ArmInfo. Eight Armenian commercial banks headed by IDBank appealed to RA Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan and CBA Chairman Arthur Javadyan in connection with a lawsuit initiated by entrepreneur Gevorg Afandyan against IDBank. Chairman of Management Board at IDBank Mher Abrahamyan at a November 18 press conference stated this.
Abrahamyan noted that with such an initiative, banks do not expect any mediation in judicial matters by the authorities, since they consider this an unacceptable phenomenon. , he said, recalling that IDBank is an organization with 100% foreign capital.
Opening the contents of the letter, Abrahamyan noted that in the letter the commercial banks asked to accelerate the reforms in the judicial system of the Republic of Armenia in all directions, which would preclude the adoption of such biased decisions.
, he stressed.
Continuing the above, IDBank's Chairman of the Management Board announced that the appeal to international authorities is not the most prudent decision , since such an initiative poses threats to the country, in particular in terms of rating and the business environment as a whole.
To recall, in 2010 Gevorg Afandyan received a loan of $ 7 million from Anelik Bank, which was secured by the property complex of the Arzni mineral water plant with an area of 14 thousand square meters, a land plot of 2.8 hectares and another trifle. Unfortunately, Afandyan by that time was no longer able to pay the loan and, as a result, did not fulfill his obligations to the bank. Under normal conditions, the mortgaged property was transferred to the bank on the balance sheet and after some time it was alienated in order to cover losses. But the agreement contained a , which the former management of the bank, and especially its consultants, could not have known. When taking this large loan by our standards, a proposal was written in the document, which, in case it comes to the alienation of collateral, provided for the possibility of a pre-emptive repurchase of this property from the bank by the borrower himself for the noble purpose of not breaking the business and trying to fulfill obligations over time.
At that time, the Lebanese Credit Bank SAL acted as the owner of the bank, and the bank's management accepted this proposal and concluded an agreement with G. Afandyan, under which Anelik Bank undertook to provide the mortgagor or the third person indicated by him with an exclusive preference for redemption of collateral for a period of 2 years. The same agreement stipulates that in case of non-compliance with the specified pre-emptive right to purchase, the bank is obliged to pay a fine five times (!!!) the cost of recovery, and the fine should be sent to the "Central Station", "Ecoprint" and "Supra" LLCs owned by the Afandyan family "in order to repay their current obligations to the bank. In August 2016, the Lebanese management and shareholders in the Vergins Islands created an offshore company with the sonorous name Private International Company (PIC), followed by the Armenian "Tarmak" LLC affiliated with it, to which the property complex of the "Arzni" mineral water plant was sold in October of the same year. After Afandyan filed a lawsuit against the bank and requested $ 21 million, for that, it turns out, he was not aware of his son's participation in the offshore transaction and the family bought back its property pledged 10 years ago. The court found the Afandyan testimony reliable, and "Tarmak" LLC considered it a third party in the process. And as a result, the lawsuit filed by B.M.L. ARZNI Hakob Asoyan against the bank was very quickly satisfied in March 2018 by the judge of the court of general jurisdiction of Kotayk region Tigran Poladyan. The bank successfully appealed the decision of the trial court to the Court of Appeal, which sent the case for further investigation. However, the court of general jurisdiction of Yerevan, chaired by Judge Gayane Mazmanyan, on September 20, 2019 partially satisfied the claim of B.M.L. ARZNI to recover from the bank an amount equivalent to approximately $ 22 million as a fine under the agreement.