Nepal publishes two investor residence thresholds, ten times apart

The copy of Nepal’s Foreign Investment and Technology Transfer Act 2075 (2019) published by the Department of Industry says a residential visa goes to a foreign investor who invests, at one time, more than one million US dollars. The English visa page of that same department puts the threshold at more than one hundred thousand. The Department of Immigration, which issues the visa, publishes a minimum of one hundred thousand.

What the published text of section 30 says

Section 30 of the published text carries seven sub-sections on visas, and the section that follows it concerns land.

Sub-section (2) provides a business visa to the foreign investor, to one authorised representative, and to family members of either, for as long as the foreign investment is maintained at the prescribed minimum. An explanation defines “family member” as spouse, parents and minor children.

Sub-section (4) carries the figure. It provides a residential visa where the investor makes, at one time, a foreign investment of more than ten lakh — one million — US dollars, or the equivalent in convertible foreign currency, extending it to the authorised representative and family, for as long as the prescribed minimum investment is retained. What that prescribed minimum is, the sub-section does not say, and nothing found here establishes whether it equals the amount that opens the door.

Two things about that text need stating. It is a Nepali-language PDF that sets Devanagari in a legacy font, and the font transposes consonants: searching the file for the correct spelling of “investment” returns nothing across a thirty-page investment act. The wording above was read from the transposed form and decoded.

What the two visa pages say

The visa recommendation page of the Department of Industry, which prints its own update date as a day in April 2021, states that a “foreign investor making an investment equivalent to more than US $ one hundred thousand, at one time and in convertible foreign currency, will be granted a residential visa on recommendation of DOI”, and that the visa “can be granted for one year at a time”.

The visa information page of the Department of Immigration, which prints no update date at all, lists among those who may apply “persons who have invested minimum USD 100,000 (or equivalent) in an industrial enterprise in Nepal”.

Those two sentences do not draw the line in the same place. One asks for more than one hundred thousand; the other for a minimum of one hundred thousand. An investment of exactly that amount clears the second department’s figure and not the first’s — before either page’s further conditions, convertible currency on one and an industrial enterprise on the other, are reached.

Why the English sentence appears to describe sub-section (4)

Three elements appear in the same order in both: the investment is made at one time; it is made in convertible foreign currency; and what follows is a residential visa. That sequence is the reason for treating the two as descriptions of one provision — a match of order, not of a single shared word.

It is not a claim that the two texts say the same thing apart from the number. The published sub-section also names who else the visa reaches and ties it to the investment being retained, neither of which appears in the department’s English sentence, which instead says one year at a time. Nothing found states whether a yearly grant and a retention condition are meant to operate together through renewal, or to differ.

Two fee schedules for the residential visa

The Department of Industry publishes one line, with no category attached to it: USD 700 for the first year and USD 1,200 for each renewal.

The Department of Immigration publishes two. A foreigner intending to live in Nepal without carrying on any business is listed at USD 700 and then USD 1,200, with a further line reading “Pre-1998: USD 100”. That category carries conditions of its own — a bank statement of USD 20,000, regular income of at least USD 20,000 a year, a health certificate, and proof of being sixty or retired. An investor of USD 100,000 or more is listed at USD 200 a year, renewing at USD 100.

So the pair on the Department of Industry’s page matches, to the dollar, the rate the issuing department lists for the non-business category. Because the first page publishes no investor category at all, an investor reading it finds figures three and a half times and twelve times the ones the issuing department publishes for investors. Nothing found states which schedule is charged.

The business visa diverges too. The Department of Industry lists two bands by invested capital. The Department of Immigration lists three, and the third — capital above one hundred million rupees — is marked “No Charge”. The largest investors form a band that does not appear on the first schedule.

Four grounds on one page, one on the other

The Department of Immigration gives four grounds for a residential visa: international reputation; capacity to make an outstanding contribution to Nepal’s economic, social or cultural growth; investment of at least USD 100,000 in an industrial enterprise; and an intention to spend life in Nepal without carrying on business. The Department of Industry names only the investor ground.

The two departments are not alternatives on that investor ground. Its document list at the Department of Immigration includes a recommendation letter from the Department of Industry, so that application crosses both desks.

What this article cannot settle

It cannot say which figure governs. Nothing found on either site reconciles the act with the visa pages, and nothing found says that one figure replaces the other.

It cannot say whether the text of section 30 still reads as quoted. The department publishes an act amending certain Nepal acts relating to investment facilitation, 2081, but the file is an eighteen-page scan of 13.4 megabytes from which no text can be extracted, and it has not been read. Whether it touched section 30 is unknown here.

Two further layers are unread. The Immigration Act 2049 and the Immigration Regulation 2051, which the Department of Industry cites as the basis for Nepal’s visa categories, were not examined. The official English translation held by the Nepal Law Commission could not be obtained: the commission’s index of acts is built by script and returned no entry for this act. Quotations from the act are translated from the Nepali text the Department of Industry publishes, after the decoding described above.