THE COURT of appeals has upheld a lower court’s three-year jail sentence for Benja Louichareon, a former deputy finance minister, who abused her authority to help Panthongtae and Pinthongta Shinawatra evade income taxes.

Benja and three other former Revenue Department officials and an aide were not released yesterday and had to spend the night in a temporary detention centre awaiting their bid for the Supreme Court to review the case. Besides Benja, three other former officials – Chamras Yaemsoithong, Molirat Bunyasiri, and Krit Vipulanusas – as well as Pranee Vejpuekpitak, an aide to Khunying Pojaman Na Prompet’s secretary, were found guilty in the case.

The two children of former premier Thaksin Shinawatra sold shares of Shin Corp but did not pay taxes with Benja’s help, according to the verdict.

Benja, who was deputy finance minister of the Yingluck Shinawatra government, was ruled guilty along with four other persons who were former senior officials of the Revenue Department.

As a former deputy chief of the Revenue Department, Benja violated Article 157 of the Criminal Code causing damages to the state.

The National Anti-Corruption Commission filed the charges against Benja and other persons who allegedly helped Panthongtae and Pinthongta to evade taxes on the sale of Shin shares in 2006.

Each of them purchased 164 million shares at Bt1 each and sold them at the market price of Bt49.25 per share. They should have paid income taxes amounting to Bt7.9 billion each.

The lower court ruled in July 2016 that Benja and three other persons were guilty and sentenced them to a three-year jail term.

The appeal court said in a statement upholding the lower court’s verdict that there are no grounds for a suspended jail term. Individuals can forward their case to the Supreme Court for a final review if there are issues related to facts of the case and of one of the judges of the appeal court endorses their bid.

While Sudarat remains a potential top choice among candidates, she will have to work harder to rescue her image following the incident, said the source who requested anonymity.

The former minister shot herself in the foot when she accompanied a truck through her political base, Lat Pla Kaho region of Bangkok, encouraging marigold-planting in tribute to the late King on Sunday.

Sudarat responded with a teary apology a day later following criticism.

The tears, however, did not fully succeed in toning down criticism of the seeming opportunism and inappropriate political marketing as activities ramp up for the late King’s funeral.

But this incident will not be the death knell of Sudarat the politician who has two decades of experience. Within the party itself, Sudarat continues to enjoy the support of Khunying Potjaman na Pombejra, the former wife of former PM Thaksin Shinawatra.

Thaksin, the party’s de facto navigator, has avoided sending any negative signals about Sudarat’s move. If he gives her a pass, less pressure from other players in the party can then be predicted.

That, however, would leave Thaksin with a price to pay.

While Sudarat is rather powerful among Bangkok-based politicians, her influence is limited in rural provinces. She is also disliked by some influential party figures such as Thaksin’s sister, Yaowapha Wongsawat, and former deputy PM Pol Captain Chalerm Yubamrung.

If Thaksin gives the nod for her to run for party leader, he would be required to make deals with former MPs who oppose Sudarat, and it is very likely some of them may leave.

Other candidates to watch include Chaturon Chaisang, Bhokin Balakul, Phongthep Thepkanjana, Chaikasem Nitisiri and Chadchart Sittipunt. All are former ministers.

While they remain politically static, Chadchart recently hit the headlines after refusing to work with the junta on drafting the legally binding 20-year national strategy.

Already popular for his down-to-earth and witty personality, the former transport minister won public plaudits for his stance.

According to the Pheu Thai source, Thaksin’s sister Yaowapha supports Chadchart.

The seat of Pheu Thai leader has been vacant since the previous leader, Charupong Ruangsuwan, fled Thailand rather than obey an order to report to the junta shortly after the 2014 coup.

Although the junta ban on political activities is still in place, the organic law on political party has already been enacted, prompting parties to prepare themselves accordingly.

Founded in 2007, Pheu Thai Party is the third incarnation of Thaksin’s political aspirations following the dissolution of Thai Rak Thai Party and the People’s Power Party.

Pheu Thai’s biggest success was nominating Yingluck Shinawatra as leader shortly before the 2011 election, which the party won, catapulting her to prime minister.

PM Prayut yesterday remained silent over the report.

The premier cancelled a planned media session, which was expected to discuss the Zuckerberg meeting, after yesterday morning’s meeting of the provincial administration policy committee at Government House.

