KATHMANDU: The Special Court has granted the Commission for the Investigation of Abuse of Authority (CIAA) permission to keep the Director General of the Department of Passports, Tirtha Raj Aryal, and IT Director Sunil Kumar KC in custody for four days to investigate a massive Rs 7.66 billion e-passport procurement scandal.

A bench comprising Special Court Chairman Sudarshandev Bhatta and members Umesh Koirala and Bidur Koirala authorized the detention following the dramatic arrests of the officials and politically connected businessman Siddhartha Thapa.

While the anti-corruption body had initially requested a 20-day remand to untangle the complex web of irregularities, the court’s four-day window sets off an intense phase of interrogation into how top bureaucrats allegedly bypassed legal guardrails to manipulate a critical state contract.

The multi-billion-rupee case centers on a five-year contract awarded to two German firms, Muehlbauer ID Services and Veridos GmbH, to supply 6.4 million e-passports.

Investigators allege that Director General Aryal chaired an evaluation committee that deliberately overrode explicit warnings from a 12-member technical sub-committee led by Sunil Kumar KC.

The technical team had formally rejected Muehlbauer’s bids after discovering that the company failed to meet 238 mandatory technical specifications for the biometric infrastructure and 50 requirements for the physical booklets.

By pushing the non-compliant firm into the financial round, Aryal allegedly violated Nepal’s Public Procurement Act, causing deep internal dissent that led one technical member to retroactively withdraw his signature from the final report.

This procurement battle is further entangled in a history of institutional malfeasance and political vulnerabilities within Nepal’s travel document system.

The department’s previous supplier, French firm IDEMIA, was already under scrutiny for allegedly manipulating tender terms through its local representative, Siddhartha Pandey, following a suspicious November 2024 malware attack that completely paralyzed the passport servers.

Furthermore, Aryal had previously drawn intense public fury for deploying a mobile service team to issue diplomatic passports to former Prime Minister Sher Bahadur Deuba and his wife, Arzu Deuba Rana, on a closed public holiday—just days after their residence was burned down and while money laundering investigators were actively combing the site.

The inclusion of businessman Siddhartha Thapa—son of prominent Nepali Congress National Assembly member Sunil Bahadur Thapa and grandson of five-time Prime Minister Surya Bahadur Thapa—adds a highly sensitive political dimension to the probe.

As the CIAA digs deeper into the department’s past financial irregularities, including an unauthorized 2022 variation order flagged by the Auditor General, the current leadership vacuum threatens to disrupt a department that processes 5,000 passports daily for Nepal’s massive migrant workforce.

This sweeping operation mirrors a broader CIAA clean-up of the country’s immigration infrastructure, following the recent high-profile arrest of Tribhuvan International Airport’s chief immigration officer, Tirtha R