YEREVAN. – The National Assembly (NA) of Armenia on Saturday adopted the bill on making amendments to the Law on Funded Pensions in the first NA reading.  

Even though the opposition ARF Dashnaktsutyun and Armenian National Congress (ANC) parliamentary factions twice demanded a recounting of the votes, their request was not granted.  

The four non-ruling NA factions (ANC, Prosperous Armenia, ARF Dashnaktsutyun, and Heritage) have opposed the new bill several times arguing that the aforementioned amendments are solely cosmetic in nature.

Their dissatisfaction with this bill is due to the fact that the mandatory funded pension deductions from the employees’ salaries have remained in the law in the financial sense, and only the wording has changed. Accordingly, these salary cuts have been renamed mandatory social payment deductions, which are effective as of July 1, 2014 for the public servants and as of July 1, 2017 for the private sector workers.