YEREVAN. - Toward the end of the Friday sitting of the Armenian parliament’s 4-day session, Armenian MPs, who are not accustomed to work more than four days in three weeks, ran out of patience. Speaker Hovik Abrahamyan could hardly hold a vote.

The businessmen MPs, who were “convened” to make up a quorum, were persuading their colleagues from the ARF-D group to “put as few questions as possible” and “speak as less as possible.” However, the ARF-D group members were “inexorable”, saying they would “give it hot” to the government for submitting “raw” documents to parliament.

After the second voting, the MPs from the ruling majority ran out of patience and left. The parliament thus failed to vote on draft amendments to the Land Code. To prevent further failures, Galust Sahakyan, Chairman of the Republican Party of Armenia (RPA) parliamentary group, asked for a 20-minute interval. He called the businessmen MPs one after another and demanded that they return.

Since, after the interval, the MPs were unable to remember the bill they had discussed half an hour before, Vahan Hovhannisyan, Chairman of the ARF-D group, stated Speaker Abrahamyan was putting the same bill to the vote twice. In response, Speaker Abrahamyan called on Hovhannisyan to “take part in the voting instead of interfering with our work.” The ARF-D group leader responded to the speaker’s call by asking for another 20-minute interval. Eventually, however, the MP proved able to “cope with” the voting.