Meanwhile, Deputy PM Somkid Jatusripitak, who was the first person to reveal the proposed meeting between Prayut and Zuckerberg, called in sick yesterday and did not attend the meeting at Government House.

Somkid on Tuesday was quoted by Matichon newspaper as saying that Zuckerberg will meet Prayut on October 30. He said the visit would underline Facebook’s business interest in the Kingdom’s huge data centre and in online connectivity.

His disclosure was followed by Prayut’s comment on Tuesday that he expected to meet Zuckerberg for discussions on a range of topics, including transnational crime.

One day after Thai media ran the news, Facebook issued a statement saying, “There are no plans currently for any of our senior leaders to visit Thailand”.

The Nation contacted Facebook’s public relations staff in Thailand yesterday and they repeated the same statement.

Mechanisms would include an environmental court as well as environmental polls.

The natural resources and environmental reform committee held a press conference for the first time yesterday to update the public about their work progress after having 12 meetings to define the committee’s work goals and framework.

The committee is among 13 reform committees set up following the stipulation of the charter and the new national reform law promulgated over a month ago. The committees are to develop reform plans to pave the way for the country’s long-term change in line with the national 20-year strategy.

The committee’s chair, Royon Chitdon said the committee has set four prime work goals to guide its work. They include maintaining natural resources and their health to provide a foundation for the country’s social and economic development; balancing conservation and uses of natural resources to mitigate development impacts on natural resources; protecting the environment to minimise pollution and other public health and environmental impacts; and boosting effectiveness in managing natural resources and the environment to minimise conflicts and inequity, based on public participation.

Royon said the committee, along with its alliances, have extensive experience already while a number of similar plans have been developed and are available, so it would not take much time for the committee to develop its reform plan to be submitted to the government by this December.

“What we particularly look at is how we can develop participatory environmental management and put it in place in the future. If not, our reform of this sector is unlikely to hit a success,” said Royon, adding public participation would be at the heart of the committee’s work, with at least four major public hearings to be held for the public to share views on its reform plan before the December submission.

The committee has divided its work into six sub-sectors, covering land resources (land, mining, forests and wildlife), marine and coastal resources, water resources, biodiversity, environmental quality, and natural resources and environmental management.

Dr Buntoon Srethasirote  said the challenge that the committee has tried to address is one of the country’s critical fundamental problems: conflict over natural resources between the state and its people, which in recent years, has seen the trend become intensified.

Buntoon said Thai courts have in recent years taken care of around 4,000 environmental conflict cases, and the numbers of cases have been increasing in the administrative courts.

In 2014, the number of administrative court cases was around 6,000, but last year, the number reached 10,000, reflecting the intensifying conflict between the state and the people over natural resources.

Speaking as chair of the natural resources and environmental management reform panel, Buntoon said the panel has addressed its primary framework, which should help lead to environmental governance, sustainable development, environmental public participation, decentralisation, and environmental responsibility.

Buntoon’s panel determined five prime reform issues, which would see new environmental management mechanisms introduced, including the Strategic Environmental Assessment, the Environment Court, environmental polls, and such.

The reform issues the panel would work on include environmental management tools and innovations, environmental organisations and authority, state authority’s practices and governance, environmental budgets, and environmental law and justice reform.

“The panel’s work will be a cross-cutting sector of our other five work areas. So, I see this as quite challenging [to make the others embrace the panel’s proposals on structural and law reforms],” said Buntoon, suggesting some currently redundant as well as overlapping committees and laws in regard to natural resources and environmental management may be dissolved or integrated.

In regard to the land resources reform, Kwanchai Duangsathaporn, the panel’s co-chair (and also the now-defunct National Reform Steering Assembly’s public health and environment reform committee member), said the challenge of his panel is how to stop deforestation. Forest over-cutting, had been increasing over the year, until the junta took the issue seriously and introduced encroachment suppression orders 64/2557 and 66/2557 in 2014.

Kwanchai said the committee has determined five reform issues to be worked on for the forest sector. They include reforms of relevant organisations and laws, area-based management approaches, reorganising land uses and ownership in forest areas, participatory management and wildlife management.

For land and mining, the panel has specially proposed application of His majesty the Late King’s guidance in overseeing this sector to achieve sustainability and self-sufficiency. Where mining is allowed, it must also include holistic rehabilitation plans to mitigate impacts, said Kwanchai.

