Nepal officials could spend up to 10 years in jail for corruption
KATHMANDU (TrustLaw) – Dozens of senior police officials in Nepal have been charged with embezzling millions of dollars of public funds during the procurement of military hardware for the country’s U.N. peacekeepers stationed in Sudan, anti-graft officials said on Wednesday.
The Himalayan nation’s Commission for the Investigation of Abuse of Authority said around 300 million Nepali rupees ($4 million) were embezzled by police who were purchasing armoured vehicles for Nepali peacekeepers in Sudan’s troubled region of Darfur.
"We filed the case on Tuesday against 24 police officials and 10 retired officers with the special court and have demanded punishment according to the provisions of the anti-corruption act," a spokesman for the commission, Ishwari Prasad Paudel, told TrustLaw.
The officials, who include three former police chiefs, could face up to 10 years in jail, said the authorities, adding they also aimed to get the stolen funds returned.
Nepal has 140 police officers serving as part of the 22,000-strong United Nations-African Mission in Darfur (UNAMID) – deployed to stem years of violence in western Sudan between government forces and rebels.
The incident came to light in 2009 after the U.N. reported that the vehicles sent by Nepal were unsafe and did not meet U.N. specifications.
A Nepali parliamentary team went to the troubled Darfur region in April last year, confirming the vehicles were unsafe and a probe was then established to examine the procurement process.
There have been media reports that the U.N. had asked the Nepali government to replace the equipment or risk being pulled out of the peacekeeping mission and repatriated.
But U.N. officials have dismissed this, saying that while the Nepal’s equipment "did not meet the U.N. requirements to fulfil their mandated tasks,” there was no question of repatriation of the country's peacekeepers.
The Nepali government says it is now in the process of procuring new vehicles to send to Sudan.
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