The Special Court has convicted four top officials in the corruption case involving the procurement of two wide-body Airbus A330 jets by Nepal Airlines Corporation, commonly known as the ‘wide-body scam’.

The Commission for the Investigation of Abuse of Authority (CIAA) had filed a case against 32 individuals including the four after concluding that they caused a loss totalling Rs1.47 billion to the state coffers in the procurement deal. The loss was computed based on the exchange rate at the time of the payment of the last instalment in 2018.

A bench of the court chair Tek Narayan Kunwar and members Tej Narayan Singh Rai and Ritendra Thapa convicted the then tourism secretary and ex-officio chair of the corporation, Shankar Adhikari; the corporation’s then general manager Sugat Ratna Kansakar; and then joint secretaries of the ministry Buddhi Sagar Lamichhane and Shishir Dhungana.

The bench, however, acquitted the then tourism minister Jeevan Bahadur Shahi, among others, who had been named as defendants by the anti-corruption body.

The court has sentenced Kansakar to 2 years and six months in jail, Adhikari to 1 year and 9 months, and Dhungana and Lamichhane to 1 year and six months each in jail.

In its charge sheet, the CIAA had accused the minister and the officials of going against the procurement law and accepting the supplier’s escalation condition to purchase second-hand aircraft, a condition which came to $6.78 million (Rs74.58 million) of the $209.6 million valuation. Escalation condition is a rule in a contract that says if certain things change, like prices, then the terms of the contract can also change. Investigators suspect that the condition was included in the $209.6 million deal to covertly generate kickbacks for the officials involved.