We have recently touched upon the disinformation spread by Aysor.am, when the website published a story with a headline that not only failed to reflect the statements made by Daniel Ioannisyan, Programs Coordinator at the Union of Informed Citiznes NGO, but also misled the reader.
We also mentioned in our article that the website is linked with the second President Robert Kocharyan.
However, Aysor.am blamed fip.am of fraud instead of denying the misinformation it disseminated, and made the following statement: “We are asking the website fighting against lies and propagating professionalism to point out media publications where links of Aysor.am with Robert Kocharyan’s office are presented as a proven fact, otherwise, publicly refute the obvious fraud.”
Below we introduce some of the remarkable information about the owner of the website.
Aysor.am was founded in 2008 by “Panorama.am” LLC. This company and the same-name news website, Panorama.am, belong to former Head of the Public Relations and Information Center SNCO, Head of National Assembly Staff Ara Saghatelyan, who is also the uncle of Arman Saghatelyan, member of the RPA faction.
We can see from the e-registry of the Ministry of Justice that Ara Saghatelyan handed 49 percent of his shares of “Panorama.am” LLC to Robert Kocharyan’s close companion Armen Tavadyan. By the way, earlier it had become known that Tavadyan had also bought Ararat TV.
With regard to Aysor.am website, we should also note that its editor-in-chief, Hovhannes Kosyan, also worked at the SNCO headed by Ara Saghatelyan.
In response to our inquiry, the SNCO has presented the list of its staff as of May 1, where Kosyan occupied the position of a public relations expert.
We think that the conflict of interests is obvious. Saghatelyan hired a person who works in his own news website to work in a state-run government organization.
Taking into consideration the circumstances mentioned above, we propose the editor of the website and Ara Saghatelyan to provide the following information:
1․ Was there cooperation between the SNCO headed by him and Aysor.am, Panorama.am media outlets belonging to him. If yes, in what format?
2․ What did the employees of the media outlets do in the SNCO? Is it true that they were paid salaries from public funds?
3․ Where was the office of Panorama.am media outlet located before the revolution?
Rafael Afrikyan
