Nepal took loans from China to build an international airport in the scenic city of Pokhara. Not a single international scheduled flight has taken off from there since its inauguration on January 1, 2023. Now, it has landed in a corruption case.
Nepal’s anti-graft agency this week filed charges against 55 individuals, including five former ministers, 10 senior bureaucrats, and a Chinese state-owned construction firm, China CAMC Engineering Company, in what is dubbed the biggest corruption case the Himalayan country has witnessed.
They have been accused of inflating construction costs while building the Pokhara International Airport, 200 kilometres west of Kathmandu, the capital.
The filing follows months-long investigations by the Commission for Investigation of Abuse of Authority (CIAA), Nepal’s constitutional anti-graft body, and findings by a parliamentary committee earlier this year. The parliamentary panel, in its report made public in April, had said that irregularities and corruption were found in the construction of the $216 million airport.
According to the chargesheet filed on Sunday (December 7, 2025), the anti-corruption agency has determined that NPR 8.36 billion ($74.34 million at the exchange rate as of August 10, 2018) should be recovered from the 56 defendants, including the Chinese firm, the construction arm of the state-owned conglomerate China National Machinery Industry Corporation (Sinomach).
