The third president of Armenia Serzh Sargsyan has been charged with plotting embezzlement of almost 500 million drams in the period between 25 January-7 February 2013 by a group of officials, the Special Investigative Service informed, Eurasia Diary reports citing Armenian media Lragir.

According to the charges, on 24 January 2013 the government approved the government assistance program for acquisition of diesel fuel to subsidize agriculture in spring 2013. The program envisaged selling 17,041,300 liters of diesel fuel to farmers based on requests submitted by the regional governors’ offices and the organizations of the system of the Ministry of Agriculture. Several companies, including Maxhur and Flash LLC expressed readiness to supply fuel. Maxhur proposed the lowest price, and the official of the Ministry of Agriculture decided to submit the data of the mentioned company to the government for approval as a supplier. Nevertheless, Serzh Sargsyan ordered his subordinates to select Flash LLC as a supplier, with a motivation to misuse his powers to facilitate maximum profit for Flash LLC, ignoring the circumstance that thereby an immense sum would be wasted from the treasury.

As a result, under a government decision dated 7 February, 2013 1,789,336,500 AMD was allocated to the Ministry of Agriculture from the reserve fund of the government to supply 17,041,300 liters of diesel and the amount was transferred to the bank account of Flash LLC.

In the result of this program, in the period between February 14 and June 28 in 2013 12,088,334 liters of diesel was sold, the subsidy totaled 1,269,275,070 AMD. The subsidy would total 846,183,380 AMD if the same quantity of fuel had been bought from Maxhur LLC, which means that 423,091,690 AMD was wasted from the treasury.