KATHMANDU, JULY 20
The Special Parliamentary Committee formed to investigate interference in the budget making process by outsiders has got a seven-day extension to submit its report.
Speaker Agni Prasad Sapkota extended the tenure of the committee as sought by the panel. Democratic Socialist Party-Nepal leader Laxman Lal Karna, who chairs the committee, said the committee might need to record statements of more people and gather more evidence in the next seven days.
The committee has sent CCTV footage to Central Police Science Forensic Laboratory asking it to retrieve the CCTV footage from May 28, a day before the budget was presented in the HoR. "Let's see if the forensic lab succeeds in recovering the footage in question."
The Ministry of Finance has said that the footage in question got deleted after 13 days.
The parliamentary committee today quizzed former finance minister Janardan Sharma for three hours.
He said he had not committed any wrongdoing. CPN-UML has accused the finance minister of allowing outsiders to tweak the budget so as to benefit certain business houses.
A version of this article appears in the print on July 22, 2022, of The Himalayan Times.
