Nepal Weekly - 2026-05-27
Nepal business, finance and trade news, every Wednesday.
One House, Two-Thirds, No Senate
The House of Representatives Rules Drafting Committee has tucked a constitutional workaround into Rule 140(11) of the proposed House regulations. The provision would allow for a constitutional amendment to pass on a combined two-thirds vote across both chambers, 223 out of 334 total seats, instead of the separate two-thirds majority each house must independently clear under the constitution as written now. The ruling Rastriya Swatantra Party holds 182 of the lower house's 275 seats on its own, a short walk to the combined threshold. A parliamentary secretariat official said the arrangement "could create controversy." Opposition members on the drafting committee say RSP applied direct pressure to get the provision on paper. Under the constitution, if the National Assembly refuses a constitutional amendment, it dies right there; Rule 140(11) would let a lower house supermajority paper over that refusal by pooling tallies.
Read more: Constitutionnet (expert opposition), myRepublica (RSP seat math)
Balen Skips Question Hour
Rule 56 of the House of Representatives Regulations isn’t complicated. The Speaker is required to set aside an hour in the first week of every month for lawmakers to grill the prime minister directly, but PM Balen Shah has yet to show up. The opposition, a rare unified front of Nepali Congress, CPN-UML, Nepali Communist Party, and Rastriya Prajatantra Party is up in arms. RSP Chief Whip Kabindra Burlakoti told the House Shah would appear "within a week," but the Prime Minister's secretariat refused to let anyone announce a specific date. Nepali Congress lawmaker Arjun Narsingh KC told Parliament his prime minister resembled "the emperor of some separate island."
Read more: Nepal News (Shah declined attendance), Khabarhub (Burlakoti commitment), The Kathmandu Post (Speaker's Singh Durbar visit), Ratopati (Rule 56 sub-rule), The Himalayan Times (bills passed anyway)
Wrong Court, Your Honour
The Supreme Court on blocked the arrest of former Prime Minister Sher Bahadur Deuba and his wife Arzu Rana Deuba on money laundering charges Monday, ruling that the Kathmandu District Court had no jurisdiction to issue the warrant. A May 1 ordinance had assigned all cases investigated by the Department of Money Laundering Investigation exclusively to the Special Court, leaving the district court's April 6 warrant legally dead on arrival. The bench found that both the state and the lower court had skipped proper procedure at every step. The Deubas, in Hong Kong since February, had already watched Interpol turn down Nepal Police's red notice request because of insufficient documentation.
Read more: The Hindu (medical travel claim), Spotlight Nepal (Deuba cooperation stance), Online Khabar (Special Court jurisdiction), The Kathmandu Post (warrant nullification), myRepublica (arrest unnecessary claim)
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Lamichhane's Charge Sheet Goes on a Diet
Kaski District Court on Friday stripped the two most serious charges from the Suryadarshan Cooperative fraud case, removing organized crime and money laundering counts against RSP chair Rabi Lamichhane and nearly 50 co-defendants, leaving only the cooperative fraud charge standing. Judge Himlal Belbase approved the amendment at the request of the Kaski district government attorney's office, which was acting on instructions from the Office of the Attorney General. The court offered three reasons. The victims' original complaint never included those charges, the government didn't pursue them in its first charge-sheet, and keeping them on the books would get in the way of settlement talks and complicate any recovery of depositors' savings.
Read more: The Kathmandu Post (co-defendants), The Himalayan Times (bail amounts)
Delhi Skips PM, Rings the Chairman
Rabi Lamichhane, whose RSP won close to a two-thirds majority in the last elections, will be in New Delhi starting June 1 for a three-day visit. He is scheduled to meet Narendra Modi, External Affairs Minister S Jaishankar, National Security Adviser Ajit Doval, Road Transport Minister Nitin Gadkari, and Foreign Secretary Vikram Misri, among others. The invitation came from India's Ministry of External Affairs, with no official communication from the RSP to Kathmandu's Foreign Ministry about the trip. Modi had already called PM Balen Shah after the elections to congratulate him and extend an invitation, but that visit remains unscheduled.
Read more: The Kathmandu Post (Lipulekh dispute), Online Khabar (RSP election majority)
Oli's Deputies Show Him the Door
At Saturday's UML Secretariat meeting, Deputy General Secretary Yogesh Bhattarai reportedly told KP Sharma Oli that the party couldn’t move forward under him and he should step aside. The day before, on Friday, vice chairpersons Bishnu Paudel, Gokarna Bista, Prithvi Subba Gurung, and Raghu Pant made the same demand. General Secretary Shankar Pokharel told Saturday's session the party couldn’t continue in its current condition, but it isn’t clear if the demands have any chance of being met in the near term.
