Second President of Armenia Robert Kocharyan posted on his Facebook page that he had participated in the remote session of the Board of Trustees of Hayastan All-Armenian Fund yesterday. The Facebook post reads as follows:

“Yesterday I participated in the remote session of the Board of Trustees of Hayastan All-Armenian Fund. The topic was the report on the AMD 52,000,000,000 that the Fund transferred to the government during the war in Artsakh (Nagorno-Karabakh).

The discussion sparked a concern. The Prime Minister had unequivocally declared that the AMD 52,000,000,000 had been transferred to the state budget and was spent and that it was impossible to specify what the donations had been spent on. However, according to the agreement with the Fund, the government is obliged to provide a report on the expenditures.

It’s clear that the funds had to be transferred to the government’s account opened for this purpose and had to be spent for urgent needs. The government’s actions are seriously hurting the reputation of Hayastan All-Armenian Fund.

In this context, I don’t understand the statement adopted by the Board of Trustees. How can the Board be certain that the funds were spent in a targeted manner when there are no documents on expenditures? In the current situation, no audit will make things clear. The only and right way out of this situation is to state that the AMD 52,000,000,000 was paid to the Fund as a debt under the condition that it is returned in the course of 3-5 years. In its turn, Hayastan All-Armenian Fund needs to spend the money to implement several programs to take care of the needs of Artsakh.”