Armenialiberty
RFE/RL puts its Armenia news on Armenialiberty.org - one of my favorite sources for Armenian news. Yesterday there were 3 items which were all interesting.
I am not big on following politics here, but there has been some big movement going on. I logged somewhat recently about Dodi Gago's extremely well funded new "Prosperous Armenia" party. This appears to have become Kocharian's new political base. The current ruling party - the Republican Party, was recently joined by Serzh Sarkisian, the defense minister. Neither of these was known to have a party affiliation before this. Serzh has also made comments about Kocharian and Prosperous Armenia - though I don't think Kocharian himself has even said a thing about the party officially, let alone join. Also interesting is that Kocharian presumably (according to the constitution) cannot run for a third term (never mind that he likely should not have run the first two times on the technical reason that he was not an Armenian citizen for 10 years, just like Raffi Hovanissian). So let's see how all this shapes up. The speaker of parliament (Artur Baghdasarian) was recently removed by Kocharian/Sarkisian for making too many pro-democratic/western statements, though whether he was saying this things to curry favor with the US is not clear.
In other news Justice Minister David Harutiunian "outlined on Tuesday an impending reform of Armenia’s judicial and law-enforcement systems which he said is aimed at making them more independent and less corrupt." The proposal seems likely to do nothing to help make them less corrupt.
The third bit of news - good news! Moody's (a western risk assessment company) now has a rating for Armenia. This means Armenian government bonds and t-bills have a better market, since people know what they are getting into now. Armenia's rating "BA2" is a medium level rating, equal to oil-rich Azerbaijan, and better than Georgia and Turkey.
I am not big on following politics here, but there has been some big movement going on. I logged somewhat recently about Dodi Gago's extremely well funded new "Prosperous Armenia" party. This appears to have become Kocharian's new political base. The current ruling party - the Republican Party, was recently joined by Serzh Sarkisian, the defense minister. Neither of these was known to have a party affiliation before this. Serzh has also made comments about Kocharian and Prosperous Armenia - though I don't think Kocharian himself has even said a thing about the party officially, let alone join. Also interesting is that Kocharian presumably (according to the constitution) cannot run for a third term (never mind that he likely should not have run the first two times on the technical reason that he was not an Armenian citizen for 10 years, just like Raffi Hovanissian). So let's see how all this shapes up. The speaker of parliament (Artur Baghdasarian) was recently removed by Kocharian/Sarkisian for making too many pro-democratic/western statements, though whether he was saying this things to curry favor with the US is not clear.
In other news Justice Minister David Harutiunian "outlined on Tuesday an impending reform of Armenia’s judicial and law-enforcement systems which he said is aimed at making them more independent and less corrupt." The proposal seems likely to do nothing to help make them less corrupt.
The third bit of news - good news! Moody's (a western risk assessment company) now has a rating for Armenia. This means Armenian government bonds and t-bills have a better market, since people know what they are getting into now. Armenia's rating "BA2" is a medium level rating, equal to oil-rich Azerbaijan, and better than Georgia and Turkey.
posted by Raffi K. at 7:46 AM
1 Comments:
very interesting stuff.. thanks..
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