ArmInfo.The furnaces of the Alaverdi copper blister smelter are extinguished. "This is the last copper smelting produced in the plant: I report with great sorrow that the heart of the copper smelter, the metallurgical plant, has stopped since that moment," Garegin Antashyan, an employee of the enterprise, wrote on his Facebook page the night before.
From today about 650 employees of the enterprise have been left without work and means of subsistence. In protest, they blocked the interstate M6 road leading to the Armenian-Georgian border and railway tracks. According to them, at the moment they do not know for what reason they closed the plant - due to environmental or financial problems. As soon as ArmInfo became known, the plant's workers are heading for Yerevan, where at 18:00 they are expected to meet with Deputy Prime Minister Tigran Avinyan.
Employees of the company previously sent an open letter to the Prime Minister of Armenia with a request to assist in resolving the issue, noting "otherwise they will be forced to take sharp and unpredictable actions that can be viewed as steps against the government."
On this issue today to the Acting Deputy Prime Minister Eduard Sharmazanov, who hails from Alaverdi, also addressed the head of government, Nikol Pashinyan. In his address, he stressed the inadmissibility of closing the plant, which for 250 years was the axial enterprise of the region. He called for. Premier to do everything possible and impossible to ensure the normal operation of the plant. Otherwise, as he pointed out, this will result in a new wave of emigration from the region.
A week earlier, ArmInfo reported that the workforce of the Alaverdi Copper Smelter launched protest actions calling on the government to provide an opportunity for the company to significantly increase sulfur dioxide emissions. As they stated, otherwise, the fines imposed on the enterprise by environmental supervisory authorities make the enterprise unprofitable. It was reported that the State Inspectorate for Environmental Protection fined the plant for 380 million drams ($ 700 thousand) because of a serious violation of environmental legislation, adopted in 2005. In an interview with the Public Radio of Armenia, plant manager Lusine Mejloumian said that the practical impossibility of fulfilling the requirements of the environmental inspectorate demands that the issue of shutting down the plant's work be put on the agenda.
According to independent observers, the position of the supervisory authority undoubtedly fits in the fabric of the behavioral line of the new government, which aims to regulate the behavior of players in the country's mining industry, who, until the April velvet revolution, usually regulated some of their painful issues with the state on the basis of informal agreements , allowing to bypass these or other standards in order to improve production efficiency. Apparently, something similar happened at the Alaverdi Combine and, according to a new approach, the company fined the enterprise, gave it a 2-month period to comply with the emission standard, for which the company simply was not ready.
The problem is complicated by the fact that the property complex of the enterprise is secured by a loan of $ 500 million, previously received from VTB Bank for the development of a large Teghut copper- molybdenum deposit, the operation of which was also stopped due to environmental problems even last year after the suspension of co-financing from overseas lenders. Under these conditions, servicing a VTB loan becomes extremely unaffordable for an enterprise and a serious decline in the level of profitability of the Alaverdi plant, in fact, may lead to its bankruptcy.
On October 15, Deputy Prime Minister Tigran Avinyan met with the group of companies Valery Mejlumyan, and according to media reports, Mejlumyan intended to cancel the fine of 380 million drams, appointed by the Ecology and Mineral Resources Inspectorate. As Tigran Avinyan's head of staff, Varag Siserian, later stated: "we listened to the problems and said that we are going to discuss this issue and understand what solutions we can find together. That is, there are no concrete promises either from our side or from Mr. Mejlumyan".
Alaverdi copper smelter was built in the 50s of the last century. Its modernization under the modern enterprise is extremely difficult and inefficient. One of the solutions to the problem of processing copper raw materials inside the country is the construction of a new plant of average capacity, the interest to which is shown by Chinese investors.
Vallex Group (Vallex Group) was established in 1998 and unites 20 subsidiaries and affiliates. Among them, Teghut CJSC, founded in May 2006, 100% of the shares of CJSC belong to Teghut Investments Limited of Cyprus, 100% of which voting shares in turn belong to Armenian Kopr Program CJSC, which is fully owned by Valery Mejlumyan, and also CJSC "Base Metals", operating the copper-gold deposit in the village of Drmbon, Martakert region, NKR, Armenian Copper Program CJSC (ACP), operating the Alaverdi Copper Smelter.
