Former Thai prime minister Yingluck Shinawatra was yesterday indicted over a bungled rice subsidy scheme in the latest legal move against her family that could see her jailed for up to a decade.
Thailand’s junta-stacked government is also considering launching a civil suit against Yingluck to seek US$18 billion in compensation for damages caused by the scheme introduced by her government.
The indictment comes after Yingluck was retroactively impeached last month by an assembly appointed by the junta that seized power from her elected government in May last year.
Photo: EPA
“We have indicted former prime minister Yingluck Shinawatra ... for dereliction of duty” in relation to the costly rice scheme, said Chutichai Sakhakorn, a director-general at Thailand’s attorney general’s office, which filed the criminal charges.
The Thai Supreme Court is to decide whether to accept the case on March 19.
Yingluck did not attend the indictment hearing at Bangkok’s Supreme Court, but her lawyer Norawit Larlaeng said she had no plans to travel overseas amid rumors she might seek to flee the kingdom.
“She will enter the justice process,” he told reporters just before the formal charges were laid out.
Yingluck’s brother, former Thai prime minister Thaksin Shinawatra, has been in self-exile since 2008 to avoid being jailed for corruption after he was ousted in a 2006 coup.
Yingluck has defended the rice scheme as a necessary subsidy to help poor farmers, but it was economically disastrous and led to massive stockpiles of the grain.
A global survey showed that 60 percent of Taiwanese had attained higher education, second only to Canada, the Ministry of the Interior said. Taiwan easily surpassed the global average of 43 percent and ranked ahead of major economies, including Japan, South Korea and the US, data from the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) for 2024 showed. Taiwan has a high literacy rate, data released by the ministry showed. As of the end of last year, Taiwan had 20.617 million people aged 15 or older, accounting for 88.5 percent of the total population, with a literacy rate of 99.4 percent, the data
CCP ‘PAWN’? Beijing could use the KMT chairwoman’s visit to signal to the world that many people in Taiwan support the ‘one China’ principle, an academic said Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) Chairwoman Cheng Li-wun (鄭麗文) yesterday arrived in China for a “peace” mission and potential meeting with Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平), while a Taiwanese minister detailed the number of Chinese warships currently deployed around the nation. Cheng is visiting at a time of increased Chinese military pressure on Taiwan, as the opposition-dominated Legislative Yuan stalls a government plan for US$40 billion in extra defense spending. Speaking to reporters before going to the airport, Cheng said she was going on a “historic journey for peace,” but added that some people felt uneasy about her trip. “If you truly love Taiwan,
NEW LOW: The council in 2024 based predictions on a pessimistic estimate for the nation’s total fertility rate of 0.84, but last year that rate was 0.69, 17 percent lower An expected National Development Council (NDC) report expects the nation’s population to drop below 12 million by 2065, with the old-age dependency ratio to top 100 percent sooner than 2070, sources said yesterday. The council is slated to release its latest population projections in August, using an ultra-low fertility model, the sources said. The previous report projected that Taiwan’s population would fall to 14.37 million by 2070, but based on a new estimate of the total fertility rate (TFR) — the average number of children born to a woman over her lifetime — the population is expected to reach 12 million by
INTENSIFYING THREATS: Beijing’s tactics include massive attacks on the government service network, aircraft and naval vessel incursions and damaging undersea cables China is prepared to interfere in November’s nine-in-one local elections by launching massive attacks on the Taiwanese government’s service network (GSN), a report published by the National Security Bureau showed. The report was submitted to the Legislative Yuan ahead of the bureau’s scheduled briefing at the Foreign Affairs and National Defense Committee tomorrow. The national security team has identified about 13,000 suspicious Internet accounts and 860,000 disputed messages, the bureau said of China’s cognitive warfare against Taiwan. The disputed messages focus on major foreign affairs, national defense and economic issues, which were produced using generative artificial intelligence (AI) and distributed through Chinese
RSS