Corruption and Favoritism: Government Officials' Wives Drawing Massive Salaries Through Rigged Job Contests
Deputy Speaker Hayk Konjoryan's wife, Shushan Aleksanyan, is making 10,000 dollars a month as executive director of HayPost. And there's a back and forth in parliament about it.
Armenia’s captured state apparatus extends to deliberate nepotism masked by procedural formalities. Deputy Speaker Hayk Konjoryan’s wife, Shushan Aleksanyan, draws 10,000 dollars monthly as executive director of HayPost-a salary that far exceeds what most rank-and-file postal employees earn and is generous even by U.S. standards. Similarly, Foreign Minister Ararat Mirzoyan’s wife manages Enterprise Armenia at a comparable level, having also secured her position through an opaque ‘job contest.’ These contests are devoid of transparency: no public announcement, no documentation of competing applicants, no justification for salary levels. Everything is conducted behind closed doors and subsequently defended with bureaucratic language.
The financial scandal deepens when institutional performance is examined. HayPost’s revenues have shrunk by approximately 7 percent over the past year while its debt has increased sixfold. Management salaries, by contrast, have jumped 28 percent. The enterprise is visibly deteriorating while regime-connected individuals extract maximum compensation. This pattern extends beyond HayPost: state enterprises across Armenia show similar dynamics, where politically connected personnel enjoy vastly inflated remuneration while actual productivity and service quality decline. The government’s response has been to defend these salaries as merit-based outcomes of legitimate competitive processes-a transparent fiction.
This corruption operates alongside selective prosecution of political opponents. Opposition figures and their family members face spurious charges, asset seizures, and job terminations. Hovik documents how a legal expert’s contract at Yerevan State University was terminated because his son is an opposition MP. Mothers of opposition lawyers have been fired from medical positions. The pattern is unmistakable: reward regime loyalists with inflated salaries and cushy positions awarded through fake competitions, while punishing dissent by destroying the livelihoods of opposition figures’ relatives. It is Stalinism without the executions-a system that uses economic pressure, institutional capture, and selective prosecution to consolidate power.
Transcript
Asbed Bedrossian: Hovik, I started with a section which I thought would be interesting to do every week. Now, I kind of don't want to do it at all. I called it Corruption and Persecutions in Armenia. It's because on the corruption front, I read that Deputy Speaker Hayk Konjoryan's wife, Shushan Aleksanyan, is making $10,000 a month, being the executive director of HayPost. And there was a back and forth about this in the parliament. And it's ridiculous because most of the employees who are working at HayPost don't make, I don't know, one fifteenth of that very small amount.
Hovik Manucharyan: These are astronomical salaries. I don't know what the salary of HayPost executive was.
Asbed Bedrossian: Ten thousand dollars a month is good money in the United States.
Hovik Manucharyan: If you ask what the profit margin or what the balance books for HayPost were, let's just say that their revenues have shrunk, but that her salary has not. And of course, Ararat Mirzoyan's wife, Ararat Mirzoyan is the foreign minister, his wife runs Enterprise Armenia, which she also apparently landed through job contest.
Asbed Bedrossian: I'd like to quote that job contest, because in both cases, these two significant others, wives or whatever, they won their jobs through a job contest. And I'll tell you more about those job contests in a moment.
Hovik Manucharyan: I feel bad because, you know, we want to support women's rights and we want to be able to be confident and state that these women actually earned that position outright.