The Two Flights
Per the Hetq report, on March 22, 2026, President Vahagn Khachaturyan flew Yerevan to Tbilisi to attend the funeral of Catholicos-Patriarch Ilya II of Georgia. The flight took thirty minutes one way; the return flight took thirty-two minutes. The plane was a Gulfstream G450 business jet owned by Flyone Armenia LLC. The state-owned Airbus A319 ACJ, the regular VIP transport for the Armenian President and PM, was, according to public flight-tracking data, not assigned to other government flights on March 22.
On March 26 and March 27, 2026, Deputy Prime Minister Mher Grigoryan led a delegation to Shymkent, Kazakhstan. The delegation included the Deputy Foreign Minister, the Armenian Ambassador to Kazakhstan, the Deputy Economy Minister, the Deputy Chairman of the State Revenue Committee, Grigoryan's advisor, and the protocol officer. The delegation flew to Kazakhstan and back on the same Sukiasyan-family Gulfstream G450. The state Airbus A319 was again, per public flight-tracking, idle for those days. Flyone Armenia received AMD 28.6 million (US$77,000) from the state budget, including taxes, for the Kazakhstan flights.
The Ownership Architecture
Flyone Armenia LLC ownership, per the corporate registry: 50 percent Eduard Sukiasyan, brother of Civil Contract MP Khachatur Sukiasyan; 4 percent Aram Khachatryan, the company's general director; and 46 percent the Moldovan parent Fly One airline. The Sukiasyan brothers (Khachatur, Saribek, Eduard) hold the controlling stake of 51.45 percent in Armeconombank OJSC, one of the country's mid-tier banks. Khachatur Sukiasyan sits in the National Assembly as a Civil Contract MP and is profile #17 in OWL's Left Behind series.
The Armenian state, in late March 2026, paid a private Armenian airline 50 percent owned by the brother of a sitting ruling-party MP for transportation services to the President of the Republic and the Deputy Prime Minister. The state's own regular VIP aircraft was available on the same days. The procurement decision selecting the private operator over the state aircraft has not been disclosed in public form. Per Hetq, the Presidential Office's Public Relations Department refused to answer Hetq's questions about whether a tender was conducted, what the procurement procedure was, what the legal basis was for selecting Flyone Armenia, what the contract sum was for the Georgia flight, or whether the Sukiasyan ownership was disclosed in the procurement file.
The State-Secrets Shield
The Presidential Office's stated legal basis for refusing disclosure: the Law on Procurement, which provides that the procurement plan covering accommodation, food, and transportation services for officials subject to special state protection (including the President of the Republic) "contains state secrets" and is therefore not subject to disclosure. The provision was added in December 2016. As Hetq notes in the same article, this provision has, in operational practice, become a recurring shield for senior officials and their staff against journalistic inquiry into private-aircraft use, regardless of which party holds power.
The Armenian Law on Public Service has the symmetric counter-provision. Public officials are prohibited from accepting gifts in connection with the performance of their duties. A "gift" includes any property-related benefit, including free services, services offered at unusually low prices, and other actions that provide an advantage. Public officials are also required to prevent and disclose conflicts of interest. The combination of the two laws produces a specific puzzle: if the Khachaturyan office paid Flyone Armenia at fair market rates, the procurement should be disclosable subject to the security carve-outs, and the Sukiasyan-side conflict should have been disclosed; if the Khachaturyan office did not pay or paid below market, the gift prohibition is engaged. The state-secrets shield removes the public's ability to determine which of the two scenarios applies.
The 2017 Precedent and the Continuity of the Shield
Hetq surfaces a directly comparable case from 2017 to make the procedural point. In January 2017, then-PM Karen Karapetyan's delegation flew to the Davos World Economic Forum on a Gulfstream G650 business jet owned by businessman Samvel Karapetyan (no family relation to the PM). In July 2017, then-President Serzh Sargsyan flew to Tehran for the inauguration of the new Iranian President on the same Samvel Karapetyan plane. In both cases the official staffs cited the same Law on Procurement state-secrets carve-out and refused to disclose whether state funds were used or whether the transportation was provided as a benefit. In both cases the journalists' inquiries went unanswered.
The continuity from 2017 to 2026 is the procedural point of the Hetq investigation and the OWL editorial frame is the same. The Pashinyan-era Khachaturyan office, in 2026, is invoking the identical Law on Procurement clause that the Sargsyan-era staff invoked in 2017. The post-revolution promise that the new government would not abuse the state-secrets shield to conceal conflicts of interest in private-aircraft use has not been kept. The Pashinyan government is, in this specific procedural device, indistinguishable from its predecessor.
Why This Matters
The conflict-of-interest analysis here is unusually concrete. The President of the Republic flew on a plane half-owned by the brother of a sitting ruling-party MP whose family controls a mid-tier domestic bank. The same President will, in his official capacity, sign laws and decrees that affect the operating environment of that bank, that airline, and that MP. The Armenian Law on Public Service requires that the conflict be disclosed and managed. The Armenian Law on Procurement is being used to prevent the public from seeing whether the conflict was disclosed. The combination is a structural failure of the post-revolution accountability architecture.
The narrow news is one set of flights in late March. The wider news is that the state-secrets shield around private-aircraft procurement is now a normalised feature of Armenian senior-official transportation across two governments and three Presidents. The Hetq investigation forces the issue into the light. We add the link to OWL's prior work on the Sukiasyan family business architecture (Left Behind #17 Khachatur Sukiasyan) and on the broader pattern of CC-aligned business interests interfacing with state procurement. The press window to ask what the actual contract sums were and whether the Sukiasyan ownership was disclosed in the procurement file is now.
Sources: Hetq.am article 180949, "Taxpayer Money Used to Fly Top Armenian Officials on Planes Owned by Family of Ruling Party MP," published 2026-04-23 (primary source for the March 22 and March 26-27 flights, the AMD 28.6M figure, the Flyone Armenia ownership structure, the Law on Procurement state-secrets citation, and the 2017 Sargsyan / Samvel Karapetyan precedent). Armenian e-register.am corporate registry filing for Flyone Armenia LLC. Armeconombank OJSC shareholder filings. RA Law on Procurement (December 2016 amendment). RA Law on Public Service. OWL Left Behind profile #17 Khachatur Sukiasyan. All facts asserted are drawn from the Hetq report or named statutory references; OWL's editorial framing on the procedural-continuity point is clearly identified as such.