The fate of Yerevan’s Nayirit Rubber Plant remains unclear.

The plant’s production lines have stood idle since February 2011.

Recently, representatives of the Russian Itera company visited Yerevan and had talks with the Ministry of Energy and Natural Resources. The ministry remains tight-lipped as to what transpired.

Nonetheless, ten deputy managers have been officially employed at the plant, receiving astronomical wages, since 2008. The government has been pulling funds from here and there to pay these supervisors.

On November 9, Hetq wrote a piece about workers not getting paid at the plant. ($40 Million in Wages at Non-Operating Nayirit)

The article notes that while the total workforce of the plant ballooned from 2,100 to 3,000 in 2008, most of the newcomers were either managers or service-oriented staff. When the plant shut down, the workforce dropped by 200 but there were little if any cuts to management.

In preparation for the above article, I had asked the plant’s public affairs spokesperson Anoush Haroutyunyan how many deputies the plant’s executive director had. At the time, she told me five deputies, plus one assistant and one advisor.

When I asked Haroutyunyan the same question yesterday, she told me the director had seven deputies. Haroutyunyan remarked that she hadn’t forgotten about two of them.

According to our information, the plant director has three assistants and two advisors, not the one each as noted by Haroutyunyan.

The plant hasn’t refuted the fact that the director gets a salary of 7 million AMD and that deputies receive 3.5 million.

It seems more than odd that when the plant was actually producing there were only 3 deputy directors. Now, when it isn’t, there are ten.

Can Prime Minister Tigran Sargsyan justify such a use of taxpayer money?

(Itera is a private group of companies based in Moscow.  It focuses on natural gas exploration and processing. In addition, it deals with other fields of energy industry, such as oil extraction, pipeline transportation and coal mining, civil and industrial engineering, and finance and insurance. The company operates mainly in Russia, the CIS countries and Turkmenistan. Altogether, Itera has over 150 subsidiaries all over the world.)