Bagrat Badalyan is a major player when it comes to constructing roads in Armenia.

It all started in April 2020, when Badalyan, who was serving as advisor to then Deputy Prime Minister Tigran Avinyan, acquired 88.13% of a company called Road Project Institute LLC.

The company soon started to win a huge number of government road construction contracts.

In 2018, the company won just three contracts totaling 12 million drams. Since April 2020, the company has won about forty contracts totaling some 1 billion drams (US$2.5 million)

Badalyan became a high-ranking government official after Nikol Pashinyan came to power in the 2018 “Velvet Revolution”. In

In 2018-2019 he served as Armenia’s Deputy Minister of Transport, Communication and Information Technologies, followed by a one-year stint as the country’s Deputy Minister of Territorial Administration and Infrastructure. From February-November 2020, he served as Advisor to then Deputy Prime Minister Tigran Avinyan. In 2020-2021 he headed Avinyan’s office. From August-November 2021, he served as an adviser to the president of the State Revenue Committee. He was then appointed a deputy chief of PM Pashinyan’s office, where he still serves.

In 2021, according to his financial declaration, Badalyan and his wife Margarita Aganisyan, a schoolteacher, purchased a house in Marysville (Washington, USA) for US$584,950. (See photo). The house sits on a plot of land measuring 607 square meters.

The purchase document for the house does not mention any mortgage, which leads us to believe that the Badalyans paid cash on the barrel.