The decision to place Karapetyan under house arrest has been upheld.

Following a 14-hour hearing, a Yerevan court refused to tighten Samvel Karapetyan's pretrial detention and left him under house arrest. The defense stated that the businessman had been remanded in custody.

As reported by the "Caucasian Knot," on the afternoon of January 16, a representative of the Anti-Corruption Court announced that the court had overturned the decision of the trial judge to transfer Samvel Karapetyan to house arrest, and the businessman had been remanded in custody for two months.

The hearing on Samvel Karapetyan's preventive measure, which began on January 16, ended only today, according to the businessman's lawyer, Aram Vardevanyan.

"A 14-hour court hearing with a team of lawyers. The absurd intensity of political persecution. The petition to apply a preventive measure in the form of detention for Samvel Karapetyan was rejected, and house arrest was imposed. This is another intensive preventive measure. By the way, the restriction on Samvel Karapetyan's public appearances was lifted," News.am quotes him as saying.

According to the lawyer, at the first hearing on January 16, Judge Khachatryan of the Anti-Corruption Court of Appeals The court overturned not the decision to place Karapetyan under house arrest, but rather the decision to initiate proceedings. "The investigator filed a motion to extend the house arrest. The court took this into account and scheduled a hearing for 4:00 PM," Novosti-Armenia quoted Vardevanyan as saying.

The break lasted only 30 minutes.

A different judge presided over the second hearing, Vardevanyan said. "We had a court hearing that lasted 14 hours, with only a 30-minute break. The court, chaired by Dolmazyan, ruled that Samvel Karapetyan's pretrial detention cannot be maintained, no matter how much the Anti-Corruption Court of Appeals might wish to do so, given the political persecution of the prosecutor's office and the Investigative Committee," the newspaper quoted the lawyer as saying. According to him, if Samvel Karapetyan had not needed medical attention, his house arrest could have been changed to pretrial detention. At the same time, the lawyer, citing confidentiality of information, refused to say whether Karapetyan was in the medical center after the court hearing.

Karapetyan, seeing all this, was one of the first to react, saying: "Let's go!"

"January 16 was an extremely strange, special, difficult day. At the moment when Samvel Karapetyan was in the hospital, receiving an intravenous infusion, more than 10 police officers entered the hospital, since the investigator had written a receipt requiring Samvel Karapetyan to be immediately and immediately taken to a penal institution. Regardless of the fact that he was receiving inpatient treatment. At that moment, Samvel Karapetyan, seeing all this, was one of the first to react, saying: "Let's go!"," the publication quoted Vardevanyan.

As a reminder, before his arrest, Samvel Karapetyan expressed support for the Armenian Apostolic Church after Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan harshly criticized the Church at a government meeting on May 29 and responded to Archbishop Arshak Khachatryan's objections with insults on Facebook*. Armenian politicians and church representatives demanded that Pashinyan apologize for insulting the Church, according to a report prepared by the "Caucasian Knot" entitled "The Main Thing About Political Arrests in Armenia in June 2025".

In July 2025, 65 members of the Armenian parliament supported a bill that would have allowed the nationalization of Karapetyan's company, Electric Networks of Armenia. On July 8, security forces searched the company's offices and the home of board chairman Narek Karapetyan.

On July 2, 2025, searches were conducted at the Yerevan office of Tashir Group. The searches were prompted by a criminal case of tax evasion and money laundering. On July 11, 2025, Vaghinak Ghazaryan, director of Karapetyan's Tashir Pizza, was arrested for tax evasion.