Thailand’s ousted prime minister Yingluck Shinawatra said the military junta that overthrew her has ordered her assets seized and fined her 35bn baht ($996.87mn) over a rice subsidy scheme critics say haemorrhaged billions of dollars.
The scheme, which paid farmers above market rates for their rice, was a flagship policy of Yingluck’s administration and helped sweep her to office in a 2011 general election.
After her 2014 overthrow, Yingluck was charged with criminal negligence over the rice subsidy scheme and is now fighting the charges in court.
Yingluck told reporters outside a Bangkok court yesterday that she had received a notice two days ago ordering her assets to be seized.
“In terms of the order, it is not right and it is not just,” Yingluck said. “I will use every channel available to fight this.”
The former premier said she would not comment further during this sensitive time, with the kingdom still grieving the death last week of its revered monarch Bhumibol Adulyadej.
But she has previously called on the junta to file civil claims in court instead of ordering the $1 billion fine – a figure that dwarfs the some $17mn she declared in assets in 2015.
The rice subsidy scheme was a populist policy engineered by Yingluck’s brother, former prime minister Thaksin Shinawatra, who was toppled in a 2006 coup.
Her supporters say the case against Yingluck is part of a military plan to wipe out the influence of the Shinawatra family.
The junta denies that it is singling Yingluck out.
In addition to cases against Yingluck and senior members of her former cabinet, the junta is investigating some 850 cases related to the rice scheme for graft, government spokesman General Sansern Kaewkamnerd told Reuters.
Many of the cases involve lower ranking public officials and members of the private sector, he said.
An adviser to Yingluck, who declined to be named because of the sensitivity of the matter, told Reuters that the asset seizure was done using section 44 of the interim constitution which gives junta chief Prayut Chan-ocha, who is also the country’s prime minister, absolute power to give any order deemed necessary to “strengthen public unity and harmony”.
Yingluck has 45 days to appeal the order.
A senior junta official, Deputy Prime Minister Wissanu Krea-ngam, said yesterday that Yingluck is free to challenge the asset seizure order.
“She can ask for an appeal or mitigation of the order,” he said.
But analysts say the military regime is determined to block any comeback by the popular leader and her brother Thaksin, who was ousted from the premiership in a 2006 coup and remains in self-imposed exile.
The siblings have poured money in Thailand’s rural heartlands, building a support base that has helped them win every poll in the past decade.
However, their governments have been repeatedly taken down by court rulings and coups backed by a Bangkok elite unnerved by the siblings’ political ascent.
Analysts say the junta is using Yingluck’s corruption case to legitimise their coup and brandish a self-styled reputation as graft-busters.
“It is part for the course of the military coup which was to put down the Thaksin challenge once and for all,” Thitinan Pongsudhirak, a political science professor at Chulalongkorn University, told Reuters.