Nepal jails ex-ministers over Bhutan refugee scam

KATHMANDU: Nepal jailed two former ministers and more than a dozen other people for scamming citizens with the false promise of resettling them abroad as refugees, a court official said Wednesday.

More than 100,000 ethnic Nepalis fled Bhutan in the early 1990s following a shift in nationality laws, and many found new homes in the United States, Europe and elsewhere via a third-country resettlement programme.

The racket, involving senior officials, preyed on Nepalis who missed out on the scheme after it ended in 2018, promising to pass them off as refugees to qualify for resettlement in exchange for large sums of money.

Former deputy prime minister Top Bahadur Rayamajhi was jailed for four years and fined 40,000 rupees ($260) on Tuesday, according to the Kathmandu district court’s information officer Shiva Khatiwada.

Former interior minister Bal Krishna Khand was sentenced to two years’ imprisonment and fined 20,000 rupees.

The district court also convicted and sentenced 14 others, while seven defendants were acquitted, Khatiwada told AFP.

Bhutan refugees

Bhutan introduced a “One Nation, One People” policy in 1985, which stripped citizenship rights from the Nepali-speaking minority known as Lhotshampa and labelled them immigrants.

The Buddhist kingdom also made national dress compulsory and restricted the use of the Nepali language.

Many of the Lhotshampa fleeing Bhutan in the early 1990s ended up in refugee camps in Nepal.

A third-country resettlement programme ran from 2007 to 2018, after the failure of years-long negotiations to secure their return to Bhutan.

The majority were resettled in the United States. Thousands more found new homes in Europe, Australia, Canada and New Zealand.

The case involved hundreds of victims, who said the racket took their cash but then did nothing to help them, according to Nepali media.

Nepali police made the first arrests in March 2023 after receiving several complaints.