Dr Theerapat Prayurasiddhi, advisor to the biodiversity reform panel, and also vice chair of the committee, said reform of the biodiversity sector would help support reform work on land resources, as it would focus on how to increase value-added concepts.

More detail would be further worked out as the sector is intricate, but the work would focus initially on protection and maintenance of genetic resources, and ecosystems, while trying to come up with value-added products from the country’s rich biodiversity.

For their part, the marine resources reform panel has determined three main reform issues: reforms of databases of the country’s marine and coastal resources (with zones redefined based on provincial boundaries); overhauling sectoral organisations, their work structure and their laws; and marine resources and coastal resources protection.

The environmental quality panel proposed five key reform issues to ensure that the country’s impacts of pollution could be minimised and properly managed. They include reforms of concerned organisations and laws, origins of pollution management, database management, economic tools, and carbon trade supporting mechanisms.

And for water the sector, Royon, who also chairs the panel working on water resources management reform, elaborated on the panel’s framework of five issues. They include large water-project management, area-based management, integration of waterways and city planning, efficiency in water management tools and human resources, and introduction of tangible examples.

Royon said the committee modestly hoped that its work would help bring some “changes” to the environmental reform  sector, although it may not yet cover all that needed to be done.

What is of more  worry, he said, is there is no start at all.

Dr Thorn Thamrongnawasawat, a marine resources reform panel vice-chair, and also a national strategy committee member, said nobody could ascertain about the difference between “reform” and what are conventional improvements made by the various agencies.

But Thorn said he hoped that the reform could at least introduce “a beam point” to conventional approaches and what should be done.

“That’s how conventional approaches are moved, and changes begin,” said Thorn of what the reform means.

The approval was granted during a meeting of the integral provincial and cluster administrative policy committee chaired by Prayut on Thursday.

The committee was set up early this year as part of the government’s bid to improve work and manage budget efficiency at provincial and provincial cluster levels so that they can be developed at a similar pace, without leaving some behind.

Members of the new committee would be sought by the Prayut-headed committee, which will forward names for the Cabinet’s approval.

Acting as a super board, the new committee would assist provincial clusters in developing regional strategies, to bring them in line with the national one.

“All regions have to create connectivity among each other. By doing so, each region needs to be paved with a development plan to prevent work overlapping,” Prayut said “They will also be divided into clusters to support regional competitiveness.”

The second area, precautionary measures, would emphasise state office precautions, as well as asset scrutiny and reporting of all civil servants to their heads.

The committee is working out in detail how to properly report assets and changes of assets and values, said committee chair Panthep Klanarongran.

Democrat Party deputy leader Nipit Intarasombat said he agreed with the idea of all state officials reporting their assets. This, he said, could help prevent collusion between them and politicians, a relatively common practice in the country’s corruption cycle.

Nipit said the asset reporting is not as difficult as some may fear, as people should well know which assets belong to them or their families.

If they fail to report them without any ill intention, they would not be subject to any punishment, he said.

The fourth area, anti-corruption organisations, would put an emphasis on creating independent and integrated watchdogs.

The move came as the organic law on the Office of the Auditor General (OAG) was deliberated in its final reading by the National Legislative Assembly (NLA) on Thursday.

Among other things, the proposed law would give the Auditor General the authority to conduct an initial investigation against allegedly corrupt NACC officials. The Auditor General would be limited to an initial investigation and would have to pass the case on to the anti-graft committee in the event that they found irregularities.

According to a source in NACC, officials were concerned that the scrutiny could affect the agency’s work in combating graft as well as lead to conflict between the two agencies.

The NACC officials are worried that even limiting the OAG’s authority to an initial investigation would go beyond what the Constitution has allowed, the source said on condition of anonymity.

Those authorised to scrutinise NACC officials should be legal experts in the justice system. The Auditor General’s overall authority is more aligned with matters of monetary and fiscal discipline and not criminal procedure, he added.

More importantly, this could be a loophole allowing offenders under scrutiny by the NACC to buy some time by making a complaint with the OAG to investigate the officials, the source said.

There were already several mechanisms that keep NACC officials in check, he said. They include the organic law governing the agency, which prohibits them from being a stakeholder in the cases they were working on. Also, the agency’s ethical standards include double-punishment for officials found to have violated conduct requirements.

In addition, it is also a norm that other officials stay away from those involved in the cases investigated by the agency, the source said.

