The RA Anti-Corruption Court rejected the claim of the General Prosecutor’s Office against the first deputy of the former Chief Military Inspector of the President, Lieutenant General Garegin Gabrielyan. The state’s attempt to cancel a controversial land deal near Erablur has failed due to missing the statute of limitations, raising serious questions about the oversight agency’s actions.
At the center of the legal dispute was the plot of land with an area of more than 0.2 ha in the administrative region of Malatia-Sebastia, next to the “Erablur” pantheon, which the Ministry of Defense sold to Gabrielyan, known by the nickname “Gel” for 18.8 million drams back in 2005. In June of last year, the prosecutor’s office demanded to invalidate the contract, claiming that the area should be expropriated exclusively by auction, and demanded the return of the property or compensation for its value. The former official excused himself that the transaction was carried out solely to improve his housing conditions as a long-time employee of the Ministry of Defense.
The general’s defense team emphasized that the prosecutor’s office was not a proper plaintiff and, more importantly, that the one-year statute of limitations had been grossly violated. Judge R. Avagyan considered these arguments to be valid. The court recorded that the criminal proceedings regarding the expropriation of land at cheap prices by the officials of the Ministry of Defense were initiated in February 2022. Therefore, the plaintiff had to know about the alleged violation of the state’s interests from that time. However, the claim was filed only in July 2025, when the statutory deadlines had already expired.
The court’s verdict was a double blow to the prosecution. in addition to rejecting the claim, the court decided to expropriate 300,000 drams from the prosecutor’s office in favor of Gabrielyan as a reasonable attorney’s fee. The situation became more complicated on March 16, 2026, when the Appellate Anti-Corruption Court returned the appeal of the General Prosecutor’s Office. This process raises a logical question: whether the General Prosecutor Anna Vardapetyan was really not aware of the violations and did not order to file a lawsuit in time, or did she deliberately delay the process, giving the former high-ranking military officer the opportunity to win the case on the basis of statute of limitations.
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