Azernews.Az

YEREVAN – The mayor of Yerevan has resigned, his office said, over having reportedly beaten a government official.

Gagik Beglaryan is said to have beaten Aram Kandayan, an official of the presidential administration.

President Serzh Sargsyan has directed pounding criticism at the Yerevan mayor.

"The president has repeatedly expressed his stance on such incidents. Such behavior is unacceptable and intolerable. The more so in the case of a state official," the president’s spokesman Armen Arzumanyan said.

The incident reportedly came after Beglaryan’s spouse sat next to President Sargsyan at a concert of world-famous opera singer Placido Domingo in Yerevan last month. Kandayan said only representatives of the country’s leadership were entitled to sitting alongside the head of state and asked the mayor’s spouse to change her seat. Beglaryan, who did not attend the concert, allegedly drove Kandayan to one of his properties in Yerevan and beat up the young official there the next day.

The president’s spokesman said a minor incident had indeed taken place between the mayor and the President’s Office employee, but a beating never occurred, adding that the media had blown the matter out of proportion.

Beglaryan became Yerevan's first elected mayor in more than a decade after leading the Sargsyan-controlled Republican Party of Armenia (HHK) to a landslide victory in disputed municipal elections held in May 2009. The 46-year-old businessman, who is also known to many Armenians as "Black Gago," had previously governed the Armenian capital's central administrative district.

Beglaryan has long held sway in a largely blue-collar section of the district notorious for election-related violence against opposition activists. Armenian opposition groups have for years accused him of heading a local clan that rigs elections and bullies the government's political opponents. In particular, they implicated him in a December 2009 assault on more than a dozen young activists of the opposition Armenian National Congress.

Both Beglaryan and the HHK have denied these allegations. The ruling party highlighted the mayor's status as a key presidential ally when it elected him to its decision-making Executive Body late last year.