Chinese face charges over Nepal airport

Nepali officials also caught up in probe

- BINOD GHIMIRE DAISUKE WAKABAYASHI

Nepal's anti-graft watchdog has charged 55 people, including five former government ministers, with corruption, accusing them and a Chinese state-owned company of inflating the construction costs of an international airport in Pokhara, the country's second-biggest city.

After a months-long probe, the Nepali authorities said Sunday that executives of China CAMC Engineering Co, the construction arm of the state-owned conglomerate Sinomach, colluded with Nepali politicians and bureaucrats to pad construction costs by $75 million.

The corruption charges are the latest controversy surrounding the Chinese-built airport, which was opened in 2023 and has become a cautionary tale about the costs of relying heavily on China for expensive infrastructure projects. The airport was considered a "flagship project" of China's Belt and Road Initiative, the infrastructure campaign that has doled out an estimated $1 trillion in loans and grants to other countries.

Many of the findings by Nepal's Commission for the Investigation of Abuse of Authority corroborated a 2023 report by The New York Times that found China CAMC Engineering had inflated the project's costs and undermined oversight of quality control, prioritising its business interests. Shortly after the article was published, a parliamentary committee started investigating the airport's construction. A report by the committee in April found “irregularities and corruption.”