The reconstruction of a public park in the resort town about 100 kilometers north of Yerevan has been one of the projects financed by the Dilijan Development Foundation (DDF), a charity set up by Vardanyan and his wife over a decade ago. As part of that project, the former municipal administration had granted the DDF long-term leases on the then rundown park and an adjacent football stadium.
The charity has refurbished the park since 2016, building modern sports and recreation facilities there and turning it into one of Dilijan’s main tourist attractions. It claims to have spent over $5 million of its own funds in addition to funding provided by the European Union and a German development agency.
In 2023, the DDF asked the current local council to approve the next stage of the comprehensive reconstruction planned by it. The council controlled by Armenia’s ruling Civil Contract party has still not discussed the plan. It has given no reasons for the delay.
It emerged recently that the Dilijan municipality has sued the DDF, accusing it of not honoring its contractual obligations and asking an Armenian court to terminate the lease agreements. Dilijan Mayor Davit Sargsian refused to specify the alleged breach of contract when he spoke to RFE/RL’s Armenian Service on Wednesday. Nor did he say why the local council did not greenlight the park’s further reconstruction.
A sports ground built by Ruben Vardanyan’s Dilijan Development Foundation in a local public park.
“If a state institution appeals to court, then [its claims are] not unfounded,” said the mayor affiliated with Civil Contract.
In a recent interview with the Mediamax news agency, Vardanyan’s Russian-born wife, Veronika Zonabend, deplored the legal action linked by some Armenian commentators to her husband’s criticism of Prime Minister Nikol Pashinian which continued even after his September 2023 capture by Azerbaijan.
“This, of course, creates problems for us,” said Zonabend. “But what is worse is that this is also a very bad signal for private investors and social entrepreneurs because an unfavorable investment and social environment is being formed [in Dilijan,] with personal relationships with the municipality and private interests of some officials taking precedence over the law and objective standards that protect rights.”
She also stressed that her husband, who made his fortune in Russia in the 1990s and 2000s, and his international partners have invested as much as $236 million in various projects in and around Dilijan designed to promote tourism, education and environmental activism.
Those include the opening of an international high school which is part of the British-based United World Colleges (UWC) network. Pashinian visited the school and described it as a “center of inspiration, enthusiasm and optimism” just days after coming to power in 2018.
Vardanyan became openly critical of Pashinian after moving to Nagorno-Karabakh to take up the second highest post in the region’s leadership in November 2022. The tycoon held it until February 2023.
Vardanyan as well as seven other former Karabakh Armenian leaders were captured by Azerbaijan during its September 2023 military offensive that forced Karabakh’s entire population to flee to Armenia and restored Azerbaijani control over the territory. They went on trial in Baku a year ago on charges denied by them. Vardanyan remained particularly defiant just as an Azerbaijani prosecutor demanded a life sentence for him last month.
Pashinian was accused by his domestic critics of helping Baku legitimize Vardanyan’s continuing imprisonment with his scathing comments about the tycoon made in August 2024. Speaking during a news conference, the Armenian premier wondered who had told Vardanyan to renounce Russian citizenship and move to Karabakh and “for what purpose.”
He seemed to echo Azerbaijani leaders’ earlier claims that Vardanyan was dispatched to Karabakh by Moscow to serve Russian interests there. Vardanyan hit back at Pashinian in a September 2024 statement issued via his family.
In another statement circulated in March 2025, Vardanyan criticized the Armenian government’s appeasement policy towards Azerbaijan and accused it of spreading hate speech against the Karabakh Armenians. His American lawyer, Jared Genser, has repeatedly said that Pashinian is doing little to secure the release of at least 23 Armenian prisoners held in Azerbaijan.
