of a probe into misuse of government funds provided for the fight against Covid-19.
"Mr. Simonyan will be set free shortly," his lawyer Emin Khachatryan told Panorama.am, assuming that the Anti-Corruption Committee will appeal the decision to a higher court.
Director of Yerevan’s Medline Medical Center Babken Shahumyan and its Deputy Director Lilya Hovakimyan are also arrested as part of the same probe.
Lusine Yeghiazaryan, another suspect in the case who heads the Department of Drug-Resistant Tuberculosis at the National Center of Pulmonology, is under house arrest.
They are accused of embezzling 119 million drams in emergency funding allocated by the government following the outbreak of the coronavirus pandemic in 2020 and 2021.
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