KATHMANDU, May 1: The Department of Cooperatives (DoC) has started taking stern measures against the operators of cooperatives amid growing complaints of anomalies in this sector.
According to the DoC, it has stepped up efforts to freeze all the properties held by board members of Shiva Shikhar Multipurpose Cooperative, after they were found embezzling money from the depositors. The cooperative has been blamed for misappropriating Rs 10.48 billion of the depositors.
The DoC officials said the department in the third week of February wrote to the Ministry of Home Affairs and Department of Immigration to bar the former chairman, board members and executives of Shiva Shikhar Multipurpose Cooperative from travelling abroad. Similarly, the sector’s regulator also wrote to Nepal Rastra Bank to seize their bank accounts and sought the intervention of land management authority to bar transactions of the fixed assets that belong to the key players of the cooperative.
Likewise, the DoC said it also wrote to the Metropolitan Police Range, Teku, to arrest the cooperative’s chairman Kedar Nath Sharma and his wife Geeta Sharma.
Recently, a number of cooperatives have landed into financial problems, many of which have been showing a pretext of a shortfall in liquidity with them. Over exposure in real estate business, absence of transparency in their financial transactions and poor monitoring and weaker actions by the regulator have been found as the main problems faced by the cooperatives in Nepal.