KATHMANDU, Nov 26: The government has called the depositors of Oriental Cooperative, which has been declared problematic, to submit claims for their amounts embezzled by the cooperative.
Issuing a public notice on Friday, the Office of Problematic Cooperative Management Committee (OPCMC) has asked the depositors to submit their claims officially to the government body within 15 days. The OPCMC had declared Oriental a problematic cooperative for the second time on September 22. The committee has fixed the embezzled amount of Rs 10.83 billion by the cooperative.
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Oriental Cooperative went bankrupt in 2013 after it disbursed loans haphazardly and allowed its key promoter, Sudhir Basnet, to illegally invest depositors’ funds in the real-estate market, which later crashed. The cooperative was first declared problematic on November 6, 2017 and the government set up OPCMC to identify and liquidate assets owned by Basnet.
Over the period, Oriental’s victims have received no respite despite the government’s commitment to get back their money from the perpetrator of the financial misconduct.
As of mid-April 2018, a total of 7,646 depositors had submitted applications at the OPCMC, claiming embezzled amounts of Rs 16.01 billion by the cooperative. However, Basnet, who has acknowledged the outstanding amount of just Rs 2.02 billion of 4,697 depositors, had expressed his commitment to pay back the amount by selling his property in Gundu, Bhaktapur.
