CIAA shelves investigation post report KATHMANDU, Oct 29 - The Commission for the Investigation of Abuse of Authority (CIAA) Friday decided to temporarily shelve the investigation into the property of former minister Laxman Prasad Ghimire and Secretary at the Prime Minister?s Office Lok Man Singh Karki. The CIAA has decided not to proceed the cases further against them saying that the evidences against them are not adequate. Both the accused were charged of amassing huge amount of property disproportionate to their known sources of income. Bank accounts and other financial transactions frozen by the CIAA also have been released with the decision. ********************** I regret to say that CIAA is on its way to become a laughingstock in Nepal, if it isn't one already. It arrests people on charges of corruption and hogs the headlines for a while . . . . only to quietly let those arrested go away . . .again and again, because of its repeated failure to marshal any believable evidence against the accused in a court of law. [It'd be instructive to keep counts of people it has charged with corruption and THEN let them get away later!] My growing suspicion is that either the CIAA is staffed by grossly incompetent lawyers or it is basically in the business of creating ONLY halla by accusing people of corruption or both. In this case, if the evidence was flimsy from the beginning, then why did it rush to take actions against Ghimire and Karki without first doing a solid piece homework? If that was not the case, then, why not use the available evidence against Ghimire and Karki and decide, once and for all, that either they are crooks or not crooks. You don't "unfreeze" a supposedly corrupt person's bank account even temporarily in the name of buying time to gather more evidence for later. Surely, Karki and Ghimire are not stupid to wait around to incriminate themselves. Why not simply say: "We, CIAA, messed this up. Corrupt though Ghimire and Karki may be, we are so incompetent that we can't prove anything against them. Hence, by shelving this investigation, we are basically throwing our hands up in the air." This is not the first time CIAA has changed positions on so-called corrupt people. All the people it had arrested on 1 August 2002 are FREE now, most of them back to their old posts at Bhansaar and other lucrative government offices. Thist sort of thing has happened so often that CIAA has been reduced to the level of that boy who cried wolf on too many occasions. oohi ashu