Balen Shah courts business leaders as investigators detain some of them
The prime minister promises not to arrest entrepreneurs without cause. His finance minister is holding meetings of his own. Investors are watching both.
Nepal's business community has spent 2026 being courted and investigated at the same time.
The Rastriya Swatantra Party came to power in March with a near two-thirds majority, carried by the anger of the Gen Z uprising. Since then police have arrested and charged more than 460 people as middlemen in bribery and extortion cases, they told OCCRP. Separately, former prime minister KP Sharma Oli was arrested on 28 March on charges of criminal negligence over the killing of protesters during the uprising; he says he was detained illegally and accuses the government of prejudice and vindictiveness, OCCRP reported. The chairman and vice chair of the Shanker Group were among business leaders detained in the Deepak Bhatta money-laundering inquiry, OCCRP reported.
The July meeting
On 8 July Prime Minister Balendra Shah sat down for the first time with the three big business bodies: the Federation of Nepalese Chambers of Commerce and Industry (FNCCI), the Nepal Chamber of Commerce and the Confederation of Nepalese Industries. According to Ratopati, the industrialists asked for anticipatory bail in financial cases, so that owners could keep running their companies while under investigation. They also asked for faster government capital spending, an end to land-ceiling obstacles for factories, and a standing desk for business inside the prime minister's office.
Shah told them the government had no intention of arresting entrepreneurs without cause. He also said "the economy cannot move forward by cracking down on entrepreneurs," and promised to consider legal changes. Nepal Chamber of Commerce president Kamlesh Kumar Agarwal argued that every trillion rupees of capital spending generates about four trillion in economic activity.
Ujjwal Kumar Shrestha, who chairs FNCCI's industry committee, said business leaders left the meeting reinvigorated, Clickmandu reported. By late July the prime minister had met representatives of 12 sectors, from construction and energy to garments and hotels.
Two doors to knock on
Tax, investment and industrial policy belong to the finance ministry, and Finance Minister Swarnim Wagle was absent from those meetings. In late July, Khabarhub reported, Wagle began his own consultations with about three dozen industrialists, many of them people the prime minister had already seen. The overlap raised questions in Kathmandu about who speaks for economic policy.
Confidence, not cash
Money is not the problem. Banks have plenty to lend at the lowest rates in a decade, and the government's first budget, worth Rs 2.12 trillion, named agriculture, tourism, industry, IT and human capital as growth drivers. Yet private-sector credit has grown only about 6% a year, half the central bank's target, and in the first month of this fiscal year it barely moved.
Economists quoted by the Kathmandu Post put the gap down to confidence. Business owners want to know whether the next arrest will be for fraud or for politics, and whether a promise made in the prime minister's office will survive the finance ministry. The government has held the meetings. It has not yet passed the legal changes it promised in July.
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The long view The Gen Z uprising and business
