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The taxes paid by the Zangezur Copper Molybdenum Combine (ZCMC) to Armenia’s state budget have declined since Russian billionaire Roman Trotsenko acquired a majority stake in the mining giant as part of a corrupt deal with Nikol Pashinyan’s government in 2021, Pastinfo reported.

Industrial Company JSC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Trotsenko's GeoProMining group, mysteriously acquired 60% of ZCMC on 30 September 2021 and then donated a quarter of that stake to the Armenian government. The firm called AMP Holding secretly donated its 6.8% stake in ZCMC to the government in March 2022.

Speaking in the parliament on Monday, Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan recalled that his government got hold of 21.8% of ZCMC's stock in 2021-2022 and has been involved in its management since 2021.

“The mining company has always been among Armenia’s top ten taxpayers, but according to Pashinyan, in 2022 ZCMC paid a record amount of 145,636,000,000 drams in taxes,” Pastinfo said.

“The taxes paid [by ZCMC] in 2022 exceed the total amount of taxes paid in 2012, 2013, 2014, 2015, 2016, 2017 by around 7 billion drams. In other words, the total amount of taxes paid in 2012, 2013, 2014, 2015, 2016 and 2017 is 7 billion drams less than the taxes paid in 2022 alone. I think this is a striking figure," Pashinyan said, but did not reveal that the tax payments of the ZCMC have dramatically declined this year.

“According to the figures for the first quarter of 2023, the list of 1,000 large taxpayers is topped by Gazprom Armenia, which paid to the state more than 20,9 billion drams in this period. ZCMC paid more than 15,4 billion drams, which is almost twice less than the amount of taxes paid in the same period last year. ZCMC paid around 35,5bln in taxes in the first quarter of 2022,” the report added.