The procedure is in its last step. A draft government decision, published by the Ministry of Territorial Administration and Infrastructure, declares an overriding public interest in 100% of the shares of Electric Networks of Armenia, on the grounds of consumer rights, energy security and continuity of service; consultation ran from 22 June to 8 July, and the company’s state-appointed interim manager, Romanos Petrosyan, says the government decides in mid-July, after which a market valuation and compensation follow.
The road here was short and steep. Samvel Karapetyan, the Tashir Group owner whose company has held the grid since 2015, was detained in June 2025 after siding publicly with the Armenian Apostolic Church in its confrontation with the government, and remains under house arrest; amendments passed that summer created the mechanism now being used; the regulator revoked ENA’s distribution license on 17 November 2025; and on 9 April prime minister Pashinyan said the company had already been nationalized de facto, with the legal form to follow.
The arithmetic is the part investors will memorize. According to documents obtained by RFE/RL, the state’s offer was 23.3 billion drams, about $59 million, conditional on Karapetyan returning 23.158 billion drams of dividends taken over the past decade, which nets out near $360,000 for the whole distribution grid. Tashir says it has invested about $900 million in the company since 2016, has rejected the framing, and has taken the dispute to international arbitration seeking hundreds of millions; Karapetyan has publicly dismissed the takeover announcements. The government has not confirmed the RFE/RL figures.
Compensation shaped by the buyer’s own conditions is the precedent every investor will read.
Both records on performance are contested. The interim management says it services the networks under difficult conditions while running investment programs; opposition-leaning outlets counter that official quality and outage targets have been missed since the state manager took over. Blackout announcements this summer sit awkwardly under a takeover justified by continuity of service, whichever side’s numbers hold.
CAW’s interest is the precedent, and it is regional. A government taking a privately held strategic network by declaring overriding public interest, with compensation shaped by the buyer’s own conditions, lands on the desk of everyone weighing infrastructure assets from the Caucasus to Central Asia, in the same season the EU is putting grant money into exactly this region’s connectivity. Karapetyan is also an opposition figure consolidating parties after a disputed election, which makes the takeover impossible to read as economics alone. What to watch: the decision’s date and wording, the valuation methodology it sets, and the arbitration, which is where the real price will eventually be argued.