New electricity bills displease Armenians

The group "No to robbery!" stated numerous appeals of citizens of Armenia about the fact that electricity bills for August do not indicate how much money is subsidized by the authorities.

The "Caucasian Knot" has reported that since June 17 Armenia has been holding protest actions against the decision to increase the electricity tariff by 6.93 drams per 1 kW/h. The authorities promised to conduct an audit of "Electric Grids of Armenia"; and until the end of the audit, the government promised to subsidize the tariff balance.

"Citizens are worried that they are being deceived; they started to pay suspiciously large sums for electricity," a member of the group "No to robbery!" told the "Caucasian Knot" correspondent.

Artak Manukyan, an economist and an employee of the "Transparency International", believes that the government does not take a great burden of payment because, according to his story, in August and September, due to favourable weather conditions, the population did not consume a lot of electricity.

"In winter, when people consume much more electricity than now, the difference will be very noticeable," Artak Manukyan said in his interview to the "Caucasian Knot" correspondent.

He believes that, since the government is unable to subsidize really big money, it does its best to remove this burden, and make the decision to increase the electricity tariff without subsidy before winter.

The economist believes that the people should demand to revise the decision not from the "Armenian Electricity Grids" but from their authorities, since the latter are in charge of running socio-economic policy.

Full text of the article is available on the Russian page of 24/7 Internet agency ‘Caucasian Knot’.