In 1987, Yeghiayan came across a passage in the
memoirs of
Henry Morgenthau Sr., the American Ambassador to the Ottoman Empire from 1913 to 1916, describing an exchange between him and
Mehmed Talat Pasha, the man chiefly held responsible for the Armenian Genocide. The text in question spoke of Talat's and, by extension, the state's interest in claiming as beneficiaries the life insurance policies of the Armenians who had perished during the genocide. The Armenians had purchased these policies from
New York Life and Equitable Life of New York prior to the beginning of the war and, after exploring the issue more in depth, Yeghiayan came to the conclusion that New York Life, as well as other insurance companies, had withheld death benefits totaling in the tens of millions from the descendants of the deceased. After gathering evidence and finding several descendants of the victims, in 1999 he filed a
class action lawsuit against New York Life in a case which lasted for four years. In January 2004, New York Life agreed to pay $20 million to settle the lawsuit. The California state insurance commissioner appointed a committee of prominent Los Angeles Armenians to vet applications for settlement money, with the committee ultimately approving claims from the descendants of 2,400 Armenian Genocide victims. The settlement also included $3 million earmarked for nine Armenian church and charity groups. He has given lectures in the United States, Europe, the Middle East, Canada, and Armenia on the legal ramifications of the class lawsuits regarding the Armenian Genocide and restitution of Armenian properties. In September 2008, Yeghiayan filed suit against the National Archives and Records Administration of the United States, seeking documents from 1914 to 1925 relating to the Armenian Genocide, following the administrations failed response to his repeated request to procure information. In June 2010, Yeghiayan filed on behalf of the Western Prelacy of the
Armenian Church suit against the
J. Paul Getty Museum for the return of eight thirteenth-century Armenian
illuminated manuscript folios, the work of Armenian manuscript illuminator
Toros Roslin, the first such case in the United States that the return of cultural or religious objects stolen during the Armenian Genocide. In September 2015 both parties reached an agreement whereby legal title of the folios would be returned to the Church while the pages themselves would remain in the possession of the Getty. In December 2010, a suit was filed against the Turkish government and two Turkish banks, the
Central Bank of the Republic of Turkey and
Ziraat Bankası, for seized Armenian assets in the region of
Adana. In March 2011, Yeghiayan filed suit against the
United States Federal Reserve on behalf of the Center for Armenian Remembrance, to demand the disclosure of information pertaining to Armenian assets and confiscated gold, which was seized by the Ottomans during the Armenian Genocide. ==Awards and honors==