YEREVAN -- Armenian police have arrested former President Robert Kocharian, now leader of the country’s second-largest opposition party, amid accusations of corruption-related offenses.
Kocharian, 71, served as Armenia's president between 1998 and 2008. He currently leads the Armenia Alliance, which is considered pro-Moscow and finished third in recent parliamentary elections in June, winning almost 10 percent of the vote.
On August 25, Armenia's Anti-Corruption Committee told RFE/RL's Armenian Service that Kocharian had been arrested and charged with abuse of power, large-scale money laundering, and bribery.
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Pashinian Wins In Armenia, But No SupermajorityIn a separate statement, Armenia’s prosecutor-general said that the former president had used his position when he was president to transfer state-owned property to himself and his associates on "advantageous terms" and to hide the "criminal origin" of that property.
The committee has also published an extensive list of properties that it says were illegally transferred and purchased for Kocharian's benefit. This included a plot of land belonging to Armenia's Defense Ministry that was sold to an associate of the ex-president for a quarter of its market price.
Five other people were arrested alongside Kocharian on the same charges, one of them his eldest son, businessman Sedrak Kocharian. The authorities did not disclose the names of the other four. Altogether, 14 people have been charged in the case.
There was no immediate comment from Robert Kocharian, but a message on his Telegram page described the developments as an "attack" on him and his family.
Kocharian's lawyer, Aleksander Kochubaev, told RFE/RL that his client had been taken to a hospital following his arrest, while the ex-president's spokesman said Kocharian had recently undergone medical treatment and that doctors had "deemed it necessary to conduct additional tests."
The arrests came a day after Kocharian's younger son, Levon, also an opposition lawmaker, criticized Prime Minister Nikol Pashinian in parliament, blaming him for losing control of Nagorno-Karabakh to Azerbaijan.
Nagorno-Karabakh, internationally recognized as part of Azerbaijan but long controlled by ethnic Armenian separatists, was retaken by Baku in 2023, prompting more than 100,000 ethnic Armenians to flee.
Investigators have also been conducting a search at Levon Kocharian's apartment.
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Two other leading opposition figures, Gagik Tsarukian and Samvel Karapetian, are currently in pretrial detention and under house arrest, respectively, while Catholicos Karekin II, the head of the Armenian Apostolic Church and a prominent critic of Pashinian, is also on trial.
Kocharian has previously faced prosecution over the deadly unrest that followed Armenia's disputed 2008 presidential election, when at least 10 people were killed in clashes between police and protesters. He was arrested in 2018 and put on trial the following year, but the charges were later dropped and the trial ended in 2021.