The Regulator
The Public Services Regulatory Commission is one of the highest-leverage non-cabinet bodies in the Armenian state. It controls the licensing of every telecommunications operator, every broadcasting-and-cable provider, every electricity-distribution and gas-distribution company, every water utility. Tariff-setting, license issuance, license revocation, and renewal-conditions adjudication for these sectors run through it. The regulator is, by design, supposed to be independent of party. The current Chairman is a frozen Civil Contract member.
"Frozen" party membership is the formal device by which a party member can take a regulatory or judicial post that requires public neutrality without resigning the party affiliation. The legal effect is that the affiliation is dormant during the regulatory tenure. The political effect is that everyone in the system, including the regulated companies, knows what the chairman's actual loyalty is. The Tashir Group lawyers acting for Karapetyan said this in plain language during the ENA license dispute: a frozen-membership party operative cannot be the impartial adjudicator of a license dispute against the party's most prominent political enemy.
The ENA Revocation
Electric Networks of Armenia is the country's monopoly electricity-distribution company. From 2015 onward it was owned by the holding structures of Samvel Karapetyan, the Russian-Armenian billionaire whose Tashir Group is one of the largest private-sector employers in Armenia and whose 2025 public defense of the Armenian Apostolic Church against the Pashinyan government's church-state confrontation made him the most consequential private opponent of the regime. The ENA license was the operational lever the regime had over Karapetyan. Revoking the license meant taking control of the country's electricity distribution.
The PSRC, under Mesropyan's chairmanship, executed the revocation. Tashir's legal response cited the party-membership conflict, the procedural irregularities of the underlying review, and the political timing of the decision. The PSRC then appointed Romanos Petrosyan, a sitting Civil Contract board member, as ENA's temporary administrator. The political enemy's company was taken into temporary state control under the operational direction of a member of the political party that opposes the political enemy. The conflict-of-interest objection is, on its face, neither novel nor strained.
The Russia Position
Mesropyan has publicly accused Russia of neocolonialism in connection with the Armenian electricity sector. Karapetyan's ENA was historically the Armenian asset most connected to Russian power-sector counterparties, and the public framing of the revocation included the argument that the asset's foreign ownership posed a sovereignty problem for Armenia. The same Mesropyan has also publicly supported the connection of Armenia's electricity grid to the Turkish and Azerbaijani systems. The Russia-out-of-Armenian-electricity-supply position and the Turkey-and-Azerbaijan-into-Armenian-electricity-supply position are presented as a coherent post-Soviet emancipation. They can also be read as substituting the historic Russian dependency for a new Turkish-Azerbaijani dependency. The choice of which dependency the Armenian state opts into is, structurally, a strategic question, not a regulatory one. The PSRC Chairman has positioned himself on it.
The Telecom and Broadcast Implication
The PSRC's powers cover not just electricity but also every telecommunications operator and every broadcaster. The same chairmanship that decided the ENA case decides, year by year, which telecommunications providers can operate at what conditions, which broadcasters can renew their licenses, and which independent media platforms have a path through the regulatory environment. OWL has not yet documented a parallel major broadcasting-license action under Mesropyan's chairmanship, but the precedent set by ENA, that an opposition-aligned licensee can lose its license under a frozen-CC-member's chairmanship, is a precedent that defines the regulatory environment for every Armenian broadcaster the regime considers unfriendly.
Why This Slot Matters
The PSRC Chairmanship is, in functional terms, one of the half-dozen most powerful posts in the Armenian state apparatus, and it is currently held by a Civil Contract operator with formally frozen party membership. The single most operationally consequential action by that chairmanship was the seizure of the country's electricity-distribution monopoly from the regime's most prominent private opponent. The follow-on appointment of a CC board member as temporary administrator made the political character of the action explicit. When the regime falls, two things follow. The ENA license action will be litigated, and any successor government will inherit the political and legal liability of the seizure if it is not unwound. And the personnel question will become acute: a frozen-membership party operative who delivered the regime's largest single private-sector confrontation does not have a credible second act inside a successor regulatory environment. Profile #74.
Sources: Public Services Regulatory Commission of Armenia (PSRC) chairman appointment records and decision filings on ENA license revocation; Tashir Group legal filings and statements responding to the PSRC action; Civil Contract party membership and frozen-membership disclosures; Romanos Petrosyan appointment as ENA temporary administrator (PSRC decree); Mesropyan public statements on Russian neocolonialism and on Turkey / Azerbaijan grid connection (parliament.am, news.am, civilnet.am archives); OWL parent investigation "Infrastructure Control" (vault). All assertions sourced to documented regulatory filings, party-membership records, and named public statements.