The Most Damning Evidence in Nepal’s Helicopter Rescue Scam

Every time I check the news, fresh articles inform me that Mount Everest guides have been poisoning their clients—a claim without any evidence so far that Climbing debunked last week. Since then, the Nepal Mountaineering Association and the Nepal Department of Culture, Tourism and Civil Aviation have both issued statements denying the poisoning rumors.

After tracking down the 784-page charge sheet, my takeaway is that even without poisoning, there’s still plenty of drama wrapped up in this scam, from fake flight manifests to forged altitude sickness diagnoses. However, not every one of the government’s claims is airtight. Here are the six craziest (but verified) facts about the investigation and upcoming trial that I’ve gleaned from the charges.

A quick refresher on the Nepal rescue fraud

Before I get into the details behind the six most wild facts about this investigation, here’s a basic summary of the situation:

• On March 22, the Kathmandu district attorney filed charges against 32 people for their role in a helicopter rescue scam. It is unknown when this case will go to trial.
• The accused are 10 hospital administrators, seven rescue coordinators, six helicopter company directors, six trekking agency directors, two local insurance agents, and one guide.
• Nine of the accused—all seven rescue coordinators, two trekking company owners, and one hospital administrator—are in police custody. The other 23 defendants are listed as fugitives.
• While the media has largely focused on allegations against guides, only one guide has been accused of participating in the scam. This guide, 27-year-old Tenzing Sherpa of Panorama Himalayan Trekking and Expedition, is accused of calling a helicopter for a perfectly healthy client who later complained she was “denied the opportunity to descend on foot.” Tenzing Sherpa is not an Everest guide, but he has guided non-technical, smaller peaks in Nepal, including Mera Peak (21,247ft) and Larke Peak (20,505ft).
• The charges were accompanied by more than 700 pages of witness testimony, text messages, audio transcripts, and bank statements recording transactions between the accused.
• The media has also placed undue and fallacious emphasis on the rumor that guides are poisoning clients. However, no proof of this exists in the charge sheet, and the investigators have denied any facts that support a poisoning scheme (more details here).

1. The Nepal rescue fraud scam is actually five separate scams.

The charge sheet reveals that the single “scam” is split across five categories of fraud that operate semi-independently:

1. Trekking company owners, plus one guide, are accused of calling for unnecessary rescues.
2. Rescue company directors are accused of combining evacuations into one flight while submitting claims to insurance companies for separate ones.
3. Helicopter coordinators are accused of providing fake flight manifests when the rescue coordinators request them.
4. Hospital administrators are accused of forging medical reports, keeping patients for excessive periods of time, and ordering unnecessary tests to drive up medical bills.
5. Finally, all defendants are accused of exchanging kickbacks, or commission fees, to profit from the insurance fraud, although this happens even when a rescue is legitimate.

2. Nepal isn’t just calling out fraud. They’re accusing defendants of organized crime.

Instead of pinning the defendants with fraud, state prosecutors are attempting to charge them with much more serious offenses, including organized crime, acting against the national interest, money laundering, and extortion.

Under Nepal’s Organized Crime Prevention Act, if the prosecutors can prove that the defendants comprised a “criminal group,” they will unlock a whole wave of multiplying charges. Anyone who interacted with the group for the purpose of receiving commission or insurance money will be guilty of organized crime by association.

Furthermore, these charges add up. Letting a rescue company use a helicopter to commit an organized crime, for example, carries a prison term of three to five years. If anyone in a criminal organization knows about a serious crime before it happens, Nepalese law considers them guilty of committing it, too.

In a February 8 police report included with the charge sheet, Officer Indrajit Sunar wrote: “To obtain financial gain, the defendants organized themselves and created parallel structures under the guise of an organized institution to commit crimes among group members.”

The seriousness of this charge has already inspired some defendants, such as Vivek Pandey, to confess to enabling unnecessary rescues while still denying it was an act of organized crime. Pandey, a field coordinator at Kathmandu-based Mountain Rescue Services, said that when a guide would call him and say that a tourist was tired or had a headache, he would immediately arrange a helicopter for them.

“I am aware that many of these tourists do not actually have a life-threatening emergency,” Pandey wrote in a statement on page 252 of the charge sheet. “However, to ensure the insurance company pays for the flight, we coordinate with the hospital, usually Swacon or Shreedhi, to make sure the medical report shows a serious condition like AMS or HAPE… I have managed hundreds of such ‘rescues’ over the last three seasons. I realized only now, through this investigation, that this coordination is being viewed as an organized crime syndicate.”

Aside from organized crime, the other surprising charge is acting against Nepal’s national interest. In Section 51 of Nepal’s National Penal Code, this crime is defined as follows: “to dishonor or degrade or spread hatred or enmity against the freedom, sovereignty, or territorial integrity, nationality, independence, self-esteem of, or international image of, Nepal.” (Other types of acts against national interest include altering national boundaries and throwing a national sports game for betting reasons).

