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The Armenian National Interests Fund (ANIF), a state-owned enterprise, has lost a defamation lawsuit against Pastinfo over its 2022 report, the news outlet said late on Friday.

The lawsuit accused Pastinfo of defaming the company for the report that concerned ANIF’s management of the Zangezur Copper-Molybdenum Combine (ZCMC) stake held by the government.

The chairman of ANIF's Board of Directors is Deputy Yerevan Mayor Tigran Avinyan.

Pastinfo claimed that ANIF’s foreign leaders were excluded from the trust management of the ZCMC shares transferred to the government as part of a “corruption scheme” in September 2021, accusing ANIF of trying to hide the details of the shady deal from them.

The media outlet said it tried to reach out to the Italian and French members of ANIF Board of Directors and President of the ANIF Investment Committee Khaled Helioui to get answers to a number of controversial questions about the ZCMC deal and its stake management, but said its queries never reached ANIF’s foreign leaders. Instead, Pastinfo received an unsigned letter from ANIF saying that as the manager of a minority shareholder’s stake, it was not involved in most of the day-to-day management tasks of ZCMC and asked the media to submit the queries to the mining enterprise.

ANIF sued the news website earlier this year, asking a first instance court in Yerevan to oblige Pastinfo to refute its report and demanded compensation for non-pecuniary damages.

The court rejected the lawsuit against Pastinfo as “baseless”. Moreover, it ordered ANIF to pay Pastinfo 200,000 drams as a fee for the attorney's services.