Armenia’s Administrative Court, in a decision today, has sided with the Investigative Journalists NGO (hetq.am) in a lawsuit filed in February 2023 demanding that the Ministry of High-Tech Industry hand over a list of organizations that received millions of state assistance.

The Investigative Journalists NGO was forced to take the ministry to court after it refused, following several requests, to make the information public.

On December 1, 2022, the Armenian government adopted a decision to provide ten billion drams of state support to organizations operating in the IT sector. The government argued such assistance was necessary due to the losses suffered by the companies that resulted by the devaluation of the Armenian dram against the dollar. ((AMD 10 billion=US$25.8 million at current rate).

The ministry first argued that the applications were still being studied, and then, that not all companies have signed contracts. On May 29, 2023, Narek Melkumyan, Secretary General of the Ministry of High-Tech Industry, told Hetq that the list of companies and the information about the amount of support they received contain “trade secrets”.

Despite the ministry’s refusal to make the list public, Hetq revealed that some of the companies that received government largesse ceased operating soon after or were no longer operating at the time of the grant agreement.

One such example is Eftek Lab LLC, a company founded in 2022 that received 91.5 million AMD (US$210K) in taxpayer money. It went belly-up in January after several months of non-operation.

Equally disturbing is that thirty-three of the forty-seven companies that received state support were founded in 2022, just like Eftek Lab.

See: Armenian IT Company Gets $210K in State Aid; Goes "Belly Up"

Hetq compiled a list of 111 companies that received taxpayer money and the amounts of such largesse. Surprisingly, and seemingly unbeknownst to the Ministry of High-Tech, the data was available on the Ministry of Finance’s Armeps website.

Picsart, a platform offering online photo and video editing services, and Energy Global Services CJSC, received the largest support - 400 million drams (US$1million) each.

Service Titan Arevelk (East), a branch of ServiceTitan, (a US-based all-in-one, cloud-based software for residential home service businesses) received 389.4 million drams.

In December 2023, Armenian PM Nikol Pashinyan dismissed Robert Khachatryan as the country’s high-tech industry minister, replacing him with Mkhitar Hayrapetyan.

Whether his dismissal was connected to the above revelations remains a mystery.

The court today also decided to seize 10,000 drams as a pre-paid state fee and 40,000 drams as legal fee compensation from the Ministry of High-Tech Industry in favor of Hetq.