Ex-Nepal ministers among 30 charged in US-bound refugee scam

Prosecutors say hundreds of Nepalese have raised huge sums of money to send them to the US as Bhutanese refugees.

Nepalese prosecutors have charged 30 people, including two former cabinet ministers, with corruption in a case involving forged documents for Nepalese nationals to enter the United States as Bhutanese refugees.

Former Interior Minister Bal Krishna Khand, former Energy Minister Tope Bahadur Rayamajhi and former Interior Minister Tek Narayan Pandey, the top bureaucrat in the ministry, were among 16 people detained and charged this month.

Police are looking for 14 others charged in absentia.

Lakshman Upadhyay Ghimire, a spokesperson for the prosecutor’s office, said the suspects are charged with “cheating, organized crime, document forgery and state crimes”.

The case was registered in Kathmandu District Court after police investigated allegations that they collected large amounts of money from hundreds of Nepalese nationals who promised to send them to the United States as Bhutanese refugees.

“If found guilty, they could face up to 15 years in prison,” Ghimire told Reuters news agency.

The Kathmandu Post reported that those involved reportedly “swindled about 875 Nepalese nationals out of millions of rupees”.

According to the Post, Rayamajhi has been suspended as secretary of the Communist Party of Nepal (Unified Marxist-Leninist).

Since the early 1990s, approximately 120,000 Bhutanese nationals of Nepalese descent have been expelled or fled neighboring Bhutan to Nepal.

Nearly 113,000 of them have been resettled in various countries, including the US, Canada and Australia, under a third-country resettlement program after their two South Asian neighbors failed to repatriate them.

The US has taken about 100,000 refugees from Nepal. Several thousand still live in camps in eastern Nepal and say they want to return to Bhutan.

It was not immediately clear whether Nepalese nationals had been sent to the US as bogus Bhutanese refugees.