A court in Nepal has jailed two former government ministers after they were found guilty of forging documents to enable Nepali nationals to be resettled in the U.S. as Bhutanese refugees. The district court in Kathmandu jailed former Deputy Prime Minister and Energy Minister Top Bahadur Rayamajhi to four years for offences against the state, fraud and involvement in organised crime.
Fourteen other people, including a former top bureaucrat in the home ministry and a former Bhutanese refugee leader, were sentenced to up to four years in jail. The scam was uncovered in 2023 when both men had already left government.
About 120,000 Bhutanese nationals of Nepali origin have fled the neighbouring Himalayan kingdom of Bhutan to Nepal since the early 1990s, demanding more political freedom in the majority Buddhist country of less than 800,000 people. Nearly 113,000 of them have been resettled in several Western countries, including the United States, Canada and Australia, under a third-country resettlement programme.
Original reporting: Appleton, WI News Feed (HLL/CB) — read the source article.
