Who Says Crime Doesn’t Pay?
Armenia Now has an excellent article on corruption in the judicial system in Armenia. Although people say that crime doesn’t pay, it does here. Ironically, however, it is judges — and not criminals, although many here would say they’re the same thing — that reap the benefits. Nothing new there, of course, but the article does spell it out quite clearly.
The judge, whose salary is about $642 a month, owns six cars (including those given to his sons) worth about $61,000, a house in the resort town of Tsaghkadzor, and a four room Yerevan apartment into which he invested about $100,000 in 2002. He later purchased two other apartments.
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ArmeniaNow asked the judge to account for how he could afford such expensive property and vehicles on his salary.
Indignant, Kostanyan angrily replied:
“I am a judge, why shouldn’t I have the right to have a Mercedes? (The judge has one Mercedes for work and another – a 600SL for private use.) My son is a doctor, shouldn’t he have a car? My other son is Armenia’s representative to the European court, shouldn’t he have a car?”
And to make this example even more representative of how corruption and nepotism defines the way Armenia is governed, it turns out that the Minister of Justice is the godfather of one of those sons. Unfortunately, the article won’t shock anyone here because this is how Armenia works, and the money in question is pocket-money for those at the top.
