Ex-Foreign Minister Vartan Oskanyan says the court ruling to reject his lawyer’s motion for dismissing the criminal case against his foundation has left his opinion about the proceeding unchanged.

Oskanyan, now a member of the Prosperous Armenia party faction in National Assembly, considers the money laundering lawsuit against the Civilitas Foundation politically motivated.

The politician says on his Facebook page that the main motive for filing an appeal was a precedential ruling which states that  money laundering charges cannot be considered valid unless there are proven records of a preceding crime.

“The court unfortunately ignored this precedential ruling and rejected the appeal for dismissing the case. We will proceed with appealing against the NSS [National Security Service] decision in other instances, including the Cassation Court, which logically cannot contradict its own ruling. Today’s court ruling once again reaffirms my belief that the only conclusion to be drawn from all this is that it has political motives. Two months have now passed since the filing of a case under a rather serious article, but no legal justification is known so far, at least to me,” says Oskanyan.