On June 6, Thailand’s Supreme Court sentenced former Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra to two years in prison for his illicit handling of a state lottery program almost 10 years ago. The sentence was pronounced in absentia; in 2008, Shinawatra fled the country to avoid arrest in a previous case.
According to the Associated Press, Shinawatra was convicted on charges of malfeasance; his two-year prison term was added to a three-year sentence handed down in April. In the former case he was found liable for facilitating a loan from Thailand’s Export-Import Bank to Myanmar. The loan was used to pay a satellite communications company then controlled by the prime minister and his family.
In 2003, Thaksin established a legal lottery that played like the illegal lottery, in which people can pick two- and three-digit numbers and bet small amounts, compared with the official system of lottery tickets with fixed numbers and fewer opportunities to win. The illegal lottery is “hugely popular,” the AP reported, and Thaksin hoped to divert some of the money that went to the underground system to government coffers instead.
The court found that Thaksin did not have the authority to start the new lottery, which was discontinued when he was forced from office.
Thaksin is a telecommunications magnate and billionaire who now lives in Dubai. He has denied any wrongdoing and says the cases against him were politically motivated. He became prime minister in 2001 and was popular among the poor—a popularity that supposedly unnerved the country’s ruling class including royalists, industrialists and the military. In 2006, he was unseated in a coup that accused him of abuse of power.
