Kathmandu District Court on Tuesday sentenced former deputy prime minister Top Bahadur Rayamajhi to 11 years in prison and former home minister Balkrishna Khand to five years and three months, closing the sentencing stage of the biggest political corruption case Nepal has brought to trial in a decade.
The bench of Judge Tej Bahadur Khadka passed sentence on 16 people convicted on 7 July of running, or assisting, a network that sold Nepali citizens the promise of resettlement in the United States by passing them off as Bhutanese refugees. Rayamajhi, a senior UML figure, was convicted as a principal offender on fraud, organised crime and offences against the state. Khand, of the Nepali Congress, was convicted as an accomplice: the court found no evidence that money reached him, but held that he had lent the racket official cover, including by extending the life of a home ministry task force whose report the network then forged.
Those sentenced alongside them include former home secretary Tek Narayan Pandey, Indrajit Rai, a security adviser to then home minister Ram Bahadur Thapa, former Congress lawmaker Angtawa Sherpa, Haj Committee chair Shamsher Miya, Khand’s private secretary Narendra KC, the exiled Bhutanese refugee leader Tek Nath Rizal, and middlemen including Keshav Dulal, Sanu Bhandari, Sagar Rai and Bechan Jha.
The fraud traded on a real resettlement programme that had already ended. More than 100,000 Lhotshampa, Nepali-speaking Bhutanese, were expelled from Bhutan in the early 1990s and housed in camps in Jhapa and Morang. From 2007 a UNHCR-brokered scheme resettled over 110,000 of them abroad, the great majority in the United States, before winding down at the end of the last decade. The racket sold places on a list that was closed, and its victims, Nepali citizens who paid in many cases everything they had, were persuaded that a few more names could still be added. Prosecutors put the money collected at roughly Rs288 million.
The case, filed in 2023 after a police investigation the previous year, has taken three years to reach sentencing. Cabinet-level figures from both governing parties have now been convicted in a court of first instance, though appeals to the Patan High Court are near-certain and the seven defendants still absconding remain untried.