Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan believes that small and medium businesses in Armenia need serious support. The government has serious work to do here, he said at the government meeting on June 28.

He made this statement during the discussion of the RA law draft “On making additions to the RA law on trade and services”. According to the Prime Minister, this project should be considered within the framework of supporting small and medium enterprises.

Pashinyan mentioned that the government is working seriously in this direction, and he has called a meeting on this topic tomorrow to decide exactly what needs to be done. “We have to decide exactly what to do. We have already discussed certain modifications of the ideas and came to the conclusion that it is better to measure 7 here and cut one. But we all agree that small and medium businesses need serious support and the government has serious work to do,” said Pashinyan.

The presented bill envisages a number of changes in the legislation in the field of trade and services. In particular, it is defined that a commercial network is a group of two or more commercial objects operating under common management or under the same trade mark or other means of personalization, in which the annual sales turnover exceeds 1.5 billion drams in total.

At the same time, according to Article 6, Part 5 of the mentioned law, a set of four or more commercial objects (commercial network) under common management or owned by a given business entity or operating under the same trademark or other means of personalization (commercial network) is a dominant position.

In other words, in the sense of the mentioned law, being under the common management of two or more commercial facilities or operating under the same trademark or other means of personalization is already enough to define the group of these facilities as a commercial network. At the same time, it needs to be clarified whether the taxpayer’s sales turnover of the previous or current year will be used as a basis for determining the annual sales turnover, or if a different approach is taken into account.