News from Thailand – October 22, 2014

Enjoy your meal. A restaurant in Lamphun has barbequed crocodile on the menu. The cheapest snack costs 1.800 baht. An additional 300 baht must be paid for the cup. Question for film connoisseurs: What film does this photo remind you of?

The 250 members of the National Reform Council do not have to expose their financial bottoms. The National Anti-Corruption Commission has decided that, unlike the emergency parliament, they do not have to declare their assets and debts because their work is "academic" and cannot lead to conflicts of interest. All they do is provide their knowledge and expertise to bring about change, says NACC member Vicha Mahakhun.

The decision of the NACC has gone down badly with Chuvit Kamolvisit, the colorful ex-owner of luxury massage parlors who now devotes his life to politics with the Love Thailand party he founded. The decision, he says, violates "the concept of transparency and reform." He thinks that the NRC (of which he is a member) should first clean up its own ranks before making proposals for reforms.

Various other NRC members express a similar sound. Saree Ongsomwang: 'It is the task of the NRC to indicate the direction of the reforms and policy making, and that can lead to conflicting interests.'

The NRC met for the first time yesterday and elected Thienchay Kiranandana, former rector of Chulalongkorn University, as chairman. He is assisted by two vice-chairmen: the secretary-general of King Prajadhipok's Institute and a former senator associated with the so-called 'Group of 40 Senators', at the time a critical group of senators who were not fans of the government Yingluck.

The NRC's task is to formulate proposals for reform in eleven areas, to make recommendations to a committee that will write the new constitution, to assess the draft constitution and to propose organic laws.

– Bad luck for Greenpeace Thailand, but the Supreme Administrative Court, following the Central Administrative Court, finds that the Department of Agriculture (DOA) was not negligent in the management of its trial fields with GM papaya in Khon Kaen (genetically modified) in 2003 .

According to Greenpeace, the DOA had failed to prevent the spread of the seeds into surrounding fields. Greenpeace discovered in 2004 that bags of papaya seed sold to farmers by the DOA were contaminated.

However, the court points out that the DOA has responded adequately by stopping all experiments and the distribution and sale of GM products. All GM plants were also destroyed.

Thara Buakamsri, country director of Greenpeace, is afraid that the ruling will open the way for more experiments and field trials, even though the then government banned field trials with GM products in 2007.

– Strange turn in the reporting on the missing Japanese and the woman, previously referred to as his wife, who has withdrawn 700.000 baht from his bank account. Today the newspaper writes that the woman is married to a Thai man. Both were arrested in Ang Thong province on Monday in a taxi driven by the man. They would have driven into the country to get rid of the car.

The Japanese has been missing since September 21. The woman was later arrested at his apartment, but released on bail by the court on Friday. According to an earlier report, she would have fled with her daughter.

The police searched a pond near the Assumption University in Samut Prakan last night to see if the body of the Japanese man was there. She assumes he was killed.

– Do you remember? The National Anti-Corruption Commission (NACC) wants to prosecute former Prime Minister Yingluck for negligence over her role as chair of the National Rice Policy Committee, the prosecution refused to prosecute her and a joint commission was set up to review the case. State of affairs now: that committee has not come out whether there is sufficient evidence for Yingluck's failure to take action against the corruption in the rice mortgage system and the rising costs.

At the beginning of next month, the NACC will decide whether it will go to court itself [i.e. without the OM], because that is also possible. By the way, yesterday was a festive day for the NACC because it existed eight years. A good opportunity to throw some figures at a press conference, such as the number of cases over the past eight years (34.528) and the number of cases currently being handled (9.516). Half of all government corruption cases involve local government bodies.

– It was very busy yesterday at the military court of Khon Kaen. All relatives and acquaintances of the 26 suspects who have been imprisoned for five months on terrorism charges because of their ties to a militant red shirt group. They were formally charged with this on August 22 and yesterday they denied all (nine) allegations, including stockpiling weapons punishable by death (see photo homepage).

The suspects' lawyer has asked the court-martial to transfer the case to the civil court, because the alleged crimes took place before the declaration of martial law and the formation of military courts. A second request for bail has been rejected.

– The bodies of the two Koreans, who were missing after the collision between a speedboat and a trawler on Sunday evening, have been found. They lay in the wreckage of the sunken speedboat. The boat rammed into the fishing boat in the Andaman Sea between Koh Phi Phi and Phuket, and sank after about thirty minutes. Twenty passengers were injured in the collision. The two victims, a man and a woman, were to get married after returning from their holiday.

– Residents in Buri Ram say they have been fooled by two Chinese companies that are doing/have done/will do oil seismological surveys in the province [?]. They signed forms withdrawing their petition to the Central Administrative Court.

In that petition, they accuse the authorities of breaking the law by allowing the companies to conduct the investigation. They also asked to order the authorities to withdraw the concessions granted. The (98) villagers say they were not warned about the seismic shocks, which have damaged houses and fields.

One of the residents says that an assistant village chief asked her to sign a 'case withdrawal' form. He would have received that form from people who said they represented one of the companies. The aide told her the company would stop looking for oil when she signed.

On Friday, a representative of the Stop Global Warming Association will hand over the forms he received from the residents to the court with a request not to withdraw the case. A spokesperson for one of the companies denies the villagers' claims. Incidentally, the company initially wanted to conduct research in an area of ​​108 square kilometers, but because some villagers refused access to their land, it was reduced to 82 square kilometers.

www.dickvanderlugt.nl – Source: Bangkok Post

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