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Kathmandu Thursday May 24, 2001 Jestha 11, 2058.
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Chataut, Rawal charged of corruption on CSWA deal
By Satish Jung Shahi
KATHMANDU, May 23 - Ex-Ministers Tarani Dutta
Chataut and Bhim Bahadur Rawal have landed in hot soup as the parliamentary Public
Accounts Committee (PAC) today charged the two ex-Ministers for Civil Aviation with
corruption while leasing a Chinese jet for RNAC, the national flag carrier.
After much deliberations between PAC members
from the ruling Nepali Congress and the opposition communist CPN-UML, the parliamentary
body today came to the conclusion that the two long-term lease deals endorsed by both
Chataut and Rawal for the Royal Nepal Airlines Corporation (RNAC) at their different terms
in office as the Civil Aviation Ministers were "involved in irregularities,
intentional and against the interest of the Corporation."
The ruling is sort of a victory for the NC,
which was stung by PAC’s spirited investigation of RNAC’s deal with Lauda Air.
Chataut is already under investigation in the Lauda Air deal, which has attracted the
attention of the anti-corruption body CIAA and is threatening the government of Prime
Minister Girija Prasad Koirala.
NC’s move to demand a PAC investigation of
the China South West Airlines (CSWA) jet lease deal was seen as a counter move to nail
down Rawal, who belongs to the CPN-UML. It was during Rawal’s time that one of the
CSWA lease deals was signed which was extended later by Chataut.
Chataut however was dragged into the case by
communist members of the PAC for sanctioning foreign currency for RNAC in the ninth CSWA
lease deal and had even gone overboard the CIAA directive to lease further aircraft only
after holding a global tender. That particular lease was also against the
government’s own standing when it sacked an earlier RNAC chief for the same reasons.
Likewise, CPN-UML stalwart Bhim Bahadur Rawal,
is charged with a similar violation of his authority over a year long deal he made as the
then Civil Aviation Minister in 1999. The state airline had then leased a CSWA Boeing 757
for the fourth time though it had held a global tender for a 767 jet. There were also
numerous controversies regarding hefty commission involved in this particular deal.
In today’s PAC decision, the parliamentary
all-party body has directed the Cabinet Secretariat and Ministry for Tourism, Culture and
Civil Aviation "to initiate legal action and impose maximum punishment allowed by the
law" against all the people and officials involved in both the deals. "We have
also decided to draw the interest of the concerned constitutional bodies to initiate
further action," a copy of the decision states.
The CSWA case has been presently kept in
abeyance at the Commission for Investigation of Abuse of Authority (CIAA).
However, the PAC decision on the controversial
case of CSWA aircraft has mentioned the words "giving continuity to the former
deals" in Chataut’s case. The phrase was added after a lengthy debate between
members from NC and the opposition communist CPN-UML. The former claimed that one of the
two deals was more serious than the other.
Even today, the decision was expected to head
nowhere in the morning until the PAC members sat for an informal two-hour meeting to agree
upon the draft of the decision. It later took less than 20 minutes when the PAC members
sat for a formal meeting at 11:00 p.m. and agreed upon the decision.
"We came to an agreement on the decision
after continuous discussions," said PAC Chairman Subash Nembang, before starting
today’s formal meeting. "There were extensive debates on the draft of the
decision over its language and a few wording."
In today’s directive issued by PAC, it has
also demanded "legal action" against the government officials who have failed to
provide necessary documents when the CSWA jet was leased for the first three times. They
have also demanded that the government hold investigations over the authenticity of a fax
letter from CSWA printed in a local weekly which claimed that both RNAC and Ministry
officials were involved in hefty commissions on the deal.
Furthermore, PAC has also directed the
government to find out if any local agents were present in all of the lease agreements
made so far and make the amount of commission involved transparent.
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