The parliamentary special committee formed to investigate allegations of budget tampering against former finance minister Janardan Sharma has decided to seek documents and details related to Sharma from the Finance Ministry on Wednesday.
“Today’s meeting has decided to write to the Finance Ministry tomorrow seeking details and documents,” said Surendra Aryal, the committee’s secretary. The committee held its first meeting at Singha Durbar on Tuesday afternoon.
According to Aryal, the meeting on Tuesday also endorsed the committee's working procedure and decided to pick the committee chair through consensus.
The committee will finalize its chair during its next meeting, scheduled for Wednesday afternoon.
Loktantrik Samajwadi Party lawmaker Laxman Lal Karna presided over Tuesday’s meeting in his capacity as the committee’s seniormost member.
The 11-member committee has four members from CPN-UML, 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 finalizing 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.
Sapkota has allotted 10 days for investigations and the committee must submit the report within 10 days of its first meeting.
