By Our Reporter
The government as speculated by many has weakened the Lalita Niwas Land scam case by filing a forgey cases instead of organised crimes.
In the forgery case, a guilty will be jailed for a year while in organised crime he will be jailed for five years. The parties decided to weaken the case to protect the powerful leaders, mostly affiliated to the parties in the ruling coalition.
A case of forgery of government documents was filed at the Kathmandu District Court (KDC) against 290 individuals in connection with the Lalita Niwas land scam on Sunday.
Serving Secretary at the Ministry of Communication and Information Technology Krishna Bahadur Raut and Under-secretary Sushil Vaidya are also made defendants in the case.
The Court has also made defendants four former ministers, including Nepali Congress leader and former deputy prime minister Bijaya Kumar Gachchhadar and six former secretaries on charge of forging government documents to transfer government land to the names of individuals.
The other two former ministers accused in the case are Dambar Shrestha, Chandradev Joshi and then minister of state Sanjay Sah ‘Takla’.
Earlier on Tuesday last week, the Central Investigation Bureau (CIB) recommended that a case be filed against 286 individuals under forgery and organised crime.
However, the District Attorney filed the case only on charge of forgery citing lack of evidence to prosecute them for organised crime. It said organised crime was not attracted to the case as the incident happened when the Prevention of Organised Crime 2013 was not issued.
Obviously, the case was weakened in the consensus of the ruling parties because many of its leaders were dragged to the case.
Under the case, the District Attorney’s Office has claimed that property worth about Rs. 18 billion be recovered from the defendants. Since it is an old incident, the recovery amount was sought in accordance with the General Code, 1963.
Although the CIB had recommended making Sudhir Kumar Shah a defendant in the case, the District Attorney’s Office, however, didn’t make him so.
Now what happened with the Lalita land case, will also happen with the gold smuggling case because Prime Minister Pushpa Kamal Dahal had to protect Krishna Bahadur Mahara from reaching the jail in the case.
Login to add a comment