"Nepal's Former Deputy Prime Minister Sentenced to 4 Years for 'Scam' Promising U.S. Resettlement"

Deceived Hundreds with Fraud Ring
Fourteen Accomplices Also Sentenced to Up to Four Years in Prison

Former Deputy Prime Minister and Minister in Nepal have been sentenced to prison for deceiving their own citizens by promising to settle them in the United States as Bhutanese refugees and then embezzling their money.

Top Bahadur Rayamajhi, former Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of Energy. Photo from local media capture.

According to Reuters and AFP on the 16th (local time), the Kathmandu District Court sentenced Top Bahadur Rayamajhi, former Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of Energy, to four years in prison on charges including treason and fraud. Balkrishna Khand, former Minister of Home Affairs, was sentenced to two years in prison. Fourteen accomplices in the fraud ring who were prosecuted together were each given up to four years in prison. Another seven individuals were acquitted.

Former Deputy Prime Minister Rayamajhi and former Minister Khand were indicted for conspiring with a fraud ring in 2018, deceiving Nepalis by claiming they could help them settle in the United States as Bhutanese refugees, and then embezzling their money. The victims in this case number in the hundreds, and it is reported that these victims claim the fraudulent group took their cash and provided no assistance whatsoever.

After receiving complaints from victims, Nepalese police launched an investigation in 2023. At that time, both Rayamajhi and Khand had already left office. Rayamajhi's lawyer stated, "(The defendant) was never involved in policy-making related to refugees," and announced plans to appeal the verdict. Lawyers for former Minister Khand also plan to appeal.

Some 120,000 Bhutanese people, who follow Hinduism, fled to Nepal after facing persecution on religious and cultural grounds by Buddhist-majority Bhutan in the early 1990s and have lived in refugee camps there since then.

Nepal and Bhutan held several rounds of high-level talks over this issue but failed to find a meaningful solution. As a result, around 113,000 Bhutanese refugees of Nepali origin were resettled in third countries, such as the United States, Canada, and Australia, through a third-country resettlement program between 2007 and 2018. Among these countries, the United States accepted the largest number, taking in about 100,000 refugees. Thousands of Bhutanese refugees of Nepali origin are still believed to remain in refugee camps in eastern Nepal.

This content was produced with the assistance of AI translation services.