The Central Bank’s Governor Bijaya Nath Bhattarai and its executive director Surendra Man Pradhan have been held guilty of corruption by a single bench of Supreme Court judge Tahir Ali Ansari, and each has been slapped with a fine of Rs.3,449,970. However, they can appeal the decision, because the Special Court, the anti-corruption tribunal, had referred the case to the apex court, after all of its three judges had given separate judgements on the case. This is so in order to protect the right of a litigant to appeal the decision of the court of first instance. If the defendants appeal, a larger bench may uphold or reverse the current decision, but Bhattarai will hardly be able to regain the post even then, because he will almost certainly have completed his NRB term by the time of the verdict.

The guilt established is that Bhattarai and Pradhan had caused a financial loss to NRB by signing a contract on NRB Banking Sector Reform Project with a foreign firm and then terminating it. The court did not see it fit to slap a jail term. If they had actually done wrong, the question may arise whether a fine alone would have been enough. However, in an atmosphere hardly hostile to the corrupt, this decision might give a ray of hope. At least, it conveys a message to others that even the incumbent chief of the autonomous body like the central bank can be prosecuted and he may lose his position for wrongdoing. On the other hand, there is no dearth of people who have alleged that Bhattarai had been implicated by vested interests, particularly by some of those who had been put on the black list of bank defaulters. Whatever the allegations, the law should take its course, and if Bhattarai and Pradhan are in the right, they might still have a chance of something good coming their way.

But action against corruption should not look like mere exceptions. In Nepal, however, neither the judiciary nor the CIAA, the constitutional anti-graft body, is high on the scale of public rating for their performance on this count. The clearance of one after another of high-ranking former bureaucrats or politicians, most of them known to be corrupt in the public eye, has hardly sent favourable signals to the public, nor has the delay in deciding on their cases. Besides, the excessive stress of the law-enforcement authorities, including the CIAA, and of the judiciary on the red-handedness of the crime — not much on the possession of wealth disproportionate to one’s income or the relatively extravagant living style or other evidences — has left too many escape routes open for the offenders. Improvement on this score could help fight corruption better. The verdict has also left the post of NRB governor vacant, over which the CPN-UML and Sher Bahadur Deuba had fought not very long ago, with donor agencies throwing their weight behind Deuba. But these are unhealthy practices that must be stopped in the upcoming decision. The criteria should be clear-cut and the selection process transparent. The first requirement for the job must be the qualification of a monetary economist – not mere experience in the Ministry of Finance or the National Planning Commission.