"Hraparak" writes.
Huge sums of money are already being spent on the budget for the Conference on Biodiversity, COP17. It would be more correct to call it a budget waste conference rather than a biodiversity conference. In August 2026 alone, an additional 2.64 billion drams (about $7.2 million) was allocated from the government's reserve fund to the Ministry of Environment to organize this event. The government allocated a total of $25 million to host COP17. Let's note that the total budget of the Ministry of Environment is 40 million dollars, that is, the government intends to spend more than half of the Ministry's budget for the organization of one event.
A country that cannot or does not want to solve its own ecological disasters, that spends small amounts of money for environmental purposes, where mining tailings poison the nature, deforestation cannot be stopped, and the capital has turned into a center of dust and garbage, has the ambition to give "green lessons" to the world. But more important than this environmental farce is how this money is spent. Following the official reports, we find out that, in fact, we have become rich dramatically and so much that we have decided to become a global "sponsor".
On September 11, the government decided that Armenia should finance the participation of underdeveloped countries in the Biodiversity Conference. According to the government's decision, 93.5 million drams, about 257 thousand dollars, will be allocated for the participation of 74 "high-ranking representatives of the least developed and developing small island countries" at COP17. A country where the border villages have a problem of basic security and living, where the pensioner counts the pennies without being able to buy medicine, with a "gentleman's" attitude finances the high-ranking delegates of the island countries to come, drink coffee in the center of Yerevan and tell us how the Antarctic ice is melting. On the 27th, it was organized in one of the famous restaurants in Nairobi, Kenya. The Armenian branch of the Ministry of Environment and the World Wildlife Fund, WWF-Armenia, paid 4 million 652 thousand 75 US dollars for that dinner. It was held within the framework of the Convention on Biological Diversity with the participation of more than 70 high-ranking guests.
But mythical biodiversity is not the only excuse for wasting public money. Another incident, which we mentioned again recently, the mayor of Yerevan allocated a huge sum of money to H1, 11 million drams, to digitize the films authored by Artavazd Peleshyan. What does the Yerevan Municipality have to do with the Public Television Company? It is not clear. The capital city is immersed in a widespread ecological, transport and communal disaster, and the municipality finances the digitization of Artavazd Peleshyan's films, which is quite possible with public funds, without spending additional drams. Only for the organization of this last cycling event, the Tour of Armenia international cycling race, which was held on September 10-13, the government allocated 884 million drams (about 2.4 million dollars) from the budget. The money was allocated at the session of the government on August 20, again in the middle of the year, again by budget reformulation, directly from the reserve fund. For four days, almost 900 million drams were given from the budget so that about 300 delegates and athletes could come to ride bicycles on the roads of Armenia. Along with these shows and coffees of the bureaucrats of the island countries, the intense process of "distributing money" continues inside the government offices.
The salary of a state employee defined by law is an outdated formula for this government. A recent fact from the July 16 session of the government, with some incomprehensible "pilot program", as an incentive for the semester, around 5 billion drams (4 billion 961 million drams) were allocated from the government's reserve fund at once to reward employees of state bodies. The matter was unreported, 5 billion drams were taken out of the reserve fund in the middle of the year, outside of the main budget law, and distributed to their own. Meanwhile, the Constitution and the law clearly state that the salary and bonus of a civil servant should be determined exclusively by the law, not by "pilot" decisions made in the government rooms. But Nikol Pashinyan, do you remember, woke up one winter morning and suddenly decided to increase his pension? Not by economic indicators, but by own desire, for pre-election PR.
Otherwise, what should he talk about during the pre-election campaign days? "The people gave Nikol Pashinyan a mandate, and this is the answer of the authorities," says economist Tatul Manaseryan. According to him, even a modest pension increase should be based on strict economic calculation, budget planning and the law. "Encouraging promises of pension increase were made, then it turned out that they were made at the expense of reducing other important expenses, at the expense of reducing the benefits of Artsakh residents and other vulnerable groups. And this gave the government a reason to say that we have few beneficiaries and we are overcoming poverty, which is an eye-opener," he says. He sees two important problems in terms of the government's extravagances. "The priorities of the state have not been defined in any way for years. This should be clearly stated in the budget message, but it is not. If the country does not have clear targets, then they work in whichever direction the wind blows.
And secondly, our country lacks budgetary discipline. The budget is not something that you calculate and don't know what to do, it is a law that needs to be enforced".
