A Cabinet meeting was held today, chaired by Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan.

The Cabinet decided that Lentex LLC shall benefit from the privilege of VAT deferment for a period of three years. The Company is planning to invest AMD 1.98 billion to procure high-quality raw materials. The same privilege will be granted to Hello LLC, which is going to invest 370.8 million drams in the knitwear sector.

Prime Minister Pashinyan pointed out that while the policy of granting similar privileges is understandable, specific questions may arise as regards their substantiation. “At the latest meeting, we made it clear that there are specific standards applicable in this field, but questions are arising as to what extent they are objective. In general, the most important problem we need to address is the provision of new jobs along with industry development. We will shortly have a more detailed discussion on this subject. We need to take measures to promote light industry development,” Nikol Pashinyan said, adding that the process of granting companies a privilege should be organized transparently so that the atmosphere of public confidence is not impaired.

According to the Government’s decision, on October 21, 2018, snap elections of community leaders will be held in Armavir and Vagharshapat (Etchmiadzin) communities (Armavir Marz), as well as in Lusashogh community of Ararat Marz.

The Government established a procedure for surrendering to the Republic of Armenia such gifts and presents received by judges the cost of which may exceed the prescribed amount. The decision shall thereby streamline the surrender of non-authorized gifts and the subsequent use thereof. The value of a single gift cannot exceed the mark of 100 thousand drams. The total value of gifts received within a year cannot exceed 400 thousand drams.

The Premier said awareness-raising steps should be taken to tell the public that there are laws to that effect, and that judges should not be given high-value gifts. The Prime Minister highlighted the relevance of this arrangement for public servants, the public-at-large, and in terms of transparency, in general.

“I do believe that certain awareness-raising measures should be taken so that not only public officials, but also the public-at-large could come aware of the rules of the game, since I think that rules are not always observed in practice,” the Head of Government said.

At the end of the meeting, the Prime Minister stated in part, “I have always felt that one of the most important problems in our reality is the existence of parallel realities, and I used to describe them as follows: “On the one hand, we have the Constitution, which states that relations should be settled in a way or another and, on the other hand, we have a reality where relations are regulated quite differently, at least in their significant part.” Our task is to synchronize these two realities, and I think that we are now dealing with it in Armenia.

After assuming the post of Prime Minister, I could see that we have parallel realities in the field of management, specifically in education. Why not merge, for instance, the Diplomatic Academy with the Master’s Degree of the YSU Faculty of International Relations? At the same time, the authority should be delegated and reserved to the entity, which provides higher educational quality. I believe that we need to think of initiating such a process in the field of education so that we could have a single reality there. This will ultimately lead to a more efficacious human resource training system and, secondly, to huge savings of public funds. We are actually spending twice as many resources for the same purpose, and this is at least not at all effective.”