With two days left for the much-touted third investment summit, uncertainty hangs over the amendment to nine laws necessary to attract investors.

To attract investors, the Cabinet on Tuesday decided to amend nine Acts through an ordinance to clear legal complexities. An ordinance becomes effective after an authentication by the President.

However, the ordinance did not reach the President’s Office by the end of office hours on Friday, clearly indicating a lack of urgency in the Pushpa Kamal Dahal administration. “The ordinance hasn’t reached the President’s Office by Friday evening. The President needs to study the content before authentication,” Baburam Kunwar, legal adviser to President Ramchandra Paudel, told the Post. “Saturday is a public holiday. I don’t think the ordinance will be issued before the summit.”

The two-day summit commences on Sunday. Kunwar said the government should give the President ample time to study the content of the ordinance but, despite repeated inquiries, the government has not forwarded it.

Ministers in the Dahal Cabinet say the ordinance could not be dispatched early as they were busy fine-tuning its language. “It took time to refine the language. I believe it will reach the President's Office and be issued on Saturday,” Padam Giri, minister for law, justice and parliamentary affairs, told the Post.

The presidential seal alone is not enough for the ordinance to come into force. It also needs to be published in the national gazette after the authentication.

If the claim of the government is to be believed, various provisions of the Lands Act, National Parks and Wildlife Conservation Act, Land Acquisition Act, Electronic Transactions Act, Special Financial Act, Public Private Partnership and Investment Act, Foreign Investment and Technology Transfer Act, Forest Act and Industrial Enterprises Act have been amended through the ordinance.

When the ordinance is issued there will be no legal hurdles in the execution of projects in forest areas, mainly those listed as national priority projects or those approved by the Investment Board Nepal. Similarly, payments in foreign exchange will be made easy once the ordinance comes into force.

Easing the registration and operation of startup enterprises, allowing mining and extraction of minerals from forest areas and ensuring uninterrupted supply of construction materials to infrastructure projects are other new arrangements in the Acts.

The decisions on the amendments were made just a few days before the summit. It was in November last year that the Dahal government decided to hold the summit to attract foreign and domestic investors.

Amid suggestions from the business community that several provisions in the existing laws are unfriendly for investment, the government in January had constituted a committee headed by Ek Narayan Aryal, then secretary at the Prime Minister’s Office, to identify laws and regulations that keep investments from flowing into the country as well as problems in accessing financing, and suggest ways to streamline laws and remove procedural and structural flaws.

The report submitted to Chief Secretary Baikuntha Aryal in February first week recommended amending over a dozen Acts.

The report said legal reforms will improve the investment climate and help bring capital into various service and industrial sectors.

However, for months, there was no initiative to amend the laws. The government was in no hurry to present the bills in the winter session of Parliament. With the summit less than a week away, the government on Tuesday decided to issue the ordinance.

Economists have been warning that such an ad hoc approach cannot create a conducive climate for investment.

The government has decided to showcase 148 potential projects, with nearly Rs900 billion worth of ready-to-go projects, before foreign and domestic investors at the summit.

Most of them are hydropower projects, with 1,902 MW Mugu Karnali storage hydro project, whose cost has yet to be estimated, being the biggest, followed by 1,216 MW Khimti Thoshe Shivalaya storage hydro project in Dolakha, with an estimated cost of Rs231 billion. Likewise, the 150-km Chandragiri-Chitlang-Palung expressway, which connects Kathmandu with Chitwan, is also on the list. Its estimated cost is Rs221.12 billion.

Over 1,100 people representing various business houses and donor agencies from Nepal and abroad are participating in the two-day event. In addition to 385 from Nepal, 634 investors, business people and representatives of the donor communities from 52 countries are converging in Kathmandu for the summit.

China will have the highest number of delegates (265), followed by India (143), the United States (33) and Japan (28).