91.000 sacks of rice worth 69 million baht have disappeared from a warehouse in Pathum Thani. The army yesterday raided the warehouse that stores rice bought by the government under the mortgage system after a tip-off.
There should have been 130.000 bags in the warehouse, but they were not there. To mask the theft, a scaffolding had been placed in the empty space in the middle of the pile of rice sacks. There was even more wrong with the rice, by the way; most of the rice was contaminated with weevils (homepage photo).
The warehouse is owned by Phoenix Agritec (Thailand). The hulled rice was supplied by the Marketing Organization For Farmers, one of the two organizations that receive the mortgaged rice in Thailand. Phoenix is one of four companies allowed to store rice in Muang district. It was allowed to keep the rice from March 1 last year to February 2016.
The authorities had also received information in July and November last year that rice was missing. Then it concerned 10.000 bags of rice from the harvest of 2012 and 2013. The newspaper does not write how that case ended.
Soldiers are now stationed at the warehouse to guard it day and night. A report is made to the police so that they can investigate the villains who have concealed the rice.
As is well known, the junta has announced that it will inspect all 1.800 warehouses and silos in the country where mortgaged rice is stored to determine quantity and quality. 100 teams have been formed for this purpose. The inspection teams compare the stored quantity and quality with data from the Department of Commerce.
Corruption in the mortgage system led the National Anti-Corruption Commission to charge then Prime Minister Yingluck with dereliction of duty. As chairman of the National Rice Policy Committee, she would have let things take their course and did nothing about the spiraling costs. The NACC has already questioned Yingluck, but as far as I know has not yet reached a final conclusion.
(Source: bangkok mail, June 28, 2014)
Photos: So that's how you do it: darken rice. The explanatory note states that the removed rice will be replaced by lesser quality rice; in Pathum Thani the empty space is filled with a theorem.
91.000 Bags, you don't just load them on a cargo bike. That won't hold the cargo bike and neither will your legs. This required cartloads and therefore knowledge from one of the bosses there.
Someone has well stuffed the ass on the backs of the 80% of the poor in that country, the day laborers and the small rice farmers who have not sold rice to the 'system' for the simple reason that their few ngans already yielded too little to raise their own to feed the family.
Perpetrators flew! Take a loss, cry and certainly don't start again with this unfortunate system.;
If you don't wheel those bags in, you don't have to wheel them out later.
Those bags just never existed.
Other bags have been filled!
Sincerely,
Lodewijk
Just not with rice.
This will not be the first and last time that it is proven how much has been stolen, or how much subsidies have been received unjustly. And all this at the expense of a) the small farmers and b) the taxpayer. Hope the culprit(s) are found and brought to justice soon.
How many kilos is (or rather should have been) in a bag?
And does anyone have any idea how many trucks have to be loaded for these 91.000 bags?
M curious
Cor Verkerk
Dear Cor, 1 bag contains 35 kilos of Paddy, unhusked rice, so most likely there are 50 kilos in a bag of peeled rice. 91.000 bags of 50 kilos is 4.550 tons. Normally 25 tons go on a truck, but here in Thailand everything is overloaded, so say 30 tons. This means that approximately 150 trucks are needed to transport this volume.
Thank you Gerrie Q8
Now it's all a lot clearer.
150 truckloads you can't even notice that.
This is not corruption, just a miscount. I'm glad this has been resolved because I thought it was strange that Thai people were accused of corruption
Cor Verkerk
If you know that most Thai workers do not even earn 300 bath a day, this is not surprising. Some have served their own to feed their families, because it is not like us, What are we going to eat today? is. Often only rice with a little sauce and usually sticky rice because that is cheaper.