By Thai Newsroom Reporters
PRIME MINISTER PAETONGTARN Shinawatra today (Nov. 5) offered to “cooperate” with the National Anti-Corruption Commission (NACC) in search of information pertaining to her father/de facto Pheu Thai boss Thaksin Shinawatra’s previous, contentious stay at Police Hospital.
Though the prime minister-cum-Pheu Thai leader yesterday declined to comment on the controversy surrounding her father’s “critical illnesses”, privileged stay and medical treatment at Police Hospital, she did today confirm to reporters at Government House that she will “cooperate” with the anti-graft agency but stopped short of saying how.
Paetongtarn said she will definitely help an NACC fact-finding committee as much as the law allows with their ongoing search for detailed information pertaining to her father’s medical treatment at Police Hospital for a six-month period until he was released on parole earlier this year.
The NACC committee had earlier asked the hospital’s executive officials to provide factual information pertaining to the de facto Pheu Thai boss’s medical treatment but was arguably denied.
However, the prime minister said she has not yet consulted with police chief Pol.Gen. Kitrat Panpet over the matter surrounding her father, given the fact that Police Hospital is officially under care of the Office of the National Police.
The billionaire power player has been invariably accused of staging a “fake-out” by feigning “critical illnesses” to the extent that he literally kept himself from being put behind bars to otherwise serve a curtailed, one-year jail term and instead was granted the privileges, deemed by the National Human Rights Commission as inaccessible to ordinary convicts, of staying in a private ward of Police Hospital.
Meanwhile, it remains to be seen whether the Constitutional Court may accept a lawsuit earlier filed against the de facto Pheu Thai boss on grounds of allegedly domineering and steering the largest ruling party’s rank and file led by his daughter-turned-prime minister as well as exerting an unlawful influence over all coalition partners during a hush-hush meeting at his house hours after former prime minister Srettha Thavisin had been immediately deprived of power by a split decision of the court last August.
Thaksin has been also accused of manipulating to have the Pheu Thai-led government adopt his personal views as part of their policies and to kick the Palang Pracharath out of the coalition government, among other alleged, illegal features of his power play.
Remarkably, the prime minister’s father had been allegedly instrumental, albeit in behind-the-scenes fashion, in reviving a joint Thai-Cambodian development scheme to explore and produce undersea natural gas, oil and other natural resources around Koh Kood island off Trat.
Former Cambodian prime minister Hun Sen was the first guest who visited his Thai counterpart at the latter’s Chan Song Lah residence a few days after he had been released on parole from the hospital.
CAPTIONS:
Top and Front Page: Prime Minister Paetongtarn Shinawatra. Photos: Thai Rath
Insert: De facto Pheu Thai boss Thaksin Shinawatra. Photo: Thai Rath
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