Following Kerope’s death, the business returned to Avedis’s side of the family. The eldest, Haroutune II, had become a lawyer and held a high position in the Ottoman government, thus he was not interested, and being a bachelor, he passed it to Aram. He was involved in the Armenian nationalist movement and resistance to the atrocities of the ruling Sultan, Abdul Hamid II. This was a time of political upheaval when the Ottoman Empire was in decline. Abdul Hamid II, also known as the ‘Bloody Sultan’ for his massacres of up to 300,000 Armenians in the mid-1890s, had reasserted Pan-Islamism.  Before Sultan Abdul Hamid II was finally deposed, there were several attempts to assassinate him. After being implicated in a 1905 failed plot to assassinate the Sultan, Aram fled to Bucharest, where he set up a small foundry.