In the meeting, held three hours behind the schedule because the required number of committee members weren’t present, the committee grilled Hira Bahadur Thapa, the prime minister’s foreign policy advisor, because he’d lodged a complaint against the choosing of the ambassadorial nominee for Germany, Suresh Pradhan.
Thapa said that he’d chosen to protest Pradhan’s nomination because Pradhan had committed a serious crime against the country by disclosing facts about China’s proposal to make a new treaty between Nepal and China.
Thapa was the only complainant who appeared in Sunday’s meeting to clarify his complaint against an ambassadorial nominee. “The issues that advisor Thapa has raised in his complaints are serious, and the committee should treat them as a serious matter,” said lawmaker Pari Thapa, after the meeting.
Two others—Ram Dayal Rakesh, who had filed a complaint against the ambassadorial nominee for the UK, Ram Swartha Ray, and Amar Yadav, who had filed complaints against the ambassadorial nominee for the USA, Dr Sukhdev Shah—did not appear in the meeting.
Intrigues were apparently afoot everywhere: Rakesh informed the committee that he had not filed the complaint. “Rakesh said that someone else had filed the complaint in his name,” said Laxman Ghimire, Nepali Congress Chief Whip in the parliament.
And Amar Yadav claimed that that the issues raised in the complaints against Dr Shah were legitimate but that he’d raised the issues with Foreign Affairs Minister Upendra Yadav, not with the committee. “Someone else filed the complaint in my name, but the issues are true,” he told parliament secretariat officials who asked him to appear before the committee.
Yadav had claimed in the complaint that Shah had breached his commitment to return to his Nepal Rastra Bank job upon the completion of his study in the USA, that Shah had bribed Minister Upendra Yadav to get the ambassadorial appointment, and that Shah had exploited the labor of a domestic help in the USA, among others.
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