Prime Minister Pashinyan, after consulting with the officials working in the disaster area of the flood and hearing the assessment of the TKE Minister that the damages are quite large and will be a serious burden for the government, announced that he will instruct the Foreign Minister Mirzoyan to consider possible sources of external assistance. Until now, Armenia was trying to solve the problem of foreign aid for forcibly displaced Artsakh citizens.
Now, in fact, another problem is being added, in the case that even the external assistance provided for solving the problems of our forcibly displaced compatriots is difficult to say enough. Perhaps one circumstance is very important here. First, you should try to find internal resources for support. In particular, the banking system of Armenia, for example, has been working with huge profits for the last two years. In both 2022 and 2023, the system’s annual revenue, i.e. net profit, amounted to almost 250 billion drams, which is equal to almost 1 billion dollars in the sum of two years.
The external conjuncture was favorable for that super profit of the banking system as a result of the sanctions against Russia. In the current year, the income of the system will probably be quite respectable, even if it is less than previous years. At the same time, Armenian citizens, legal entities, are more and more forced to carry out financial and even daily operations through banks. Now the time has come when, within the framework of corporate responsibility, which also implies important components of the value system, the banking system working with super profits reaches out to the citizens who suffered from the disaster.
Even more so, no matter how big the damage caused by the disaster is, it will make up maybe 10-15 percent of the banking system’s super profit. If there is more, let the government take care of that more from other internal and external sources. Moreover, it is also very important here that the Armenian government can provide diversification in the matter of external sources of assistance, which will allow potential external supporters to avoid the temptation to make the circumstances of this assistance the basis of “political” expectations towards Armenia.
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