With the Prime Minister’s Office (PMO) and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs remain divided over the ability of German firms, Veridos GmbH and Muhlbauer ID Service GmbH, to deliver biometric passports from the third week of July, the government is in a mood to wait until the deadline before deciding its next course in the passport procurement process.

According to a senior official at the PMO, the prime minister’s team is not confident that the German firms will start passport operations on July 19, the contractual deadline. The team believes that the migration of records of 20 million Nepali citizens from IDEMIA’s legacy system to new German firms’ platforms is incomplete, and the sample passport copies provided by the German firms also do not meet the technical criteria.

But the foreign minister, the bureaucratic team of the Foreign Ministry and the technical team at the Department of Passports are confident that German companies can deliver the passports on time, according to officials.

The Commission for the Investigation of Abuse of Authority, under pressure from the PMO, filed corruption cases against officials of the Department of Passports and representatives of Veridos and Muehlbauer. Ten individuals including the director of the DoP and a representative of Muehlbauer were arrested on charges of irregularities. A full bench of the Special Court on Monday directed the government to release eight of them on bail and two others on general dates without bail.

The uncertainty over passport delivery following the commission’s intervention prompted Foreign Minister Shisir Khanal to enlist two independent consultants to assess the Department of Passports’ preparedness for rolling out the new biometric passports.

With the PMO and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs holding opposing views on the German firms’ ability to deliver the new biometric passports, both sides have now agreed to wait until July 19—the contractual deadline for the rollout—before deciding on any further course of action, according to aides to the prime minister and the foreign minister.

“There is no immediate plan to terminate the contract with the German firms, but the government is also not going to wait indefinitely for passport rollout,” said a senior government official.

The Department of Passports signed separate agreements in July last year with Veridos and Muehlbauer to supply and deliver biometric passports and provide related technical services, ending the one-and-a-half-decade dominance of the French company Oberthur Technologies, which was later renamed IDEMIA Smart Identity and now part of the French state-owned IN Groupe.

The procurement process became complicated after the commission filed a charge sheet against director general of Department of Passports Tirtha Aryal and 17 other individuals, including local representatives of the two German firms, at the Special Court on June 22.

At present, the department has a stock of 38,000 passports, while daily demand is around 5,000-6,000. The government is currently meeting only half the demand.

Under the agreement signed in July last year, Veridos is responsible for supplying e-passport booklets and providing personalisation services. The contract envisaged a nine-month implementation period, with the rollout of the new biometric passports scheduled to begin in March 2026, followed by a five-year operational phase. The deadline was extended till July 19 after the German firms failed to start rolling out the passports by March.