In the staff of the government delegation headed by the Prime-Minister a translator is involved, a contract is signed for translation services, payments are done.
At the beginning of the year, when the government delegation left for Kuwait and Egypt, translation services were provided by Khachatur Adumyan. Pursuant to the contract signed with him on 10 March, approximately 900.000 AMD was paid for services done from 10 to 14 March.
Khachatur Adumyan did translation services during the business trip to Czech Republic from 1 to 3 June. This time the Government paid 640.000 AMD to him.
It is not clear yet, whether translation services were provided during the trip to Paris or not. The juridical basis of this business trip is 539- A decision of the Prime-Minister made on 26 June, which does not exist factually- it is not published on the internet.
In his interview with Iravaban.net Artak Manukyan, expert at “Transparency International” anti-corruption organization mentioned that in these cases the purchase of translation services in an ineffective expense: “But there is a translator in the stuff of the Government. This is a bit strange. That is, if you have a translator, but you don’t use his/her services, then why do you keep that position? Find the best qualified specialist, hire him/her, and there will be only one specialist providing the best services.”
A. Manukyan drives parallels with ineffective expenses done by the ENA. “This is the same, when the ENA pays 84 million AMD salary to 35 lawyers, and then hired others for juridical services.”
In his interview with Irtavaban.net the lawyer and expert of “Multi-Faced Anti-Corruption Promotion” project Arthur Sukiasyan finds this circumstance suspicious: “A Reasonable suspicion may arise, that not proper specialist was appointed in that position, who gets salary from the state, but is not able to carry out his/her responsibilities. It is possible that not proper specialist is chosen in a corrupted way, and because of this a necessity of ineffective expenses arises”.
“The fulfillment of translation services” is within the frames of the activities of the department for foreign relations of the staff of the Government. And by the way, the head of the department Stepan Kartashyan is usually included in the stuff of delegations.
According to the experts, the contracts signed with other specialists might have been justified, if there were a need for a specialist of a not-wide-spread language, as Hebrew. But in the above mentioned cases, the chosen translator Khachatur Adumyan is a specialist of English, Russian and Armenian.
Astghik Karapetyan