“They committed offenses against the national interest,” argued Officer Sunar, “causing mistrust and a negative impact on the country’s tourism sector and harming the country’s overall economy.” This language resurfaces throughout dozens of witness statements.

If convicted of acting against the national interest, each defendant could serve up to five years in prison and be forced to return significant percentages of their income from 2018 onwards. The fact that Nepal is bringing to bear this charge for inflating insurance costs indicates how valuable tourism is to the country.

3. The accused don’t deny that they received commission from insurance payouts.

Of the 32 defendants, the 10 arrested by the Nepal Police all provided statements addressing their charges. Most, besides Pandey, denied that rescues were unnecessary, arguing that only the trekking guides would know if the rescue was needed. All of them, however, acknowledged that they received a commission for each rescue.

Jayaram Rimal, a director and coordinator for Mountain Rescue Service, which organizes about 400 helicopter rescues per year, usually gave 60-70% of the profit from the rescue to the trekking agency. “I have not performed any act against the law,” he wrote. “As tourism entrepreneurs, we engage in a competitive business and we provide commission for business expansion.”

One trekking agency owner, who is not a defendant in the case, affirmed that commissions are standard practice in Nepal rescues. “In the tourism business, it is common for rescue companies to offer commissions to trekking agencies for referring sick tourists,” wrote Santosh Paudel, who runs Himalayan Guides Trekking & Expedition. Paudel claimed that he does not call for a helicopter unless his guides report that a client is ill, but that he has received commissions of 15 to 25% of the total rescue and hospital bill for a rescue.

Hospital administrators echoed this sentiment. Dr. Girvan Raj Timilsina, the director of Shreedhi International Hospital, stated that he routinely paid 20-25% of his insurance money for a foreign patient to their rescue company and trekking company. “Every hospital provides commissions for business promotion,” he wrote. “No law prohibits it.”

It makes sense that none of the accused deny these payments. Most of the government’s extensive evidence consists of financial records and WhatsApp screenshots that prove the commissions incontrovertibly.

4. Hospital administrators forged doctor signatures on hundreds of medical records.

Forged medical records are the biggest smoking gun in the accusations of insurance fraud. About one-third of the defendants are hospital administrators charged with falsifying medical records to boost an insurance payout—and the evidence comes from their own doctors. In the charge sheet, at least eight Kathmandu doctors accuse their former administrators of forging doctor signatures on medical reports without their consent.

In one case, investigators uncovered text messages that showed Dr. Timilsina, the director at Shreedhi International Hospital, instructing a colleague to make counterfeit stamps for two consulting physicians.

“Make a stamp for Dr. Subash Kharel, MDGP NMC no. 15964, just like Dr. Kabir’s,” reads the message, according to page 385 of the charge sheet. “From now on, tell the doctor on duty to alternate between both stamps. Today there were five admissions but none of them stayed; they said they would come if needed and went to the hotel instead.”

Dr. Kabir Thakali, a general physician in Kathmandu who had previously consulted for Shreedhi, told prosecutors that he’s now seen 627 false medical reports with his name on them. All were for foreign patients at Shreedhi between 2022 and 2025.

“I did not treat those patients,” Dr. Thakali insisted. “I was not aware that my signature and stamp were being used.”

Even more egregiously, Dr. Kharel said that he has never actually treated any patient at Shreedhi, but that he previously shared his Nepal Medical Council registration certificate with Dr. Timilsina. Now, more than 36 medical reports bear Dr. Kharel’s name.

“In many cases, the reports were forged to state, ‘Acute Mountain Sickness (AMS) with moderate dehydration,’” Dr. Kharel stated in the charge sheet. “The stamp and signature are not mine.”

Shreedhi’s head accountant, Hira Dangol, confirmed that even without superfluous diagnoses, foreign patients were still charged differently than local ones. “The rates charged to international insurance companies are significantly higher—sometimes 300% to 500% higher—than the rates for local patients for the same services, such as room rent, nursing care, and basic diagnostics,” Dangol wrote, adding that he was merely an employee following the orders of hospital management.

Kathmandu has dozens of hospitals with inpatient beds, but the three hospitals involved lie within the same five-kilometer radius: Shreedhi International Hospital, Era International Hospital, and Swacon International Hospital. Defendants asserted that Shreedhi, Era, and Swacon were preferred by rescue agencies because they were some of the only hospitals in Nepal that accepted foreign insurance.

5. There’s more to the “fake flights” than meets the eye.

According to the evidence in the charge sheet, most of the “fake flights” actually did happen—but rescue coordinators allowed the friends and family of the “sick” client to join them on the helicopter, too. The coordinators knew that client insurance companies would reject a rescue flight manifest documenting multiple passengers. But instead of telling friends and family to stay behind, they asked the helicopter company for a second manifest showing only the “sick” client as the sole passenger. This second manifest, which contained a false description, is what coordinators submitted to insurance.

