BAKU, Feb 17 (Reuters) – Ruben Vardanyan, an Armenian-born billionaire banker who served as a senior official in the breakaway Armenian administration of Nagorno-Karabakh, was sentenced to 20 years in prison by an Azerbaijani court on Tuesday, state media reported.
Vardanyan, who was Karabakh’s number two official in 2022 and 2023, had been on trial in a military court on charges including terrorism, war crimes and crimes against humanity.
Azerbaijani state news agency Azertac did not say if Vardanyan intended to appeal. Reuters was not able to immediately reach his Baku-based lawyer, Emil Babishov.
Prosecutors had sought a life sentence for the 57-year-old, whose international legal counsel has described the trial as neither free nor fair. His family has previously quoted him as saying he does not recognise the proceedings and regrets nothing.
The verdict comes as Armenia and Azerbaijan make steps towards peace after nearly forty years of conflict fought primarily over Nagorno-Karabakh, a mountainous region within Azerbaijan that had enjoyed de facto independence for three decades until Baku regained full control in 2023.
Vardanyan, a former banker who previously held Russian citizenship and made his fortune in Russia, moved to Karabakh in 2022 and joined the Armenian administration there as state minister. Forbes estimates his and his family’s combined wealth at $1.2 billion.
Baku casts him and other former separatist officials as leaders of an illegal armed entity who tried to stop Azerbaijan from reclaiming the territory.
Vardanyan was arrested in September 2023 while attempting to cross into Armenia amid a mass exodus of the region’s roughly 100,000 ethnic Armenians after Azerbaijan retook the territory that month.
(Reporting by Nailia Bagirova and Lucy Papachristou. Writing by Lucy Papachristou. Editing by Guy Faulconbridge and Mark Potter)
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