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Vahe Sarukhanyan

Top Armenian Police Official Dismissed from the Force

The Armenian Police Department has confirmed that Colonel Babken Sedrakyan, the Head of the Police Department’s Operative Investigation Unit, has been dismissed from its ranks.

Hetq first wrote about Sedrakyan in a March 26, 2019 expose entitled Wealthy Armenians Join the Dubai Land Rush.

In the summer of 2018, the OCCRP (Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project) published Dubai’s Golden Sands, an extensive study on Dubai and its booming real estate market. The report describes Dubai as “a one-stop shop where the world’s wealthy can avoid taxes, dodge sanctions, launder money, or hide their assets from police or taxpayers back home.”

According to the Golden Sands data, Sedrakyan and his wife, Ida Yeghiazaryan, bought two apartments in Dubai. One is listed as having been purchased in 2014 in Sedrakyan’s name only and is in the Al Hatimi Building in Palm Jumeirah. Prices for two-bedroom flats at that location currently range from about $ 510,000 to over $1 million, depending on amenities.

The Golden Sands list also includes an apartment owned by the couple in the Al Dana 1 residential building in Dubai’s International City neighborhood. A two-bedroom flat at that address goes for about $190,000.

Of interest is the fact that after Hetq published the above article Armenia’s Prosecutor General’s Office (PGO) sent corresponding case material to the Department of Police. The PGO claimed that the police were looking into the matter.

Sedrakyan was appointed to head the Operative Investigative Unit in December 2018, by then Chief of Police Valery Osipyan.

Hetq also wrote that after Sedrakyan’s appointment his son Jirayr, again on the orders of Osipyan, was transferred from his post at the Police Department’s Organized Crime Division to the Division of Criminal Investigation at Yerevan’s Zvartnots International Airport. Jirayr Sedrakyan was appointed head of this division.

Babken Sedrakyan also serves as Honorary Consul of Kyrgyzstan in Armenia.

Prior to his appointment as Head of the Operative Investigation Unit, he was a member of the Public Council attached to the Chief of Police and later a member of the Police Advisory Board.

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