Last October, Armavair Regional Administrator Ashot Ghahramanyan bestowed Mrgashat village Mayor Gevorg Danielyan with a letter of commendation for renovating the St. Astvatzatzin Church.

What Ghahramanyan still doesn’t know is that Mayor Danielyan took out a $10,000 bank loan and used the village municipal building as collateral. The mayor signed off on the bank loan without the approval of the municipal council.

When I spoke to Mayor Danielyan he brushed off any inference of wrongdoing. He refused to be recorded and would only say that the loan was for work on the church and that a part of the loan was already paid off.

“Last year we spent 68 million AMD ($175,000) on renovating the church. The money was from the village budget. It was an old church in terrible condition. What’s the big fuss?”

Our sources in Mrgashat told us that last year the mayor took 18 hectares of land from the uncultivated land from the villagers and used it to plant cotton for himself. The loan, they claim, was for this purpose.

They also state that the church wasn’t renovated with municipal funds but by small and large donations made by the residents themselves and that Sargis Khlghatyan, brother of the Mayor of Armavir, donated money to repair the church roof. Another benefactor was MP Nahapet Gevorgyan who was bestowed the title of honorary Mgrashat citizen by the village council in gratitude.

Many in the village were also unaware that the municipal building had been used as collateral for a bank loan. There’s no bulletin board in the office and no information about municipal dealings or budgetary matters gets posted.

“There was notice board outside but some village kids tore it down. I’ll have a new one installed in a few days,” Mayor Danielyan promised.

When we asked Regional Administrator Ghahramanyan if he knew of other municipal property in Armavir that had been used as bank collateral, he said there wasn’t any on file.

So it would appear that Mayor Danielyan conducted the loan transaction on the “sly” and that it was most probably for personal rather than village related reasons.

In his defense, Mayor Danielyan boasted that in the eleven years he’s served as village mayor, he’s built a club, a hospital and a kindergarten.

He says that the village roads and one of the school annexes are in need of repair and that work will begin this year. He couldn’t tell me what particular project would encompass such endeavours.

“Project? There are many projects out there,” was his response.

He also pointed to municipal funding for a football team and dance, puppet and painting clubs.

Mayor Danielyan says he pays particular attention to the senior citizens in the village. He was even to tell me the exact number of grandfathers and grandmothers; 350 and 420.

He says the municipality pays for an annual trip that takes them to Lake Sevan.

“This year, we’ll go somewhere different for the summer. But we’ll take them separately so as not to quarrel,” Mayor Danielyan joked.

He said that starting this year, the municipality would send a wreath of flowers to burial services whenever someone in the village passes away.

Every year, 3-4 million of the village’s 90 million AMD budget is spent of social services, Danielyan added.

The mayor told me that 1.2 kilometres of village streets will get lighting installed and that the State Water Resources Committee has launched a tender for the repair of 7.5 kilometres of irrigation pipes.