KATHMANDU, OCTOBER 16

The Supreme Court stayed the Election Commission's decision to scrap the candidacy of CPN (Unified Socialist) candidate from Rupandehi Constituency-2 Raju Gurung.

The apex court issued a short-term stay order against the EC decision, which means that the court would conduct another hearing to hear arguments of both sides before deciding whether or not the stay order should continue.

Election Office, Rupandehi, had scrapped Gurung's candidacy, arguing that he had been blacklisted in a banking offence case, following which Gurung filed a writ petition against the EC.

He had urged the court to issue an interim order against the EC decision barring him from contesting the election.

A single bench of Justice Bishowambhar Prasad Shrestha issued the stay order and asked both sides to appear on October 19 when the court would hear arguments from them on whether or not an interim order should be issued in the case.

Senior Advocates Harihar Dahal, Shambhu Thapa, Chandra Kanta Gyawali, Dinesh Tripathi and Raman Kumar Shrestha pleaded on behalf of the petitioner.

The petitioner's lawyer Chandra Kanta Gyawali said scrapping Gurung's candidacy was wrong as the election officer had taken the decision to cancel his candidacy.

'The HoR Election Act stipulates that the EC can take decision to cancel a candidate's decision, but in this case, the concerned election officer had taken decision to scrap his candidacy pursuant to directives issued by the EC and thus it was not a legal decision,' he added.

Gyawali said Gurung was one of the five Board of Directors of North West Nepal Infra Pvt Ltd (a construction company) against which a criminal case of civil nature was filed seeking recoupment of almost Rs 20 million.

It was his company that was blacklisted and not Gurung himself. When a company is blacklisted, an individual of the company cannot be barred from contesting election,' Gyawali added.

He said the case filed against Gurung was still sub judice.

The petitioner's lawyer Dinesh Tripathi said that the there was jurisdictional error in the case as the election officer who was supposed to refer the matter to the EC himself took the decision to scrap Gurung's candidacy.

'Company has a limited liability and when a company is blacklisted, that does not mean its board of directors and employees are also blacklisted,' he argued.

Tripathi said the election officer should have given seven days' time to Gurung to present his arguments before forwarding the matter to the EC, but the election officer did not complete all the processes before taking a call on the issue.

A version of this article appears in the print on October 17, 2022 of The Himalayan Times.