It is among more than 100 cases of civil service scholarship recipients allegedly failing to repay debts that have been filed with the Administrative Court, Isara News Agency said. And this case discovery follows news that the university sued Thai Harvard School of Dental Medicine lecturer Dr Dolrudee Jumlongras for allegedly not repaying a scholarship debt.

Unlike Dolrudee’s case, guarantors in this recently-discovered case didn’t have to repay the debt on her behalf because the dentist’s parents accepted responsibility for the debt, which probably would result in them having to sell their home, Isara News Agency said.

Saying that Dolrudee wasn’t the first scholarship holder to be sued by Mahidol University, the news agency revealed that, in 2003, the university and the Office of Higher Education Commission sued another dentistry lecturer. The lecterer received fully paid leave to do master’s and PhD degrees in the US between 1995 and 2000 and failed to return to Thailand.

The university demanded she repay her scholarship debt and the salary she received during her 1,954-day leave and pay contract-breaching fines. The total amount is Bt22 million. She lost her civil service job in 2000.

The news agency said that dentist last contacted her parents in 2000 and disappeared.

Her mother petitioned a Bangkok court to consider her a missing person, resulting to the dentist being deemed presumed dead and the court ordering her family to pay her debt.

In September 2015, the Central Administrative Court found that the dentist may be avoiding returning to Thailand to avoid repaying the debt. Later that month, the court ruled that her family must repay the debt.

One of the dentist’s non-family guarantors told the news agency that they were lucky the lecturer’s elderly parents agreed to repay the debt and they were still unable to locate their daughter. They are in the process of the acquiring money, the guarantor said.

Meanwhile, Auditor-General Phisit Leelavachiropas has instructed legal experts to investigate using criminal code laws against Dolrudee on top of the civil lawsuit despite her no longer being in the civil service, Isara News Agency reported.

Phisit has also instructed officials to gather information on the number of civil service scholarships and the number of those who have failed to repay scholarship debts.

He also told officials to study the debt-collecting methods used so better methods could be formulated.

He said his office would this week announce measures to be used in the granting of scholarship.