CIAA raids Gaur municipal office

Rautahat, June 28

Acting on a news report about massive irregularities in social security allowance, a team from the Commission for the Investigation of Abuse of Authority raided the office of Gaur Municipality in Rautahat today.

THT, in yesterday’s edition, had reported about embezzlement of millions of rupees by municipal staffers in the name of social security allowance.

It is learnt that second-class non-gazetted officer Binod Paswan at Community Development Section of the municipality had been misusing the allowance of 500 people for the past three years by preparing fake documents with the help of focal person Sarojlal Das, who was responsible for verifying documents before issuing allowance cards to the beneficiaries.

The team assigned by the anti-graft body, however, returned empty-handed today after the related documents were found to be missing. “It is he (Paswan) who is in charge of the documents, but to everyone’s surprise, the documents are nowhere to be found,” said the chief of the Community Development Section Uttam Bhattarai, accusing Paswan of hiding the documents in his home.

Preliminary investigation has shown that more than 20 million rupees was misappropriated in the past three years.