The government has appointed controversial former lawmaker Lharkyal Lama as the vice chairman of the Lumbini Development Fund.

Lama has earlier been charged with several crimes, including foreign employment fraud, possession of illegal firearms, accumulating property disproportionate to his known source of income, and possession of dual citizenship and passport.

A meeting of the Cabinet on Sunday decided to appoint Lama to the post.

Lama confirmed that the government has appointed him as the vice president of the fund.

“I have been appointed and now I’ll have to work,” said Lama during a brief telephone conversation with Kantipur daily, the sister paper of the Post.

Lama, who is a central committee member of the CPN (Maoist Centre), received the appointment letter on Sunday.

Lama, a former CPN-UML member, was the state minister for finance in the Jhala Nath Khanal-led government in 2011. The party had made him a lawmaker under the proportional representation category after the first Constituent Assembly election.

He resigned from the post on April 21, 2011, just 11 days after assuming office, after he ran into controversy for possessing a Nepali citizenship certificate, an Indian passport and a Tibetan refugee identity card.

He then quit the UML. But he later joined the Maoist party, which in February 2015 made him a lawmaker. Lama was also appointed the chairman of the then Monastery Management and Development Committee, currently the Buddhist Philosophy Promotion and Monastery Development Committee, by the Nepali Congress in 2001-02.