Electric Networks of Armenia carries power to households and businesses across the country. It belongs to Tashir Group, controlled by Karapetyan, a Russian-Armenian billionaire arrested in June 2025 after he sided with the Armenian Apostolic Church in its standoff with Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan. Within a day of the arrest, Pashinyan said the grid would be nationalised.
The machinery moved fast. Parliament passed enabling amendments in summer 2025. The regulator revoked the company’s distribution licence in November. The state installed a ruling-party figure, Romanos Petrosyan, as interim manager. In February it made a formal purchase offer, and talks with Tashir went nowhere. The mid-July step, recognition of overriding public interest under Article 60 of the constitution, clears the way for the state to take 100% of the company and pay compensation.
The compensation is the fight. Documents obtained by RFE/RL put the state’s offer at about 23.3 billion drams ($59 million), on the condition that Karapetyan first return roughly the same sum in dividends drawn over 10 years. Net those against each other and the offer for the grid falls to around $360,000. Independent estimates value the network near $360 million. Tashir has gone to international arbitration, seeking hundreds of millions.
Net the offer against the dividends and the state would pay about $360,000 for a grid worth around $360 million.
Follow the ownership and the politics line up. The grid was Russian before Karapetyan, sold by Inter RAO in 2015. Taking it back into state hands removes a Russia-linked lever over Armenian infrastructure just as Yerevan drifts toward Europe and Washington. Moscow is watching closely, and Armenian analysts frame the move as trimming Russian influence as much as settling a corporate score.
Two questions stay open. What price a court finally sets, since a near-zero payment invites an arbitration bill the budget would have to cover. And what the state does with the grid once it holds it, keeping full control or handing a stake to an “internationally reputable” operator, as officials have floated. The answer decides whether this is a single seizure or the start of a wider return of strategic assets to the state.