Editing manifests was common practice with several companies, including the Nepal Charter Service, which performs up to 200 helicopter evacuations each year. “If we bring more than one patient on a single helicopter, we ask the helicopter company to prepare separate manifests for separate insurance claims, and they do so,” wrote Nepal Charter Service owner Rabindra Adhikari in a statement included in the charge sheet. “No helicopter bill is charged for those friends and relatives.” After dropping off the friends and family, he said, his company sends only the “sick” climber onwards to Kathmandu. Then, when other rescues are called, they’ll find room for the rest of the friends and family to take a helicopter to Kathmandu and join their “sick” companion.

But while rescue operators dismiss this as merely an extra paperwork step to satisfy insurance, prosecutors and insurers are calling it illegal. In their view, if a flight had room to load more than one passenger, it was not a true rescue, so the insurance should not have paid for it at all. Flights that used fabricated flight manifests—even if they really took place, with a few extra passengers—comprise most of the $19.69 million sum that prosecutors say insurers were defrauded.

Digital rescue tracking may put these duplicate manifests to a stop. On Monday, in response to global media attention, the Ministry of Culture, Tourism, and Civil Aviation mobilized a joint task force including the police, Nepal Tourism Board, and aviation authorities to strengthen oversight of rescue operations. But the formation of this task force also signals their intention to work directly with international insurance providers to “establish verification channels and restore confidence.” The ministry announced it will develop a digital rescue management system, strengthen licensing requirements for tour operators, and standardize medical protocols for altitude sickness diagnosis.

While those reforms are in progress, the ministry will hold a zero-tolerance policy toward fraud. Any individuals found to be defrauding clients or insurance companies will be publicly disclosed and blacklisted by the government.

6. Nearly 10 years ago, Nepal’s government faced this exact problem.

Back in 2017, a cost containment company called Traveller Assist was the first to call attention to the increasing helicopter rescues in Nepal. The Ireland-based agency, which serves insurance companies, realized that helicopter rescues had made 2017 the most expensive year on record for insurance companies operating in Nepal. That August, the company reached out to Nepal’s tourism ministry and promised that three of its clients, all insurance underwriters, would pull coverage from the region if Nepal did not address the problem of over-charging for unnecessary rescues.

In response, the tourism ministry launched an investigation. In July 2018, they found that 15 trekking, rescue, and healthcare companies were likely engaged in insurance fraud. But when the ministry recommended that the Nepal Police take over all rescue coordination—similar to how the U.S. and France operate—the managing director of Traveller Assist, Jonathan Bancroft, condemned its decision, saying that “the Nepalese police know nothing about working with insurance companies.” In other words, he wanted rescues to remain private, but with insurance pre-authorization before each rescue. He also wanted flights that did happen to be capped at $4,000. Although the relationship between Nepal’s tourism ministry and Traveller Assist eventually broke down, in October 2018, the tourism ministry announced the creation of a Tourist Search and Rescue Steering Committee to monitor rescues for fraud.

But then, on February 27, 2019, Nepal’s tourism minister, Rabindra Prasad Adhikari, died in a helicopter crash with six other people. Adhikari was on his way back from inspecting an airport construction site in Taplejung. Following his death, the government abandoned the rescue scam investigation until the CIB picked it back up in January 2026. In 2020, Traveller Assist was sold to an unnamed company.

Of the original 15 companies and hospitals flagged to the Tourism Ministry in 2018, four of them are included in the 2026 investigation: Mountain Rescue Service, Manang (Base Camp) Air, Era International Hospital, and Swacon International Hospital.

What’s next?

While Nepal has uncovered a fraudulent rescue scam before, the international outrage in response to this year’s investigation seems to indicate that more serious reforms will be made, especially as the trial proceeds in the public eye. In particular, a digital rescue tracking system will likely end the false manifests. However, the medical overcharges are a trickier issue and less likely to be resolved with a single reform.

Ultimately, the victims in this situation are more than just insurance companies. Everest guides, who have been falsely accused in headlines of poisoning their clients, now bear a heightened suspicion of fraud and misbehavior.

“Now, whenever a client gets sick, they’ll wonder if they were poisoned,” Tashi Lakpa Sherpa, the CEO of 14 Peaks Expeditions, told Outside, our sister publication, this week.

Fortunately, the spring 2026 Everest season is already underway. With any luck, the high-altitude guides will be able to steer their clients toward a safe and successful season, unimpeded by the fallout of a legal drama in Kathmandu. But the more this trial drags out, the more confused tourists and false allegations it will create. The best case scenario now is not only a fair trial, but a speedy one.

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