The member of the U.S. Congress House of Representatives Brad Sherman has demanded the U.S. Secretary of the Treasury to consider the ties with Armenia not only from merely financial but also geopolitical viewpoint.

During the Finance Committee session in the Congress, reference was made to the strategic significance of Armenia, as reported by Armenian News – NEWS.am correspondent. 

In his speech, Sherman tried to explain why he considers the signing of a tax treaty with Armenia a priority. According to him, Canada, whose relevant ministry has one tenth of its U.S. counterpart, has signed such a treaty with Armenia. Having signed treaties with Luxembourg, Malta and many other countries, the U.S. is missing a very important circumstance: it considers everything exclusively in terms of economy, whereas the geopolitical and foreign policy context should also be kept in mind, Sherman noted. He thus urged the agency to take relevant measures. 

Explaining the importance of the issue for the Congress, Department of State and Department of Defense, the Congressman noted that the Congress has provided billions of dollars support to Armenia during the past 25 years. The executive is for its part running a policy aimed at the fully-fledged independence of the former Soviet states, trying to free them from Moscow, he added.

In this context, he underscored the importance of not only signing tax treaties with Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania, but also including Estonia in NATO at risk. Noting that the U.S. may appear in war with Russia and can lose soldiers in the battlefield, Sherman stressed that he is not asking the U.S. Secretary of the Treasury to put on the scales someone’s life, but merely to initiate a simple thing, since the Armenian side has developed the treaty exactly on the basis of the agency’s sample.  Considering that the Congress has provided billions of dollars to that end, Sherman asked whether the agency can provide a lawyer for several months to finalize the drafting of the tax treaty with Armenia.

In response, Secretary of the Treasury Jack Lew noted that he realizes the strategic significance of Armenia and appreciates the reasons behind the Congressman’s concern.  According to him, they consider the tax treaties in the context of economic and tax policy, the main issue here concerning the prospects for avoiding double taxation.

For his part, Sherman noted that the same answer was given the previous time. According to him, this is the story of a chicken or the egg: there are no investments, since there is no tax treaty, since there are no investments.