Read more: Spotlight Nepal
Three More Years in the Poor Kids' Club
Foreign Minister Shisir Khanal wrote to the UN Committee for Development Policy on May 13 asking to push Nepal's graduation from Least Developed Country status back to November 2029, three years beyond the original November 2026 date. The official reasoning cites five issues, including geopolitical tensions, supply chain disruptions, slow implementation of the Smooth Transition Strategy, lingering pandemic damage, and Middle East conflict squeezing remittance flows. The ILO previously warned that graduating on schedule could cost roughly 132,000 jobs and nearly a billion USD in economic losses within five years, as garments, carpets, and pashmina would get hit with higher tariffs and stricter rules of origin. The Smooth Transition Strategy that was supposed to use the intervening years to build export competitiveness has, by the government's admission, moved more slowly than was expected.
Read more: The Kathmandu Post (35% employment drop), The Kathmandu Post (minister quotes), Nepali Times (budget growth targets)
Desert Mirage Sends 80,000 Nepalis Home
About 80,000 Nepali workers are losing their jobs as Saudi Arabia scales back NEOM, the wild mega-project whose initial $500 billion price tag has grown to a jaw-dropping $8.8 trillion, and at least one internal audit suggesting full completion could take another half century plus. The 80k is a meaningful slice of the ~400,000 Nepalis who work in Saudi Arabia. Falling oil prices and the runaway cost overruns have pushed the Saudi government to redirect money toward the 2030 Riyadh World Expo and the 2034 FIFA World Cup, fixtures that will be considerably cheaper than building a 170-kilometer twin-skyscraper city in the desert. To put the numbers in to context, the $8.8 trillion figure is roughly 25 times Saudi Arabia's yearly national budget and nearly ten times the value of the $925 billion Public Investment Fund.
Read more: Ratopati
Monsoon Bill Comes Due Early
Humla's Danfe Basic School is gone, swept away by a pre-monsoon rainstorm on Tuesday night that also buried homes and destroyed crop fields belonging to 67 households. Two glacial lakes above Tilgaun in the same district burst last May and are leaking again. The municipality says they have no budget to deal with them and so far there’s been no federal response. Farther east, Friday night's flooding knocked out four hydropower projects along the Taplejung-Panchthar border, taking 55 MW offline. The 25 MW Kabeli B-1 may need two weeks to clear debris from its intake, and the 9.9 MW Iwa Khola project could be out for several months after damage to its dam site and pipeline. So, not pretty by any measure. While all of this is brewing, the National Disaster Risk Reduction and Management Authority has approved this year’s monsoon response plan, and has set aside Rs 7.56 billion ($49.7 million) to support an estimate that 51,868 households (about a quarter million people) will be affected. The monsoon hasn't officially arrived yet.
Read more: The Kathmandu Post (Karnali loss history), Spotlight Nepal (Iwa Khola timeline), Ratopati (volunteer mobilization), The Rising Nepal (force breakdown), The Kathmandu Post (substation damage)
Measles Spreads as Vaccine Stocks Run Dry
Measles has infected more than 300 children in seven districts so far this year. Ring vaccinations went ahead in only one district and one municipality, because Nepal has no buffer vaccine stocks and no emergency budget to speak of. A 200,000-dose shipment from an aid agency arrived months after an emergency request, but the chief of the Immunisation Section says it won't cover all the affected areas. A Health Ministry official, speaking anonymously, pointed the finger at the RSP government's decision to cut contract health workers and vaccinators.
Read more: The Kathmandu Post
Rush Hour at 8,848 Metres
A week ago today, 274 climbers reached the Everest summit from the Nepali side in a single day, a feat that improves (?) upon the previous record of 223 set in 2019. The lineup ran from the Balcony right to the top and some climbers were stuck in the death zone for up to five hours. The season's numbers are aggressive. This year Nepal issued 494 Everest permits, the most since Hillary and Tenzing first scaled the peak in 1953, and took in about $7 million in royalties for their effors. China has issued no permits from the Tibetan side this year, so every climber is moving through Nepal, which helps explain the pressure on the ropes. A growing chorus in the industry wants the government to scrap the May 31 season cutoff, arguing the original rationale, long monsoon marches from the foothills, no longer applies, and that year-round access would spread the load and the revenue. Three deaths have been reported so far this season.
Read more: The Kathmandu Post (nationality breakdown), Nepali Times (season cutoff debate), DW (gender split)
Seized Collateral, Squeezed Cash
Non-banking assets at BFIs reached Rs 46.10 billion ($303 million) as of mid-April, up 20 percent from a year earlier, as banks are forced to sit on foreclosed properties they can't auction fast enough to make any difference. Himalayan Bank topped the table at Rs 6.08 billion ($40 million) and Prime Bank's pile more than doubled to Rs 4.99 billion ($33 million). The Supreme Court only recently ruled that BFIs are able to auction seized assets beyond the previous three-year limit.
Read more: myRepublica (bank-level breakdown), myRepublica (auction mechanics)
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