IMAGE VIA OSNEPALNEWS INC
IF YOU WANT a snapshot of Nepal’s young democracy, forget parliament for a moment and skip the tea shops too, where everyone already knows what everyone else thinks. Look instead at a charge-sheet, because on January 14th a few key lines vanished from one. With a stroke of her pen, Sabita Bhandari, the attorney-general, approved the removal of organised-crime and money-laundering charges against Rabi Lamichhane, the boss of the Rastriya Swatantra Party and the country’s loudest critic of cosy power. It was an elegant trick, and one that left Mr Lamichhane enjoying the sort of executive kindness he once made a career railing against on television.
That tweak landed like a political thunderclap because it raises a far more awkward question: who really decides whether powerful people face a trial in Nepal? Yubaraj Paudel, a constant irritant in Mr Lamichhane’s legal life, has asked the supreme court to step in. The judges should take the hint. Removing the heaviest charges before a trial even gets going looks like stepping around the courts altogether, in a case that has already cost roughly 50,000 people their savings.
The backdrop is the slow collapse of Nepal’s savings and credit cooperatives, once trusted places where ordinary people parked their life savings and now better known as cautionary tales. Investigators eventually worked out what had gone wrong. Money meant for depositors was criminally drained and fed into private businesses, with the Gorkha Media Network emerging as the most eye-catching destination.
Mr Lamichhane was hardly a distant observer. He ran Gorkha Media and fronted its Galaxy 4K Television channel, the engine of the company’s growth and spending. A parliamentary probe, led by Surya Thapa, said that responsibility for the money coming into the company sat squarely with him. The numbers alone make the point. More than Rs655m flowed in from a single cooperative in Pokhara, with plenty more arriving from Butwal, Kathmandu and Birgunj, all of it money that depositors thought was sitting safely in their accounts.
The attorney-general’s defence of her decision rests on a distinction that sounds clever until you say it out loud. Her office says Mr Lamichhane spent the money but did not personally move it out of the cooperatives, and so should be treated as an innocent user of dirty cash. That is a stretch. Nepal’s own law says that using money you know, or should know, comes from a crime is enough to get you into serious trouble. Pretending that a managing director handling hundreds of millions has no duty to ask where it came from is an open invitation to abuse.
Dropping the organised-crime charge is just as awkward. The law describes organised crime as people working together for profit in a structured way. The partnership between Mr Lamichhane, Gitanath Rai—the cooperative boss now on the run—and others involved in the scheme looks uncomfortably close to that description. Removing this charge does more than shorten a possible sentence. It also lifts the automatic suspension that money-laundering charges impose on MPs, allowing Mr Lamichhane to carry on in politics as if little had happened.
The timing makes things worse. Nepal is already under close watch from the global body that monitors money laundering, and is trying hard to avoid being labelled a country that looks the other way. That label would make borrowing costlier and scare off investors. Against that backdrop, dropping money-laundering charges against a high-profile politician in a case involving hundreds of millions of rupees sends exactly the wrong message.
Then there is the small matter of the “sweat shares”. Mr Lamichhane has said his 15% stake in Gorkha Media was earned through hard work and star power rather than cash, and later sold at a profit. The parliamentary probe concluded that the paperwork backing this story was forged. If the company’s ownership was built on fake documents to disguise where its money really came from, the idea that this was a loose, accidental arrangement becomes harder to swallow. You do not need to carry bags of cash yourself to be part of cleaning it up.
Nepal’s supreme court has, in the past, shown that it understands this. It has repeatedly said that prosecutors hold their power in trust for the public, rather than for political convenience. Just last year, in a separate high-profile case, it demanded explanations when charges were dropped. Mr Paudel’s petition gives the judges a chance to repeat that lesson.
Mr Lamichhane’s supporters say he is being hounded by old parties frightened of his popularity, and there is something to the idea that Nepal’s establishment rarely polices itself with such enthusiasm. But cries of persecution only go so far. If he is innocent, the place to show it is in open court, with evidence tested and witnesses questioned, not in back offices where charges can be edited away before a judge ever sees them.
Letting this pass would have consequences well beyond one man. If “using” stolen money no longer counts as laundering, plenty of others now behind bars will want to know why that logic does not apply to them. Many face charges for far smaller sums and enjoy none of Mr Lamichhane’s political clout. Selective leniency has a way of eating away at faith in the law.
For the families who lost their savings, all of this feels painfully remote. They were told their money was safe, then watched it disappear into studios, salaries and ambition. They do not need grand speeches about a new Nepal. They need a justice system that treats a media celebrity the same way it treats everyone else.
The supreme court should pause the attorney-general’s decision and ask to see the new evidence that supposedly made the charges melt away. The original case was built by the state’s own investigators and backed by a long parliamentary inquiry. Allowing it to be dismantled would say something bleak about how power works.
Mr Lamichhane likes to talk about cleaning up politics and putting the rule of law first. It would be a neat irony if his political future depended on the opposite. The judges now have a chance to make sure the law speaks for itself. Let the trial run on all charges. If the case is weak, a court will find that out soon enough. But if the law is to mean anything at all, it should at least be allowed its day in court. ■
