By Aram Gareginyan

YEREVAN. – By exiting Armenia, French Orange telecom group left behind a small fact in the largest taxpayers’ stats.

In the 1st half of 2015, for the first time in years, an individual made his way to Armenia’s 1,000 largest taxpayers ranking. Orange Armenia’s then-CEO, Francis Gelibter, paid 49.7 million Armenian drams in taxes (around $105 thousand).

Needless to say, a French company paid European-level salary to a manager of its subsidiary. Moreover, they could have added a hefty severance pay to their manager – again, a widely accepted Western practice. This could have further added up to his gross income and taxes.

Still, why was the largest taxpaying manager leading the 33th largest taxpayer enterprise? Where are the CEO’s of top-10, 20…30?

We would gladly praise corporate transparency (which has actually made a lot of progress already), if we knew their compensations officially, and not by word of mouth… But Armenian legislation does not provide for such disclosures.

To compare, the US legislation requires public companies to file their proxy statements to the Securities and Exchange Commission. The statement needs to contain clear disclosure of compensations to the CEOs, CFOs and three other most highly paid executives.

Furthermore, in early August, the SEC approved a decree, effective 2017, which obliges public companies to disclose CEO-worker pay gaps.

If the data comes to light, they are sure to grab headlines around the globe. According to a brand new study of the US-based recruiting company, Glassdoor, in lots of American companies the ratio of CEO vs median worker salary is 3-digit, and in some exceeds 1 thousand. These data has been collected for years from anonymous salary reports of employees to encourage corporate pay transparency.

Among the most well-known brands, Starbucks’ CEO Howard Schultz makes 669 times the wage of his average employee, Douglas McMillon, the head of Walmart, 1,133 times, and David Zaslav, the CEO of Discovery, 1,951 times the average paycheck of his employee.

We hereby encourage Armenian top managers to put an end to rumors and speak up how much they actually make. We promise to stand this psychological challenge.