Prime Minister Tigran Sargsyan visited today the state-of-the-art food and drug safety expert lab at Nor-Gyukh village of Kotayk Marz built by Tonus-Les Ltd. Accompanied by Minister of Economy Tigran Davtyan and Healthcare Minister Derenik Dumanyan, the Prime Minister toured the lab getting acquainted with the ongoing activities, Government’s Press Office reported.
The investment program has a total cost of AMD 1.3bn, which, according to the contract signed with the Ministry of Economy, will help create at least 50 jobs, 20 of which are in place already. Currently the company employs 97 people with an AMD 100 thousand average salary.
Stressing the importance of laboratory operations, the Prime Minister indicated that all food manufacturers are required to provide high quality products to the public, otherwise any breaches will be exposed by means of laboratories like this. “Our goal is to create an experimental laboratory network to administer expert findings on the quality of food and pharmaceuticals products,” Tigran Sargsyan said.
The Government has already granted a 3-year VAT delay for the goods imported by the company under the specified investment program.
Thanking the Premier for the privilege, Tonus-Les CEO Levon Hakobyan said it would have been impossible to implement the program without the government’s assistance.
The lab will make it possible to conduct quality, biological conformity and bacteriological tests on imported food and pharmaceutical products, supposed to boost local production and high-quality export.
The lab is using German, Swiss, Japanese and Israeli equipment, which should originally cost about AMD310mn, but after job realization the project cost soared up to AMD470mn.
