Supreme Court clears Dr Mingma G Sherpa of corruption in drug procurement case
Case was pending in the court for seven years after being cleared by investigators
The Supreme Court has cleared Dr. Mingma G Sherpa and 11 others of corruption in purchasing the drug misoprostol a decade ago, according to Nepali-language website swasthyakhabar.com. They were accused of buying too much of the drug at inflated prices.
My reporting of the department of health’s misoprostol programme found that the scandal delayed the effective country-wide rollout of the already faltering initiative.
“It did some damage to the programme,” recalled Yarsho Vardhan Pradhan, who was director-general of the department of health services directly before Sherpa occupied the chair.
“The procurement issue definitely demoralised all health workers and the motivation to expand and to continue misoprostol intervention became seen as somewhat fishy, even development partners starting thinking ‘oh, this has started happening—people are making money’.”
But Sherpa told me that the procurement system, which he himself had set up before becoming director-general of the department, had too many checks and balances for one person to cheat the process. He instead pointed a finger at someone working in an international organization in Nepal who was unhappy with him and complained to the Commission for the Investigation of Abuse of Authority (CIAA).
“The CIAA called me up and said, ‘Some organization called and said they are not happy with you. What happened? You used to be a nice person.’ I said ‘I’m still a nice person, I haven’t done anything wrong. But if someone does something and I’m not happy, I say plainly that I’m not happy.’ And many people don’t like that.”
When I spoke to Sherpa late last year he said that he wasn’t bothered that the case was pending in the Supreme Court, but I didn’t believe him. I think he was anxiously waiting for his name to be cleared of wrongdoing. The doctor himself sent me the link to the article about the court’s decision.