A Nepali investigation blamed lawmakers and officials for looking the other way. The $216 million airport receives only one international flight a week.
A government inquiry into a new $216 million international airport in Nepal’s second-biggest city found that “irregularities and corruption” by officials and lawmakers allowed a Chinese state-owned contractor to ignore its obligations and charge for work it never completed.
In a 36-page report released Thursday, a parliamentary committee’s investigation into the airport in Pokhara found that China CAMC Engineering Co., the construction arm of a state-owned conglomerate Sinomach, failed to pay taxes, did not finish the project to specification, and used poor quality construction, all because of corruption and a lack of oversight.
In 2023, The New York Times reported that CAMC had inflated the project’s cost and undermined Nepal’s efforts to maintain quality control, prioritizing its own business interests. Nepal’s Civil Aviation Authority, the agency overseeing the airport’s construction, was reluctant to upset Beijing on an important project for both countries, The Times found.
Shortly afterward, an 11-member parliamentary committee started investigating the airport’s construction.
The international airport in Pokhara, a tourist destination at the foothills of the Himalayas, has become a financial albatross for the impoverished country, serving as a cautionary tale about the consequences of borrowing heavily from China for major infrastructure projects.
The airport was built with a 20-year loan from the Export-Import Bank of China, a state-owned lender that finances Beijing’s overseas development work. Nepal must soon start repaying the loan using the profits generated by the airport, which opened in 2023. The airport has fallen well short of its projections for international passengers. There is only one weekly international route landing in Pokhara.
