MP outlines fight to free church from businessmen

PanARMENIAN.Net - Lawmaker Alhas Ghazaryan of the ruling “Civil Contract” party accused Ktrich Nersisyan, and his business partners of exploiting the Armenian Church. “Our fight isn’t against the church or faith—it’s to liberate the church from businessmen, to rescue belief from desecration. We aim to return the Armenian Church to the people, and we refuse to hand over Church or state to them,” Ghazaryan said, addressing Lilit Galstyan. She added that Nersisyan aspires to be “the second Sargis Getadardz” in Armenian reality—a sign of geopolitical influence supporting him and his business allies.

Meanwhile, National Assembly Vice‑President Ruben Rubinyan responded to MP Artsvik Minasyan’s call—on behalf of the “Hayastan” faction—for unity around national values. “For us, national values are real: statehood, language, national identity, national interests. For you and your faction, the national value is your colleagues’ loot, the structures your associates have seized. Everything you call ‘national values’—when someone questions whether everything in that institution is okay, you reply: ‘hands off our sacred things,’ ” Rubinyan said.

Late on the night of June 18, entrepreneur Samvel Karapetyan left his Yerevan villa and departed with law enforcement. Hours earlier, he had issued a statement supporting the Armenian Apostolic Church: “I stand by our church, by our people. No matter how much they try to smear it, I don’t care about their electric grid or them. Everything will be fine, the people will speak with one voice—they will understand that they were wrong,” he said. In reply, Prime Minister Pashinyan wrote: “Why have the immoral ‘clergy’ and their immoral ‘philanthropists’ become active? Don’t worry—they’ll be corralled again. Permanently.” He later added that the power distribution network must be nationalized—and quickly.