On 26 August, a criminal case based “on negligent attitude to service” was opened in Armenia because of a disruption of the tender for the supply of weapons in which the Russian arms company ORSIS participated, reported RIA novosti.

In May, the Armenian Ministry of Defence announced a tender for the supply of military equipment in the amount of several million dollars and only the Russian ORSIS could satisfy the qualification requirements. Soon it became known that the tender was closed without explanation. ORSIS appealed to the Appeals Commission and obtained a lawyer to represent their interests in Armenian courts. The military attache of the Armenian Embassy in Russia was also informed about the incident. The Armenian Ministry of Defence confirmed the information about the criminal case. The ministry representative said that additional information will be provided after investigating authorities complete their investigation.

The Case details so far

ORSIS, a part of the Promtechnology group, has been supplying Yerevan with weapons, ammunition and optics for several years. The company said that now it is on the black list.

“The Armenian Agency said that we did not provide the necessary documents, which is not true. After that, for several weeks we gave all the information that the Ministry of Defence officially requested from our contractors. As a result, we were told that we allegedly didn’t provide acceptance certificates for some items,” said an ORSIS representative.

According to the same representative, the Ministry of Defence of Armenia also demanded the payment of a bank guarantee of several hundred thousand dollars, although by law this is possible only if the company won the tender and itself refused to sign the contract. “We turned to the appeal commission - we asked for documents that were no longer directly related to the tender, and at the last moment announced that there weren’t several documents that we actually submitted. Moreover, they marked “top secret ”on the protocol of the appeal commission although the tender itself was closed, but unclassified,” a company representative shared the details.

In his opinion, the current situation threatens to disrupt the project for the construction of a cartridge plant in Armenia. It was assumed that the enterprise would be created for Russian investments, it was a question of an amount of several million dollars.

In the wake of the lawsuit, investigative journalists published a lengthy article about ORSIS, claiming that it was connected with the former Deputy Prime Minister of Russia Dmitry Rogozin, who at one time coordinated the sale of Russian weapons to Azerbaijan. The journalists also unveiled that ORSIS has ties with the Russian state corporation for space activities ROSCOSMOS.