By Thai Newsroom Reporters
AN AD HOC COMMITTEE under the National Anti-Corruption Commission will be set up shortly to investigate allegations that a dozen government officials had unduly helped de facto Pheu Thai boss Thaksin Shinawatra stage a fake-out as a patient with “critical illnesses” at Police Hospital.
The anti-graft agency has finally resolved to set up the ad hoc panel to look into the allegations surrounding the billionaire power player-cum-convict at large’s privileged stay for a six-month period at Police Hospital until he was released on parole last February.
The NACC investigators will summon several high-ranking officials for testimony including the Corrections Department director-general, the Bangkok Remand prison chief as well as Police Hospital doctors and executive officials, among others.
Those government officials whom the NACC panel will sooner or later summon could possibly face power abuse and misconduct charges pertaining to their alleged use of legal loopholes in handling the highly-contentious case of the de facto Pheu Thai boss who had been invariably accused of feigning “critical illnesses” to keep himself from being literally put behind bars to otherwise serve a curtailed, one-year jail sentence after he had returned from a 17-year self-exile abroad last year.
Thaksin’s critics and others have accused him of not only flouting the country’s legal and judicial systems but disregarding the royal pardon earlier granted him to the extent that his original eight-year jail sentence was curtailed to only one year.
Whilst staying in a private ward at Police Hospital in lieu of Bangkok Remand prison, the billionaire power player had allegedly manipulated the dumping of the Move Forward from a Pheu Thai-led coalition government, naming of former real estate tycoon Srettha Thavisin as prime minister, allocation of cabinet portfolios among coalition partners and that of ministerial seats among Pheu Thai partisan figures.
Thaksin had been earlier found guilty of power abuse perpetrated during his previous premiership over the last couple of decades and sentenced in absentia by court to the eight-year jail term.
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Top and Front Page: De facto Pheu Thai boss Thaksin Shinawatra. Photos: Thai Rath
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