Ajeya Sumargi's offshore funds return to Nepal's Supreme Court, eight years on

In February 2018 a single judge of Nepal's Supreme Court found the central bank's grounds for freezing $21.3m in loans to Ajeya Raj Sumargi's telecoms company too thin to justify, and let the money move, The Himalayan Times reported. Eleven months later a two-judge bench led by the chief justice quashed a similar release, The Himalayan Times reported. That swing between benches has defined the affairs of Sumargi, a businessman whose telecoms and cement ventures drew on money routed through offshore companies, for most of a decade.

The question is open again. In late June 2026 the Department of Immigration suspended Sumargi's passport at the request of the Department of Money Laundering Investigation, the state agency that investigates the proceeds of crime, as it reopened its inquiry into where those funds came from, The Kathmandu Post reported. Within about a fortnight the Supreme Court had granted him an interim order, Nepal News reported. No charge has been filed against Sumargi in any of these inquiries, and an investigation is not a finding of wrongdoing. He has consistently maintained that the money was legitimate foreign investment, according to the Post.

The file matters beyond one businessman. In February 2025 the Financial Action Task Force (FATF), the intergovernmental body that sets global standards against money laundering, placed Nepal on its grey list of jurisdictions under increased monitoring, ShareSansar reported. At its June 2026 plenary in Paris the FATF kept Nepal on the list and asked, among other things, for a measurable increase in money-laundering investigations and prosecutions, according to ShareSansar. Our explainer on what the grey list means for Nepali banks sets out the cost. How the state concludes an old, heavily documented case such as this one is part of that test, whichever way it ends.

A telecoms bet on rural Nepal

Sumargi's public career was built in telecoms. In August 2005 Nepali Times described him as a director of Spice Nepal, a private mobile operator that had made its soft launch that month; its later history is told in our profile of Upendra Mahato.

His own operator followed. Nepal Satellite Telecom won a basic telecommunications licence with limited mobility on 17 February 2008 and launched its GSM service, Hello Nepal, on 25 September 2009, with Sumargi as executive director, The Himalayan Times reported. Its investors included Mukti Shree Telecom of Nepal, Sewa Telecom of Bangladesh, Pakistan Mobile Communication and Air Bell of Cyprus, according to the same report. The licence set an unusual order of rollout: the company was to start in 273 village development committees in the mid-west, move through the far-west and west, and reach the Kathmandu Valley last, the paper reported. Two former prime ministers, Girija Prasad Koirala and Pushpa Kamal Dahal, made the ceremonial first calls, The Himalayan Times reported.

The licence obliged the company to build in thinly populated districts before it could serve the country's largest urban market. It struggled. By January 2022 Nepali Telecom, a trade publication, described the company as almost non-operational after years of weak subscriber growth. The Nepal Telecommunications Authority (NTA), the sector regulator, revoked its licence in November 2021 after it missed the second instalment on about Rs 1.39bn (about $9m) of royalties and fees, Nepali Telecom reported. The company asked the ministry to reverse the decision and allow more time, citing the effect of the pandemic, the publication reported.

The group's other main business was cement. Muktishree Cement Industries, owned by Sumargi, was the intended recipient of foreign investment at the centre of a 2019 Supreme Court case, The Himalayan Times reported.

Following the money

The dispute is less about what the companies did than about how their capital entered the country. Foreign money coming into a Nepali company as investment needs approval under the Foreign Investment and Technology Transfer Act and the foreign exchange rules, and the central bank flagged Sumargi's transfers because those approvals had not been obtained, The Himalayan Times reported in 2019.

By 2017 about $118.4m had been transferred into Nepal through various channels, The Kathmandu Post reported. Of that, $63.19m came from Airbell Services, registered in Cyprus, in nine transactions between 2008 and 2013, and $48.37m came from Zhodar Investments, registered in the British Virgin Islands, in 26 transactions without the required approval for foreign investment, the Post reported. Two further British Virgin Islands companies appear in the records, according to the Post. Nepal Rastra Bank, the central bank, classified about Rs 3.5bn (about $23m) of the money as suspicious, the Post reported.

The bank first froze funds in 2013, pointing to suspicious transactions and interest rates on the offshore loans far above international levels, The Himalayan Times reported. A preliminary report by the money-laundering department in December 2017 concluded that the funds were illicit, and a detailed investigation followed in 2018, the Post reported. The department later found grounds to question the legitimacy of some of his assets, but the case did not advance, the Post reported. None of these conclusions has been tested at trial.

Sumargi has fought each restriction in court. He argued in 2018 that there was no transparent legal basis for the freeze and that it was harming Nepal Satellite Telecom, The Kathmandu Post reported. In February 2018 Justice Tej Bahadur KC allowed $21.3m in loans from Air Bell and Zhodar to be used by the telecoms company, finding the central bank's position weak, on condition that no principal or profit was sent abroad and that the money-laundering inquiry was unaffected, The Himalayan Times reported.

The tide then turned. On 25 December 2018 Justice Deepak Raj Joshee allowed Sumargi to withdraw funds, but on 8 January 2019 a division bench of Chief Justice Cholendra Shumsher Rana and Justice Ananda Mohan Bhattarai quashed that order and said a suspicious transaction should be investigated under the money-laundering law, The Himalayan Times reported. In May 2019 Chief Justice Rana and Justice Bam Kumar Shrestha quashed Sumargi's claim to the disputed money and ordered an investigation into its source, Onlinekhabar English reported.

The 2026 round

The next public step came in late June 2026 with the passport suspension and the reopened inquiry, which focuses on the roughly Rs 3.5bn the central bank had flagged, The Kathmandu Post reported.

Sumargi went straight back to the Supreme Court. In his writ petition he said he had already been subjected to multiple investigations and asked the court to halt the inquiry, Nepal News reported on 6 July. Justice Bal Krishna Dhakal issued an interim order at the preliminary hearing, telling the authorities not to take any action against the petitioner that would contradict the court's eventual final order, according to Nepal News, which reported the order as halting further investigation for now.

That is where the matter stands. As of 11 October 2026 The Nepal Standard could find no published report of a final hearing on the writ, of the interim order being lifted, or of any charge sheet. The passport suspension, the reopened inquiry and the court's protection all remain, on the public record, unresolved.

What the outcome means for business

For investors the case is a reminder that in Nepal the route by which capital arrives matters as much as the amount. Money that comes as a loan or share subscription without the approvals the Himalayan Times described can be frozen for years, as the central bank's hold on Sumargi's loans was from 2013 until the 2018 court order, The Himalayan Times reported, whatever the eventual verdict on the money's origin.

For Nepal Rastra Bank and the money-laundering department, the case is a measure of whether suspicious-transaction reports turn into conclusions. The FATF's request for more investigations and prosecutions, reported by ShareSansar, puts long-unfinished files under scrutiny.

For the courts, the record shows benches of the same Supreme Court reaching opposite interim positions on the same money within months. A final ruling on the 2026 writ would settle at least the narrower question of whether the department can proceed. For a wider view of how investigations and arrests bear on investment, see our editorial on arrests and the investment climate.