Kathmandu, Nepal, March 29, 2021: The Supreme Court (SC), the apex court of the country, has ordered the Commission for the Investigation of Abuse of Authority (CIAA) to submit its decision not to file charge-sheets against former Prime Ministers duo Madhav Kumar Nepal and Baburam Bhattarai over the Lalita Niwas land scam.
Responding to a writ petition filed by senior advocate Bal Krishna Neupane, a joint bench of SC justices Anil Kumar Sinha and Hari Prasad Phuyal ordered the CIAA to this effect on Monday.
Senior advocate Neupane had moved the SC demanding that both the former Prime Ministers- Nepal and Bhattarai- have to be implicated in the multibillion Lalita Niwas land scam with other former ministers of their cabinet and other government officials.
The CIAA had on February 6, 2020, charge-sheeted 175 individuals including former ministers at the Special Court accusing them of involving in allegedly corruption by registering the land plots of Lalita Niwas in the names of various individuals.
Nepali Congress (NC) leader and former deputy prime minister Vijaya Kumar Gachchhadar, former ministers Chandra Dev Joshi, Chhabiraj Pant and Dambar Shrestha, former secretary duo Dinesh Hari Adhikari and Dip Basnyat, who was also the former Chief of the CIAA, were charge-sheeted for their alleged involvement in the scam.
As the former Prime Ministers duo Nepal and Bhattrai were excluded while charging the ministers of the same cabinet, the CIAA’s decision was dragged into controversies from different sectors.
In the writ petition, advocate Neupane had demanded that former Prime Ministers duo Nepal and Bhattarai including the son of CPN-UML joint secretary Bishnu Poudel had to be charge-sheeted in the scam.
