“No one can threaten a native of Kapan and tell him to vote for this one or that one,” Gagik Gevorgyan, a member of the ARF and a former MP, said during a conversation with www.aravot.am, talking about the news that Surik Khachatryan had been pressuring businessmen of Kapan in recent days.
Let us remind that according to our information, in the run-up to the Kapan mayoral election, the governor of Syunik has summoned businessmen of Kapan who work for Artur Atayan, an ARF member and the current mayor, to the regional administration and instructed them to support the Republican Party of Armenia (RPA) candidate, otherwise, he promised to take stern measures. In case of not complying with his instruction, the governor also promised to force them to flee Syunik and threatened “to close the veins feeding them.” G. Gevorgyan said that he had no information that the businessmen had been threatened and he would visit Kapan two days later, “The chances of the current mayor are high, because residents of Kapan are to vote and no one can tell them to vote for a certain person. I don’t know what the work style of the governor is, what he does… The situation is the same everywhere these days; the same thing is in every region.”
Arpine SIMONYAN
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P.S. Let us add that the regional government of Syunik stated on its website in regard to this article of ours that “it is groundless for a simple reason that there has been no such meeting. On the day mentioned in the article, Surik Khachatryan, the governor of Syunik, received guests from Yerevan on the occasion of an August forum of public education workers and had brief discussions with individual workers of the system on educational issues. And judgments about ‘terrorizing’ or ‘closing veins’ are more than ridiculous.”
Let us mention on behalf of Aravot that we have more information on the governors’ talks with the businessmen of the region of Syunik than it is mentioned in this article. We will go into detail about what happened in the short-run, if the persons involved in it agree to say their names.
