The CV the Regime Hired
Davit Papazian's appointment to lead ANIF was, at the time, the kind of hire the post-revolution government wanted to be seen making: a Sciences Po Paris and ESSEC MBA, both with distinction; Merrill Lynch in Russia, then UBS in the UK, then a board seat at Unibank Armenia. International capital-markets credibility. Western-credentialed, Western-experienced, fluent in three of the operating languages of cross-border finance. The state-investment fund of a small post-revolution country needs a face that signals competence to the foreign investors it is trying to court. ANIF's first-generation public posture reflected exactly that intention.
What was not in the public-facing biography was that the new ANIF Director and the new ANIF Moscow Office Head (#37 Sergey Grigoryan in this series) had been offshore business partners for years before either of their state-fund appointments. The public announcement of the hires was the announcement of a partnership; the public version of the partnership was that the two men met at ANIF.
The Pandora Papers Footprint
Two BVI shell entities surface in the leaked Pandora Papers attached to Papazian. Tommy Invest and Finance Corp, in which Papazian held 50 percent ownership from 2009 to 2014 before transferring his shares to a partner named Armen Gasparyan. Marathon S.A., in which Papazian was the Owner while Sergey Grigoryan was the Director. Both were serviced by Trident Trust, a corporate-services provider whose name appears repeatedly in the offshore-leaks corpora as the connective tissue around BVI structures that consolidate Russian, Armenian, and Eastern-European principals.
Neither of these structures was a state-fund vehicle. Both predate ANIF. They establish, on the public record, that the Papazian-Grigoryan business relationship was already operational in offshore form before the political moment that delivered them to ANIF. The $27.3 million ANIF case the warrant attaches to is, in this light, not the start of a financial story. It is a chapter inside one.
Fly Arna and the Sliding Mandate
While running ANIF, Papazian also chaired the board of Fly Arna, the joint-venture national airline in which the Armenian state held a stake. The chairmanship of a national-flag airline carries operational influence over fleet acquisition, route licensing, fuel contracts, and ground-services awards. Fly Arna's commercial trajectory is not the subject of this profile, but the dual role, ANIF Director plus Fly Arna chair, signals the breadth of decision-making latitude one appointee was given inside the post-revolution state-business apparatus. The successor management at both institutions has subsequently questioned the conditions of various contracts and disbursements during the Papazian period.
The September 2025 Warrant
The international arrest warrant issued in September 2025 charges Papazian with money laundering, abuse of office, and document forgery, attached to a $27.3 million figure inside the ANIF perimeter. We have not seen the full charging document published in unredacted form. What is in the public record: the warrant is live, Papazian is acknowledged on his own social media to be in London, and Armenian prosecutors have publicly described him as a fugitive from justice. The London location is operationally important: extradition between the United Kingdom and Armenia is governed by ad-hoc treaty arrangement and is not automatic, and London is one of the small set of European jurisdictions where a financially-resourced fugitive from a post-Soviet jurisdiction can sustain a years-long contest of an extradition request.
The Gaza Humanitarian Foundation
In January 2025, while ANIF was already publicly disowning the contracts and disbursements that would later trigger the warrant, Papazian founded the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF) in Geneva. The board: himself, Samuel Henderson, and David Kohler, the latter a Geneva lawyer. None of the three had humanitarian-sector experience. The Foundation became operational as a distribution platform for aid in the active war zone in Gaza. By mid-2025 the public record around GHF distribution sites included the toll: over 1,800 Palestinians killed and over 13,500 wounded in the vicinity of, or inside, the Foundation's distribution operations. The Arab Organisation for Human Rights filed a complaint stating that Papazian and his co-founders "may have facilitated war crimes." Doctors Without Borders and the Associated Press published independent investigations of the GHF distribution model and its lethality.
OWL is not the venue for the legal adjudication of the war-crimes-facilitation question; the appropriate venues are international and Swiss. We surface the foundation here because of its specific relevance to the regime that appointed Papazian: the man under an Armenian-state arrest warrant for ANIF money was simultaneously launching an international "humanitarian" vehicle in a war zone, registered in Geneva, with no humanitarian-sector co-founders. The public posture of the Pashinyan-era ANIF Director in the months when the case against him was crystallising was to launch a Geneva foundation for which his Armenian-state record was the only relevant biography.
Why This Slot Matters
Davit Papazian is the cleanest single case in this series of "regime appointee whose Western-credentialed posture concealed a pre-existing offshore partnership network and whose actions inside the appointed role triggered the most concrete legal consequences any post-revolution Armenian official has yet faced." He is in London. He is on a warrant. The fund he ran will have to litigate his decisions for years. The partner he brought into the Moscow office (#37 Grigoryan) is not on a warrant but is on the same architectural diagram. The bank, airline, and offshore-services counterparties he interacted with will have their own records subpoenaed. The credentials remain. The pension does not. Profile #68.
Sources: Pandora Papers (ICIJ Offshore Leaks Database) for Tommy Invest and Finance Corp and Marathon S.A.; Trident Trust corporate-services records; ANIF financial reports and successor-management public statements; Republic of Armenia Prosecutor General's Office international arrest warrant filings (September 2025); Fly Arna corporate filings and successor-board statements; Gaza Humanitarian Foundation Geneva commercial register (January 2025 incorporation); Arab Organisation for Human Rights complaint filing; Doctors Without Borders and AP independent investigations of GHF distribution-site casualties; Sciences Po Paris and ESSEC alumni listings; Merrill Lynch and UBS public-record employment archives. All assertions sourced to documented filings or named investigations; the war-crimes-facilitation question is left to the appropriate international and Swiss venues.