KATHMANDU, July 1: The Department of Cooperatives (DoC) says it has been receiving an increasing number of complaints from the members who failed to get back their money deposited in cooperatives.
Speaking at a program organized by the National Cooperative Federation of Nepal on Saturday, DoC Registrar Namaraj Ghimire said the panicked depositors have turned violent in recent days demanding to recover the money from the problematic cooperatives.
“They appear so aggressive that they demand to instantly arrest the operators of the cooperatives accused of embezzlement,” said Ghimire, suspecting that the mob that visits the DoC office on a daily basis could have been infiltrated with individuals with vested interest.
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Pointing to increasing cases of embezzlement seen in cooperatives in recent days, Ghimire said many cooperative operators have been misinterpreting the provisions in the act to take undue benefits out of the amount they misappropriated.
“The Cooperative Act has asked the swindlers of cooperatives to pay cash fines equivalent to the cheated amount along with a jail term of up to 10 years. However, they take this lightly, with a false belief that the benefits they get from misappropriating the money are much more than the punishment they are likely to face,” said Ghimire.
Ghimire urged the cooperatives to unveil their whitepapers in order to win the trust of the member depositors. “They must be transparent about their financial positions, while they must clearly show their plans to manage their financial assets and liabilities to maintain their credibility in the market,” he said.
Ghimire expressed his commitment that the regulator will not spare from taking action against the cooperatives that cheat the depositors. “If the cooperatives are not kept in track now, the sector will seriously fall in crisis in the near future,” he added.
The government has kept cooperatives under high priority, considering it as one of the three pillars of the country’s economic system. Although a large number of cooperatives have been doing their best to uplift the lives of the low-income people, few of them have been found cheating their depositors.
Speaker of the House of Representatives Dev Raj Ghimire said the government bodies along with those involved in the cooperative movement should jointly look for solving the present problems seen in few cooperatives. “In many cases, cooperatives are found to have landed in the problem when the operators consider fulfilling personal interests rather than overall objectives of the community members,” he said.
