Yerevan Mayor Hayk Marutyan took his next vacation on 10 March. Every employee is entitled to a 24-day vacation per year. These twenty-four days may be used fully or in part. Mayor Marutyan used 14 of his vacation days in 2019, taking another two days of unpaid leave (as they say, at his own expense). This is ordinary, even primitive information, perhaps not worthy of coverage. The municipality reports.

“But the gossip media would not have been so if they had not make an intrigue from all sorts of things, spreading the gossip with misinformation. For example, one writes that the mayor has left the country with his family unexpectedly; the other wrote that he had gone to the Czech Republic with his friends, the third is making far-reaching conclusions based on this, and so on and so forth.
Meanwhile, the mayor has not gone anywhere; he is in Yerevan with his family. The exit of any person, especially public figures, from the country can be checked and a professional journalist knows how to do it. But it seems that the task of our partners is not to spread the truth, but to spread rumors of different colors.

It is unfortunate that a member of the Council of Elders, David Khazhakyan, joined this “choir”, as he cannot calm down from the fact that the mayor is on vacation.

The tireless anti-corruption avant-garde player whose imagination we had the chance to enjoy in the last months of last year uses a mysterious term “unannounced vacation” in his Facebook posts, complaining that no one knows where the mayor went and urges him to return immediately to fight against coronavirus.

I have to urge Mr. Khazhakyan to renounce the practice of gossip-based judgment and use the free from posting Facebook statuses time to read the RA Law on Public Service and the Labor Code, in particular the provisions on the right to vacation.

As for anti-epidemic actions, the municipality follows the instructions of the Ministry of Health.

Update: I saw that Khazhakyan, in reference to his conversation with me, denied the misinformation he had spread. Very good. However, Mr. Khazhakyan had 36 hours to find out the whereabouts of the mayor from me or someone else, while he continued to spread gossip,” the statement said.