ARF Supreme Council of Armenia chair Ishkhan Saghatelyan talks to reporters in Yerevan on Jan. 13

Attorney representing Armenia Alliance lawmaker and head of the Armenian Revolutionary Federation Supreme Council of Armenia, Ishkhan Saghatelyan, issued a statement on Wednesday, saying the charges against their client is politically motivated.

Investigators searched Saghatelyan’s Yerevan residence and car on Tuesday in a criminal investigation linked by him to Armenia’s disputed parliamentary elections.

The Investigative Committee said its officers raided Saghatelyan’s home and confiscated cash and jewelry kept there early in the morning, because of his failure to comply with a court’s decision to freeze his properties and other assets worth over 258 million drams ($700,000). In particular, it said he defied orders by Armenia’s Service for the Mandatory Execution of Judicial Acts emanating from that injunction. The committee did not formally charge him with any crimes as of Tuesday evening.

Saghatelyan denied breaking any laws. He argued that he recently challenged the SMEJA’s “illegal” demands in another court.

“All this is ridiculous,” he told journalists. “We are ready for any scenario. They can’t achieve anything with such methods.”

Saghatelyan’s attorneys, Lusine Sahakyan, Aramazd Kiviryan and Yervand Varosyan, said they learned about the search from the Investigative Committee’s Facebook page, adding that “legal judgments about criminal proceedings with political motives and goals have long since lost their meaning.”

They argued that there are no legal grounds for the search and seizure of property, saying they would not have made a statement if it weren’t for the state’s unrelenting “propaganda machine,” which they say has become “part and parcel to political affairs.”

“This case, which seems to have ‘fallen from the sky’ is about giving the ordinary administrative and legal relations between a state body and a citizen the appearance of a crime,” Saghatelyan’s attorneys said.

“For the first time, we are encountering a situation where a person who has submitted a relevant declaration is being accused of not submitting that declaration a month after it was submitted. For the first time, we are encountering a situation where a person who has disclosed the location of certain property to a state body is being accused of concealing that property. After all this, we think it is unnecessary to say that the state bodies would never have known about the existence of the $60,000 cash that became the basis for this inquiry if Ishkhan Saghatelyan had not declared it in time, in accordance with the procedure prescribed by law, nor would they have known the location of the money if Ishkhan Saghatelyan had not reported it in writing,” the attorneys said.

They concluded their statement by noting that the political instructions to launch criminal proceedings against Saghatelyan were given in a public manner, and that those following those instructions were carrying them out.

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