Kathmandu: Nepali prosecutors have charged 30 people, including two former cabinet ministers, with corruption in a case involving faking documents for Nepali nationals to enter the United States as Bhutanese refugees.
Sixteen people were seized and charged last month, including the most senior bureaucrat in the ministry, former Home Secretary Tek Narayan Pandey, former Energy Minister Tope Bahadur Rayamajhi and former Home Minister Bal Krishna Khand.
Police are searching for 14 others who were charged in absentia.
Lakshman Upadhyay Ghimire, a spokesman for the district attorney’s office, said the accused are charged with “cheating, organised crime, document forgery and state offence”.
The lawsuit was filed at the Kathmandu District Court after police looked into claims that they had amassed significant sums of money from a large number of Nepali citizens while making promises to bring them to the United States as Bhutanese refugees.
“If found guilty, they could be jailed for up to more than 15 years,” Ghimire said. The media reported that those involved have allegedly “swindled around 875 Nepali nationals of millions of rupees”.
According to a report, Rayamajhi has been suspended as a secretary of the Communist Party of Nepal (Unified Marxist-Leninist) party. About 120,000 Bhutanese nationals of Nepali origin have been expelled or fled neighbouring Bhutan to Nepal since the early 1990s.
A third-country resettlement policy allowed for the relocation of about 113,000 of them after the two South Asian neighbours were unable to return them. These nations included the US, Canada, and Australia.
The US has taken about 100,000 refugees from Nepal. Several thousand are still living in camps in eastern Nepal, saying they want to go back to Bhutan.