The three candidates who had passed the stage of evaluating the documents had come to the interview phase for the selection of the candidates for the chairman of the Anti-Corruption Committee of Armenia, 168.am reported.

Sasun Khachatryan, a candidate for the chairman of the Anti-Corruption Committee, the head of the Special Investigation Service (SIS), among other questions, answered also the questions about his property—real estate and movable property, money.

In general, in this part of the interview, the name and surname of Tigran Gevorgyan—who is the brother of Sasun Khachatryan's wife—was mentioned so much that it seemed that the family of Sasun Khachatryan was being taken care of by his brother-in-law.

We do not want to go into the details of family relations, but in any case, a funny incident was not left out of 168.am's attention.

The head of the "Union of Informed Citizens" NGO, Daniel Ioannisyan, who, by the way, was the most active among the questioners, asked Sasun Khachatryan about the fact that his wife received a donation in 2017.

"Your wife's bank account had a cash entry in the amount of 2.8 million drams and 1,600 dollars, then there was the same amount of cash out, but those data are not in the annual declaration. How can you explain all this? ”asked Daniel Ioannisyan.

Sasun Khachatryan's answer was the following:

"In May 2017, when I was out of Armenia’s borders, my daughter had received an invitation from the University of Sheffield in Greece—where her friends were studying—to visit the university. And to submit [respective] documents to the [Greek] embassy [in Yerevan], it was required to have a certain amount of money in the [bank] account of one of the parents—as a guarantee that the child will be secured there. Since I was not in Armenia, my wife asked her brother Tigran Gevorgyan to transfer the mentioned amount to the account opened in her name in Ameriabank on the same day. The transfer is there. The money was transferred by Tigran Gevorgyan to the account of my wife, Lilit Khachatryan, a reference was issued, which was also provided by the bank that there is this much money in Lilit Khachatryan's account at this hour, after which only 45 minutes later that amount was withdrawn from the account again, returned to Tigran Gevorgyan, and this reference was submitted to the Greek embassy. This is the whole story. It’s just that the uncle has created that guarantee for his sister's child that the child will have that opportunity to go to a Greek university."

The issue is not that Sasun Khachatryan's family is the only family that does such a thing. In fact, they deceive in this or that embassy. Probably everyone does that. But when it is announced by a high-ranking official, the head of the SIS, a representative of the law enforcement body who aspires to become the chairman of the Anti-Corruption Committee, it is a message that such behavior be considered normal for the society.

Sasun Khachatryan, by the way, is not in such a ridiculous situation for the first time. When the first major scandal of these authorities—the criminal case on the wiretapping of the SIS chief-National Security Service (NSS) director-Prime minister Nikol Pashinyan telephone conversation—was being investigated, the investigator called the figures in this case to examine their phones in the presence of specialists and then send them for examination—after obtaining court permission.

Artur Vanetsyan, the then director of the NSS, agreed and gave his phone, whereas Sasun Khachatryan, to avoid sending his phone for examination, gave an answer which would probably have given an ordinary juvenile offender who is miles away from law.

"The phone is not in my possession, so I cannot submit it for inspection. Considering the published wiretaps and thinking that it is possible that a wiretapping device may be installed in my phone, last night I disassembled my phone, during which it broke and I threw it in the trash. I am not a specialist, I cannot say whether there were foreign devices in it, but for security reasons I decided not to hand it in for repair anymore, and threw it away," SIS chief Sasun Khachatryan had said.