A Nepali court has convicted two former government ministers and several others in connection with a fraudulent scheme involving false promises of international refugee resettlement, officials said Wednesday. The Kathmandu District Court delivered the verdict on Tuesday, finding former deputy prime minister Top Bahadur Rayamajhi guilty of offences against the state, fraud, and organized crime. Former interior minister Bal Krishna Khand was convicted as an accomplice in the case.
At least 15 individuals were found culpable in the scam, which centered on obtaining money from citizens under the pretense that they could be resettled abroad as refugees. The scheme emerged after the closure of an official third-country resettlement program that ran from 2007 to 2018.
The original resettlement initiative was established in response to the displacement of more than 100,000 ethnic Nepali Lhotshampa from Bhutan in the early 1990s. This represented about one-sixth of Bhutan’s population at the time. Tensions arose after Bhutan’s government introduced a “One Nation, One People” policy in 1985, enforcing national dress codes and restrictions on the Nepali language. The Lhotshampa were subsequently labeled as immigrants and stripped of their citizenship rights, leading many to live in refugee camps in Nepal.
Following protracted negotiations that failed to secure their return to Bhutan, a third-country resettlement program facilitated the relocation of the majority of these refugees, primarily to the United States, as well as to countries in Europe, Australia, Canada, and New Zealand.
After the official resettlement scheme ended in 2018, the fraudulent operation began. The accused reportedly promised Nepali citizens that they could still qualify for overseas relocation by presenting themselves as refugees, charging substantial fees for this purpose. Shiva Khatiwada, an information officer at the Kathmandu District Court, confirmed the convictions, stating that the court had found the former senior officials and other individuals guilty of involvement in the fake Bhutanese refugee scam.