Investment Projects of Lydian International Pass from Gndevaz Village to Jermuk Resort

EcoLur 

Gndevaz Village Head Hayrapet Mkrtchyan is concerned with community merger project. Under the information that the village head has, Jermuk community is supposed to be enlarged merging it with Gndevaz village and other villages. “Jermuk is interested in Gndevaz from financial viewpoint,” said the village head in his interview with EcoLur. The matter is that the payments made by Geoteam Company for the soil management make up more than the half of Gndevaz Village. “The budget currently makes up 81 million AMD, out of which 54 million is paid by Geoteam,” the village head said. If Gndevaz village joins Jermuk, the payments will be received by Jermuk authorities, the village head thinks. “We raised the issue: let them start from small communities, which don’t have anything,” he said. 

Geoteam Company, which represents British “Lydian International” Company in Armenia, intends to openly develop Amulsar gold mine and to construct a heap leach facility. The latter is supposed to be constructed in the territory of Gndevaz Village.

 But still the agreement on the lease of land areas for the facility construction hasn’t been concluded. “We have approximately 1000 ha, out of which 320 ha is allotted for soil management, nevertheless, we didn’t allot any land area for heap leach facility,” Mkrtchyan said. Besides the rent, the company used to carry out social programs in the village. These programs were reduced in Gndevaz Village in 2013 and were transferred to Jermuk. “Last year we proposed to construct a drying facility, but the project was approved in 2014,” the village head said. Now only one project is carried out in the village costing 1.4 million AMD: a hobby group of aircraft modeling in the local school. 

Other villagers shared the village head’s concerns. They expressed similar opinions, “The facility will be constructed in our village, while the money will be given to Jermuk…What will we do? Everything will be closed: kindergarten everything, and people will leave…We are against the merger…”

Unfortunately, Jermuk Mayor Vardan Hovhannisyan was not in the town. But now the articles published in the mass media show that the mayor supports the project. 

Reminder: in 2012 Jermuk Mayor Vardan Hovhannisyan made a number of official statements that such a project would adversely affect on Jermuk brand as an international resort and open pit mining under high seismicity conditions may harm the mineral waters in Jermuk. He supported the environmental public, which beat an alarm signal on Amulsar project risks and its immediate proximity to the resort. In 2013 the attitude of the local authorities to Amulsar project changed, which coincided with the negotiations run by Geoteam Company and its owners Lydian with Armenian top governmental officials. And then Jermuk Mayor stated that he believes in the company’s arguments about the safety of the project. Geoteam Company’s press release dated on 11 November 2013 particularly says: “This year Geoteam expanded social programs adopted in 2007 and the company decided to implement social programs in Jermuk, besides Gndevaz, Saravan and Gorayk…The company has provided 45 million AMD to rehabilitate the Art Centre and 1,2 million AMD to school for the construction of the sport field, 24 million to Jermuk Development fund and 15 million AMD  for other charity projects”, i.e. 85 million AMD (about 200,000 USD) was spent in Jermuk for short period.

March 04, 2014 at 12:24