SISSPECIAL INVESTIGATION SERVICE -- HEAD 2018-2021
ACCANTI-CORRUPTION COMMITTEE -- HEAD 2021-2025
OSFBROTHER CHAIRS BOARD OF SOROS-ARMENIA SINCE 2016
7 yrsYEARS AT THE TOP OF ARMENIA'S CORRUPTION ENFORCEMENT

The Conflict at the Centre

PUBLIC RECORD Sasun Khachatryan was appointed Head of the Special Investigation Service (SIS) in 2018, in the months immediately following the Velvet Revolution. SIS was the elite Armenian investigative body whose mandate covered economic crimes by senior officials -- ministers, deputies, judges, heads of state corporations. The agency's caseload routinely included the highest-profile state-corruption files in the country.

His brother, Davit Khachatryan, has served as Chairman of the Board of Directors of the Open Society Foundations-Armenia since 2016. OSF-Armenia is the Armenian arm of the Open Society Foundations network founded by George Soros. As board chair, Davit Khachatryan participates in the governance decisions that determine which Armenian non-governmental organisations, civic-society projects, journalism initiatives, legal-reform programmes and academic-research grants receive OSF funding. The board sets the strategic direction of OSF-Armenia and ratifies the grant-making programme.

This is the structural conflict-of-interest at the centre of Armenia's post-2018 anti-corruption regime. The senior official tasked with deciding which Armenian government corruption to investigate is the sibling of the senior board member who decides which Armenian non-government actors receive a major external funder's money. Both men hold their positions simultaneously. Both men's positions touch the same Armenian institutions -- the same NGOs that receive OSF grants are also actors who file complaints with anti-corruption enforcement, who appear in court as plaintiffs or witnesses, and whose reform proposals shape the legislation that anti-corruption enforcement applies.

The Career Sequence

CHRONOLOGY The sequence is documented in Armenian-government press releases and EVN Report's reporting on the post-Velvet enforcement architecture:

The continuous mandate spans seven years. Across two institutional names, Khachatryan was the consistent senior face of Armenia's anti-corruption enforcement. He was the official a citizen, a journalist, or a foreign embassy would speak to about the question: "what happened to that corruption case?"

The Family Position

PUBLIC RECORD Davit Khachatryan, the brother, is a former senior US-government employee:

The combination of credentials is not random. A former US DOJ Resident Legal Adviser becomes the board chair of the Armenian arm of an American philanthropic network. He is the institutional bridge between the US-government-trained Armenian legal-reform world and the Soros-network civil-society world. His brother runs the Armenian state institution that does the criminal investigations on the targets the same civil-society world has identified.

OWL is not asserting that any specific case was opened, closed, or steered for improper reasons. We are noting that the structural overlap was visible to anyone who looked, and that no formal recusal regime ever required disclosure of which cases involving OSF-Armenia grantees, their board members, or institutional partners passed through SIS or ACC during the brother's tenure.

What An Audit Would Examine

For the next government, the seven-year file from SIS to ACC is reviewable. The questions an honest audit would put on the table:

The Pipeline Pattern

Sasun Khachatryan is the law-enforcement node in the Soros-NGO-to-Government pipeline that OWL has documented across multiple Pashinyan-era appointments. The pattern in those profiles is consistent: an NGO career or NGO-funded grant career produces credibility, then the person is placed in a senior state position, while the original NGO funder retains influence through the network rather than through any single individual.

Sasun Khachatryan is the variant where the NGO connection runs through the family rather than through the individual's own grant history. His brother is the funder-network official; he is the enforcement official. The two roles are never directly combined in a single person's CV, which is why the conflict has gone largely undiscussed in mainstream Armenian press. But the structural effect is identical to the cleaner direct-grantee cases: the post-Velvet enforcement regime had, at its top, a person whose closest family member sat on the board of one of the most influential foreign-philanthropic networks operating inside Armenia.

Why This Matters Now

Six weeks before the June 7, 2026 parliamentary election, the post-Velvet Civil Contract government is asking voters to renew its mandate. Part of that mandate has rested on the claim that the 2018 revolution changed Armenia's anti-corruption regime -- that the new enforcement bodies were independent, professional, and free of the conflicts that had compromised the previous architecture.

The Sasun Khachatryan-Davit Khachatryan family overlap, undisclosed in any formal recusal record we have located, is one of the strongest single counter-arguments to that claim. A new regime cannot credibly claim independence from network influence when the senior enforcement official has, throughout, a family-line interface to one of the most active foreign philanthropic networks in the country.

The next government inherits seven years of files. It also inherits the policy question: should anti-corruption enforcement be permitted to operate, in the future, with these family-overlap relationships undisclosed at the moment of appointment?

Connected Files

OWL is anonymous. We protect our sources. Tips: /en/#tips