Billionaire Vardanyan gets 20 years in Azerbaijani prison, state media says

Tuesday, February 17, 2026 at 2:36 AM

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 before its collapse in 2023, was sentenced to 20 years in prison by a court in Baku on Tuesday, state media reported.

Vardanyan, who served as Karabakh’s number two official in 2022 and 2023, had been on trial in a military court for over a year on charges including terrorism, war crimes and crimes against humanity.

Azerbaijani prosecutors had requested a life sentence for him.

(Reporting by Reuters; Writing by Lucy Papachristou; editing by Guy Faulconbridge )


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