The Special Court on Friday gave clean chits to all 18 individuals and nine firms including then-director general of the Department of Mine and Geology Ram Prasad Ghimire on corruption charges.

The Commission for Investigation of Abuse of Authority (CIAA) on January 26 last year had filed corruption charges against Ghimire and other officials as well as promoters of nine cement companies who had allegedly mined more limestone than allowed, causing revenue losses to the government.

A bench of Special Court Judges Ramesh Kumar Pokharel, Balbhadra Bastola and Khushi Prasad Tharu cleared all the accused of the charges. The anti-graft body now has the option to appeal at the Supreme Court against the Special Court verdict.

The anti-graft body had charged them with causing revenue losses of Rs1.24 billion to the state.

The anti-graft body had said that the government had incurred huge losses as the cement and limestone companies owned by the businessmen extracted more than the permitted quantities of limestone while the officials of the department failed to collect revenue for the unauthorised extraction.

Owners of the nine cement and mining companies—Pashupati Murarka, former the president of Federation of Nepalese Chambers of Commerce and Industry and the owner of Siddhartha Mineral, Sarad Goyal of Maruti Cement and Bishnu Prasad Neupane of Sarbottam Cement, among others—were made defendants.

Rishi Agrawal of Annapurna Quarries, Naresh Dugar of United Cement, Nipesh Tayal of Sonapur Minerals and Oil Limited, Man Bahadur Shrestha of Dolomite Chundhunga Udyog, Bhim Bahadur Thapa Chhetri of Kanchan Quarries and Prabal Jung Pandey of Udaipur Mineral Tech were also charged with causing revenue losses ranging from Rs494.55 million to Rs17.97 million.

The anti-graft body had also accused cement and limestone companies of causing damage to the environment through over-extraction of the mine material.

When the probe team headed by Ghimire recommended recovering the amount on July 16, 2019, he was deputy director general at the department.

After becoming the director general, Ghimire formed another committee headed by Jayaraj Ghimire, another official at the department, with “the intention of exempting” almost all the amount determined by the previous committee led by himself, according to the commission.

Based on the recommendation of the Jayaraj Ghimire-led committee, only Rs1.8 million was recovered from these companies, according to the CIAA. They were fined only Rs100,000 each for fiscal years 2017-18 and 2018-19. Besides then-director general Ghimire, other officials including Jaya Raj Ghimire, Chandra Kumar Pokharel, Sapata Adhikari, Prashanta Bohora, Dharma Raj Khadka, Shribhadra Gautam, Basanta Adhikari and Saunak Bhandari were also charged with corruption.

The CIAA’s action against the businessmen had invited an outcry from the private sector bodies. The Federation of Nepalese Chambers of Commerce and Industry, the Confederation of Nepalese Industries and Nepal Chamber of Commerce issued a joint statement in February last year to stress that the factories were paying the applicable royalties and they were unaware of the department’s internal studies.

The CIAA’s corruption case stunned the private sector, they had said.