Vicha Mahakun, formerly a member of the National Anti-Corruption Commission (NACC), said the investigators had to put a great deal of effort into their work before they could gain cooperation from key witnesses and convince public prosecutors to bring the case to court.

“I don’t know if it’s because of our luck that we could conclude the investigation and come up with an indictment. But criminals often leave traces. We focused on the suspicious facts that often exist in big projects such as this,” Vicha said in a recent interview with Nation Group reporters.

He said the NACC had discovered massive irregularities stemming from the Yingluck government’s rice-pledging scheme and warned her administration in writing twice to discontinue the policy. The Auditor General’s Office sent four similar warnings to that government, saying that most farmers had not benefitted from the policy.

However, the government at that time ignored the warnings, arguing that it was a policy and election campaign promise to implement a rice-pledging scheme.

That was before the NACC received a complaint asking it to investigate Yingluck for alleged negligence, because she was in charge of a policy that was allegedly plagued with graft, said Vicha, who served on the NACC from 2006 to 2015.

The complaint came after Yingluck’s commerce minister, Boonsong Teriyapirom, and other government officials were accused of malfeasance over supposed government-to-government (G-to-G) deals to sell rice from state stockpiles to China.

Vicha said investigators were initially unsure if Yingluck should be charged with negligence, so they spent a lot to time looking into the details. The investigators later concluded that there were irregularities in the rice-pledging project and the sale of pledged rice through G-to-G deals.

“It was the responsibility of the government head to stop the project. The ministers responsible could not do so because they were frequently replaced,” he said.

Vicha said that, at that time, he discussed the case only with people he trusted. “Walls have ears. I had to keep our findings secret,” he added.

A former judge who is now dean of Law Faculty at Rangsit University, Vicha said that as chairperson of the National Rice Policy Committee, Yingluck could not claim that she was unaware of the massive loss of state funds in the graft-plagued project.

He pointed out that the project’s audit subcommittee reported to then-prime minister Yingluck three times about the increasing accumulative loss – Bt32.2 billion as of October 2012, Bt200-plus billion as of May 2013, and Bt332.3 billion as of October 2013.

In its reports, the subcommittee noted that the debt burden would become uncontrollable for the government and the cost of managing the rice in state stockpiles would be huge, according to Vicha.

He said a key to solving the G-to-G puzzle was the discovery that the supposed deals to sell rice to the Chinese government were not done through China National Cereals, Oils and Foodstuffs Corporation. The state-owned holding company is empowered to represent the central Chinese government in the international purchase and sale of agricultural products.

According to Vicha, the G-to-G deals were found to be “fake” as the rice sold had never been exported. He said it was found that people claiming to represent Chinese state companies in the deals in fact worked for wealthy businessman Apichart Chansakulporn, better known as “Sia Piang”.

On Friday, Boonsong and Apichart were found guilty by the Supreme Court’s Criminal Division for Political Office Holders, which sentenced them to 42 years and 48 years in jail, respectively. They were among 20 people jailed in connection with the G-to-G rice scandal.

Vicha also said that before the investigators could crack the G-to-G code, they had to get information from some key rice traders who were part of the graft scandal. Those people agreed to become NACC witnesses on condition that they were given protection from prosecution.

“They were the last piece of the jigsaw. Without their cooperation, the NACC probe would have been more difficult and have taken a longer time,” Vicha said.

The last obstacle, he said, was with public prosecutors who repeatedly refused to bring the case to court. Vicha said that even after the NACC resolved to charge Yingluck with negligence, it took a long time before it could convince the Attorney General’s Office that a case should be filed against her with the Supreme Court’s Criminal Division for Political Office Holders.