Strong Armenia’s Narek Karapetyan charged with concealing Russian citizenship

Armenia's Investigative Committee on Wednesday filed criminal charges against Narek Karapetyan, who leads the electoral list of the opposition Strong Armenia party.

The authorities have accused him of concealing Russian citizenship – if he had reported it, he would not be allowed to run in the election because of a constitutional provision barring foreign nationals from becoming members of parliament.

Concealing information that might prevent an applicant from becoming a public official is a criminal offense. Narek Karapetyan is now facing up to three years in prison and a maximum five-year ban on running for public office if he is found guilty, though more lenient punishment may also apply.

He is the nephew of Samvel Karapetyan, a Russian-Armenian billionaire behind Strong Armenia. Though the party acknowledges Samvel Karapetyan’s Russian citizenship, it has pledged to remove the constitutional provision requiring individuals to have held only Armenian citizenship for four years prior to running for public office.

The Insider, an exiled Russian investigative outlet, announced later on Wednesday that it had verified Karapetyan’s dual citizenship using publicly available information from Russian tax records, where a man with that exact name, surname, and patronymic is explicitly listed as a Russian citizen.

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Although the tax records do not mention a date of birth or birthplace, leaving room for the possibility of namesakes, The Insider compared Karapetyan’s publicly available tax credentials with those in a leaked database with more credentials, and the two matched.

It also identified a news report from 2016 in which the legal entity associated with Karapetyan in the public tax registry is mentioned as part of the Tashir Group, Samvel Karapetyan's business empire.

Responding to the accusations, Narek Karapetyan has denied being a Russian citizen, calling the reports fake news.