Five-party alliance trying to give clean chit to Janardan Sharma

Investigation into the alleged involvement of unauthorised persons while preparing the budget of this fiscal year is going on. The committee formed to investigate into the case has collected statements from Janardan Sharma, who had resigned from the post of Finance Minister after he was dragged into controversies for allowing unauthorized persons to make changes in tax rates.

However, the ruling parties are trying their best to give Sharma a clean chit and reappoint him as Finance Minister. As a result, the committee is in a mood not to investigate in depth. Moreover, the committee members reportedly failed to get evidence on the case after the Finance Secretaries and other employees, probably under political pressure, rejected the involvement of unauthorized persons in the budget-making process.

The UML is also likely to be soft to Sharma with a ‘give and take game’ as UML would ask the government not to remove Maha Prasad Adhikari from the post of governor on the condition that it would not be rude towards Sharma.

While the UML members in the parliamentarian probe committee demanded call details and location tracking of those alleged persons, Maoist Center opposed it. Still the committee looked into the revived footages of the CCTV camera on

Tuesday.,

The 11-member committee has four members from CPNUML, two each from Nepali Congress (NC) and CPN (Maoist Center), and one each from CPN (Unified Socialist), Janata Samajwadi Party (JSP) and Loktantrik Samajwadi Party (LSP). Khagaraj Adhikari, Pradeep Gyawali, Bhanubhakta Dhakal and Bimala BK are the members of the committee from UML. Similarly, the committee has Pushpa Bhusal Gautam and Sitaram Mahato from NC, Dev Gurung and Shakti Basnet from Maoist Center, Sarala Kumari Yadav from Unified Socialist, Surendra Yadav from JSP and Laxman Lal Karna from LSP.

Sharma has been accused of inviting unauthorized persons to the Finance Ministry to change tax rates at the time of finalising the budget. He has denied the allegations.

He courted another controversy when the Finance Ministry, responding to a right to information (RTI) request seeking closed-circuit TV (CCTV) footage of the night before the budget presentation, said that it does not have CCTV footage of more than 13 days.

Sharma resigned on July 6 to facilitate investigation over the allegations. Speaker Agni Sapkota had formed the 11-strong parliamentary committee to investigate the allegations just before his resignation.