Nepali Congress (NC) President and Prime Minister (PM) Sher Bahadur Deuba has committed to legislate a binding law forcing everyone holding public office to publish property details every year even as no member of his Cabinet including him has published the details in 16 months after he became PM.
Deuba recently unveiled the grand old party's commitments for the upcoming elections. The 52-page commitment paper drafted by a team led by NC General Secretary Bishwa Prakash Sharma mentions the commitment of bringing a law forcing everyone holding public office to publish property details every year in the 29th page.
NC's commitment to bring the law has been widely condemned pointing that no one from the coalition Cabinet led by Deuba has published property details.
Spokesperson with the Office of the Prime Minister and Council of Ministers (OPMCM) Joint Secretary Mahadev Pantha claimed with Setopati that property details of PM Deuba and all the ministers have been acquired a long time back, and have even been kept in the website of the OPMCM.
But the website merely mentions that property details of PM and the ministers have been obtained, but one cannot look at the details of the individual members of the Cabinet and Deuba.
There is currently no law requiring PM and ministers to publish their property details. Clause 31(A) of the Commission for Investigation of Abuse of Authority (CIAA) Act mentions that the PM and the ministers must submit their property details to the body concerned within 60 days of assuming office but the CIAA Act is silent about publishing the details submitted.
All the governments since the first elected one led by Girija Prasad Koirala after restoration of democracy in 1990 have published property details after the Koirala Cabinet took a decision requiring the PM and ministers to publish property details within 15 days of assuming office.
Even KP Sharma Oli, who became PM on February 15, 2017 after the left alliance of CPN-UML and CPN (Maoist Center) secured almost a two-third majority, had published property details two months after becoming PM. But the notice the Oli government published in the Nepal Gazette on July 4, 2018 merely mentioned that the PM and ministers must submit property details to the OPMCM but did not mention about publishing the submitted details.
Oli and the ministers who were first inducted in the Cabinet all published their property details, but Oli and the ministers did not subsequently update those details, and the ministers inducted later in the Cabinet also did not publish the details.
