The Commission for the Investigation of Abuse of Authority (CIAA) on Sunday filed a corruption case at the Special Court against Nepal Telecom Managing Director (MD) Sangita Pahadee, former MD Sunil Paudel, and 16 others over alleged irregularities in procuring the company’s billing system and annual maintenance contract.

Paudel has been implicated in other corruption cases earlier.

The CIAA has sought Rs334.8 million in damages from the defendants, along with imprisonment and fines proportional to the losses.

The anti-graft body has also demanded the recovery of an additional Rs98.8 million, which it said was directly lost due to the billing-related corruption, said the CIAA in its chargesheet registered at the Special Court on Sunday.

The officials caused loss to the public utility, the Nepal Telecom, by determining unnatural price rates with the Asia Info Linkage Technologies (China) Inc while procuring service from the international company, according to the anti-graft body.

They had caused additional financial loss to the public utility even as the supplier in the previous contract had offered a five percent discount to the Nepal Telecom while procuring Convergent Real-Time Billing and Customer Support Billing System. Nepal Telecom procured the system to integrate the billing system of various services such as cell phone, fibre, internet, leased line (a dedicated, fixed-bandwidth, symmetric data connection used for internet access), wire and wireless broadband services.

Besides Pahadee and Paudel, the CIAA has chargesheeted then technical officer Pratibha Baidya, Chief Financial Officer Rajendra Shrestha, Chief Operating Officer Jhabindra Lal Upadhyaya, Director Binita Shrestha, Acting Director Amul Pradhan, manager Devendra Khatiwada, deputy managers Rajib Kumar KC, Santosh Kumar Shrestha, Nawal Chaudhary, Mukti Prasad Aryal, Hemprabha Ram Pratap Karna and Pramatma Bhattarai.

Likewise, Senior Director Long Yong of Asia Info Yunghang Software (Beijing) Limited, then project manager Huang Wei (Yellow) of the company, and Director Shailesh Shrestha of local agent Arniko International Pvt Ltd have been implicated in the case.

Meanwhile, the CIAA has filed a separate case at the Special Court against Chitranjan Das, chief of the Pokhara-based provincial office of the Nepal Oil Corporation, allegedly for causing a loss of Rs448,525 to the corporation through underbilling.

According to the CIAA, Das, in collusion with other individuals, supplied 15,038 litres of diesel while billing only for 12,000 litres. They were found to have switched off CCTV cameras while doing all this.