Bless our country Nepal, and bless our visionary middlemen! While the ordinary citizen stands in endless lines, sweating buckets just to get an e-passport from the Department of Passport, our patriotic agents are busy playing a completely different game behind the curtain. Looking at their coordination with the French security tech company 'IDEMIA', one realizes that doing business directly inside Nepal is a total waste of time. The real wealth, after all, is made in offshore heavens!
Singapore’s Sun and Nepal’s Shade: One Face, Five Pandavas
We naive Nepalis think our government is simply buying passports. But behind the scenes, an invisible entity named 'Capital Biz Solutions' sits smiling in Singapore. This company is showcased as the official agent of IDEMIA. The funny thing? This company isn't even registered in Nepal. On the flip side, we have 'Delta Core Pvt. Ltd.' registered right here in Kathmandu’s Office of the Company Registrar, wearing the holy robe of a subcontractor to provide "maintenance and technical support" for the e-passport project.
Now comes the absolute magic. When you knock on the door of Singapore’s Accounting and Corporate Regulatory Authority (ACRA), a beautiful secret unravels. The owners of that elite foreign company and this humble domestic company are exactly the same people! Siddhartha Raj Pandey, Bipin Bassi, Sharad Gurung, Arjun Gurung, and Bijay Raj Pant—these five brave Nepali souls hold an equal 20% share in both entities. A Nepali government contract, funded by Nepali citizens, but the money flies away via Singapore and Hong Kong! What could be a more beautiful 'foreign model' for tax evasion and foreign currency flight?
"According to international norms, a middleman's commission should ideally float between 2% to 5%. But when have our brave Gorkhali brokers ever been satisfied with the bare minimum? They took a historic leap straight to 12.25%!"
The 12% Leap: Setting New Global Benchmarks in Commissions
Around the world, taking a 2% to 5% cut on international contracts is considered standard professional etiquette. Poor foreigners, so simple-minded, getting satisfied with such small changes! But our Nepali agents possess 'large hearts.' While procuring 2.5 million e-passport booklets for the Department of Passport under the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, a transaction order revealed that IDEMIA paid a whopping 12.25% commission to the broker.
Declaring that money in Nepal would mean paying taxes and dealing with the law—such a hassle! Therefore, Nepal's Delta Core plays it smart by showing a very negligible income under the guise of local subcontracting work, while the fat chunk of the cash is safely parked in foreign bank accounts under the name of 'commissions.' This art is nothing short of an Oscar-winning screenplay.
To add a cherry on top, sources claim that a similar route was used for the 'Embossed Number Plate' project, where fat commissions squeezed from citizens' hard-earned money were routed straight to Singapore via Capital Biz Solutions. Look at the beauty of it: citizens get a metal plate on their cars, and brokers get dollars in their accounts!
The Fear of Investigation: A Safe 'Soft Landing' from Singapore to Dubai
But alas, good days don’t last forever. The moment the scent of this triangular financial masterpiece reached government offices and media corridors in Nepal, our middlemen's patriotism took a sharp turn. Realizing that the financial network set up in Singapore and Hong Kong might come under the radar of investigators, the syndicate immediately drafted a master plan to pack their bags and migrate to Dubai.
Dubai—where the scorching sun and 'no-tax' policies offer the ultimate shade to suspicious wealth from around the world. To dodge investigations and find a new safe haven, the process of registering a brand-new company in Dubai is already underway. After all, corrupt syndicates and middlemen have no geography; they only have a bank balance. When you deplete your own country's capital, sell its passports, and fly to a desert kingdom the moment an investigation begins, who else deserves a standing ovation if not you?
Meanwhile, the general public back home will continue to queue up for months just to get a single passport, rubbing their fingers raw giving biometrics over and over again. Little do they know, the empire built on those very fingerprints is raising villas in Dubai. As for our regulatory and investigative bodies? True to their legacy, they are deep in their regular slumber, flipping files and muttering, "We are looking into it, we are studying it." To be born in Nepal and witness this grand circus is truly our ultimate fortune!
Jai Nepal!