By Thai Newsroom Reporters
DE FACTO PHEU THAI BOSS Thaksin Shinawatra was today (June 18) released on bail over a time-consuming lese majeste lawsuit.
Charged with violation of the lese majeste law, also known as Section 112 of the Criminal Code, the billionaire, powerful de facto Pheu Thai boss was released with 500,000 baht in bail and had his passports seized at the order of the Criminal Court where he was brought by the Office of the Attorney-General to formally hear of relevant charges.
The former prime minister has been charged in the draconian lese majeste case after he had allegedly involved the monarchy in the 2006 coup which had ousted him from power during an interview with a news agency in Seoul nearly a decade later.
The court has reportedly considered it “unlikely” for the 75-year-old Thaksin who was reported to be currently staying with his family at his Chan Song Lah residence in Bangkok to slip out of the country again as had been the case about a decade and a half earlier.
The first hearing of material and personal witnesses against Thaksin in court is scheduled for Aug 19 whilst the lawsuit could practically take a number of years before a court ruling is delivered.
Nonetheless, Thaksin has categorically denied the charges saying he had been “groundlessly framed” by the 2014 coup junta who had filed the case against him.
The latter junta headed by the then-army chief-turned-prime minister Prayut Chan-o-cha had deposed his fugitive sister Yingluck Shinawatra from elected premiership.
It remains to be seen whether or how soon Yingluck could possibly return home after several years in self-exile abroad since Thaksin had earlier said she would probably join next year’s Songkran festival in Chiang Mai, their northern home province.
Thaksin who had resided in self-exile overseas for 17 years returned home last August and managed to literally keep himself from prison though he had been originally sentenced in his absentia to eight years in jail for a few counts of power abuse perpetrated during his previous premiership.
Instead of being put behind bars at Bangkok Remand prison for a royal pardon-curtailed, one year jail term, the billionaire, powerful Thaksin had been contentiously granted double-standard privileges of staying at Police Hospital for six months due to mystery-shrouded, “critical illnesses” until he was granted parole last February.
From his private hospital ward, Thaksin who had been accused by his critics of feigning the reported illnesses to keep himself from jail had allegedly manipulated the setup of a Pheu Tha-led coalition government, allocation of cabinet portfolios among coalition partners and picking Pheu Thai-attached members of cabinet whilst real estate tycoon Srettha Thavisin, personally associated with Yingluck, was named prime minister under a secret deal which the de facto Pheu Thai boss had allegedly made with unnamed elements of the old-time powers-that-be.
CAPTION:
Top and Front Page: De facto Pheu Thai boss Thaksin Shinawatra.
Insert: Thaksin Shinawatra’s sedan arriving at the Criminal Court. All photos; Thai Rath
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