KATHMANDU, June 29: The Employees’ Provident Fund (EPF) has stepped up to take Kohinoor Hill Housing in Imadol, Lalitpur to auction. The property is owned by controversial Chairman of Oriental Cooperative Sudhir Basnet who has failed to pay back over Rs 7 billion of the depositors.
Issuing a 21-day public notice, the EPF has called for bidding from interested parties to purchase the Basnet owned property through auction. The EPF is selling under construction buildings of Kohinoor Hill Housing that spread on 10.56 ropanis of land area of Imadol.
EPF to take controversial Basnet owned Kohinoor Hills Housing t...
According to the EPF, Basnet took loans of Rs 237 million to construct the housing project. After being landed in financial problems, Basnet failed to clear the outstanding dues of the EPF, which has now reached to around 900 million.
Oriental Cooperative went bankrupt in 2013 after it disbursed loans haphazardly and allowing its key promoter Basnet to illegally invest the depositors’ funds in the real estate market which later crashed. The government formed a high-level probe committee which had validated the claims of 7,545 applicants including depositors and banks that had issued loans to Oriental.
The seven-member panel formed had estimated the total liabilities of Oriental at Rs17 billion. This includes monies owed to Oriental depositors and apartment buyers along with outstanding taxes and loans and interest to banks and financial institutions.
The EPF has also started the process to take the CTC Mall of Sundhara, Kathmandu to auction after Ichchha Raj Tamang, chairman of Civil Group, failed to pay loan amount along with the interest to the government’s financial entity. Tamang is currently in police custody, on the charge of swindling nearly 1,500 people out of over Rs 5.5 billion.
