There is legislation on tailing dumos safety in Armenia, the procedure is set, but the first person responsible for all tailing dumps safety is the operator, Minister of Environment Erik Grigoryan told repoters after the government meeting on Thursday.

According to him, the legislation deals with EIA in the first stage, later the Ministry of Emergency Situations has a technical security process which is more general.

Referring to the accident at the Artsvanik tailing dump of the Zangezur Copper and Molybdenum Combine, he noted that the pipeline was built in the last years of the USSR when it was determined that the tails of the Zangezur copper and molybdenum tanks were tens of kilometers.

Accordinh to him, mining companies have obligations to their ministry.

"They have obligations to us that there should be no pollution, no more abstraction. But since the regulations were largely fictitious, they were ridiculously low, in many cases it was beneficial not to go for technical solutions and, if there was an accident, you could pay AMD 500-600 thousand for that accident and have no worries," he noted.