Fact Check: KP Oli Disclosed The Reason For ‘Framing’ RSP President Rabi Lamichhane? No, Viral Video Is Unrelated

Claim
Prime Minister KP Sharma Oli disclosed the reason for framing Rastriya Swatantra Party President Rabi Lamichhane.
Fact
 No, the viral video shows an old and unrelated interview of KP Sharma regarding the political appointment of judges in the judiciary.

 A video showing Prime Minister and CPN-UML Chairman KP Sharma Oli allegedly revealing the secret behind framing Rastriya Swatantra Party (RSP) President Rabi Lamichhane is going viral on TikTok.

RSP President Rabi Lamichhane has been reportedly charged with swindling funds from several credit cooperatives across the country to operate the now defunct Galaxy 4K television channel.  

He has been detained at Bhairahawa District prison after the Butwal bench of the Tulsipur High Court issued an order on April 4 to remand him in custody for further investigation, by overturning a previous bail decision.

Against this backdrop, TikTok user @rameshthapa7034 posted a video showing Prime Minister KP Sharma Oli speaking on camera. Text superimposed on the video reads, “That’s the reason why we framed Rabi Lamichhane ‘[RSP president]. Let’s hear from the prime minister himself.”  In the video, PM Oli, who is also the chairman of CPN-UML, is heard saying, “If we talk about the formation of judiciary, we directly appoint our party leaders to the post of Supreme Court justice. These hand-picked candidates usually do not have judicial experience, though they might have experience in advocacy. Some of them do not even have the experience of legal practice. They only have bachelor’s degrees in law. This is how we pick our justices. They will definitely be loyal to those who appointed them. They are not appointed fairly.  It will have bad consequences.”

The video also carries a small screen showing photos of CPN-UML leaders including Shankar Pokhrel and Bishnu Poudel.

The video posted on July 4 has garnered 4680 likes, 142 users have liked it and 515 people have commented on it.

The archived version of the TikTok video can be seen here.

Newschecker found the claim to be misleading.

Fact Check /Verification

To check the veracity of the claim, Newschecker split the video into several key-frames and conducted reverse searches on them. However, the search didn’t yield any credible results.

We then closely observed the video and noticed that KP Oli was speaking in an interview with Nepal’s noted television journalist Vijaya Kumar Pandey. Taking a cue from it, we ran a keyword search for ‘Vijaya Kumar’ and ‘KP Sharma Oli’ and the search led us to a video, dated May 18, 2022, and posted on the YouTube channel named DishanirdeshTV. The channel is owned by journalist Vijaya Kumar.

On checking the 28 –minute long video, we didn’t find the exact footage though it resembled the viral clip. So, we looked for the longer version of the video and found a 1 hour 44-minute long video, dated May 9, 2022, posted on the YouTube channel of Dishanirdesh TV. On checking the video, we found that the clip from 1:09:10 onwards exactly matched the viral video. We also found that KP Sharma Oli was talking about the flawed way in which justices are appointed in Nepal based on political loyalty and affiliations.

Further, we checked when Rabi Lamichhane’s party Rastriya Swatantra Party was formed and found a news article, dated July 1, 2022, posted on Setopati online. The news article reported about the registration of a news party headed for former TV presenter Rabi Lamichhane. The party was launched on June 21 the same year.

Thus, our findings clearly shows that Rabi Lamichhane’s RSP was not even formed when journalist Vijaya Kumar conducted the interview of CPN-UML Chairman KP Sharma Oli.

Conclusion

No, Prime Minster KP Sharma Oli didn’t disclose the reason why RSP President Lamichhane was framed. The viral video actually shows KP Sharma Oli talking about the wrong practices of appointing justices to the Supreme Court.

Result: False

Sources
Dishanirdesh TV/YouTube, May 8, 2022
Setopati, July 1, 2022

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