His ruling was circulated yesterday, three weeks after the panel had read the majority verdict against Yingluck in absentia following her flight from the country.

In his verdict dated September 27, the judge explained that the Attorney-General had prosecuted Yingluck for negligence or misconduct. However, according to the law, the offence must be accompanied also by ill intention, or ill intention to cause loss to others.

The act of negligence alone did not count as an offence in the laws cited by the Attorney-General, Pison pointed out.

Although the prosecutor had proved the rice-pledging scheme was plagued with corruption, there was no evidence that Yingluck had benefited from it, Pison wrote.

In the fake government-to-government rice deals case, although Apichart Chansakulporn, better known as “Sia Piang”, had been ruled guilty, it had not been proved that Yingluck had facilitated the deals either, Pison wrote.

A photograph showing Sia Piang and Yingluck’s brother Thaksin Shinawatra in Hong Kong was not sufficient to prove that she was close to him and could have helped him gain advantage in the deals, Pison wrote.

Although the prosecutor and Yingluck had argued extensively about whether or not the rice-pledging scheme had caused losses or been beneficial to the economy, Pison said those arguments were irrelevant in the context of law.

He also rejected Yingluck’s arguments regarding judicial power as irrelevant.

Pison summed up his verdict by ruling the case against Yingluck should be dismissed.

Eight other judges, however, ruled Yingluck guilty and the panel handed down a five-year imprisonment term.

Yingluck fled the country two days before the Supreme Court’s Criminal Division for Political Office Holders was scheduled to read the verdict on August 25. She is reportedly seeking asylum in the United Kingdom.

In a statement issued yesterday, a Facebook spokesperson said: “There are no plans currently for any of our senior leaders to visit Thailand.”

Earlier, it was reported in Thai media that Zuckerberg would hold a meeting with Prime Minister Prayut Chan-o-cha during a visit to Bangkok on October 30.

Deputy Government Spokesperson Lt-General Werachon Sukondhapatipak declined comment on the Facebook statement, saying that deputy premier Somkid Jatusripitak’s team should clarify the matter.

Somkid and his aides could not be reached for clarification yesterday.

Zuckerberg was earlier expected to hold discussions with Prayut on issues regarding the use of social media as well as digital business opportunities resulting from the widespread use of social media platforms, especially Facebook.

The Thai government invited Zuckerberg to visit the Kingdom when Deputy PM Prajin Juntong met with the Facebook co-founder during the Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation Summit in Peru last November. At that time, Zuckerberg had said he would be pleased to come to the Kingdom.

Prior to Prajin’s meeting with Zuckerberg, Facebook said in a statement: “We have never provided account information or content of any Facebook user to the government of Thailand, nor do we proactively monitor people’s content or conversations for potential violations of local law.

“We apply a strict legal process to any government request for data or content restrictions and we list the requests we are getting and any content restrictions made in our Government Requests Report.

“Our policies and process for government requests have not changed, and are consistent for governments around the world. Our meeting with the Thai government was to outline this process.”

Zuckerberg had last visited Thailand in 2010 on a private trip to attend the wedding of Chris Cox, Facebook’s vice president and his long-time friend.

According to data released in April by We Are Social agency, Thailand ranked third in Southeast Asia with 47 million Facebook users nationwide, behind Indonesia and the Philippines with 111 million and 63 million users respectively.

Bangkok has the largest number of active Facebook users in the world. Its 30 million active users account for 1.5 per cent of almost 2 billion active users worldwide.

Pol Colonel Paisit Wongmuang, the DSI director-general, said yesterday that all four reported themselves and acknowledged the charges to the agency on Tuesday, October 17, ahead of the October 24 deadline set by authorities. They were released without bail.

He said the Anti-Money Laundering Organisation (AMLO) had previously submitted details of the charges to the DSI. They relate to alleged multi-billion-baht fraudulent loans from the state-owned Krungthai Bank, in which a Bt10-million cheque was said to be issued to Panthongtae and another Bt26-million cheque given to Kanchana and Wanchai Honghern, and Kesinee Jipiphop.

As a result, the DSI is pursuing money-laundering and related charges against the four suspects, who said they will provide evidence to defend themselves in court.

Money-laundering cases have a 15-year statute of limitations, so the DSI is required to close its investigation in this case by the middle of next year.

Panthongtae earlier petitioned the DSI to also investigate another 150 people and organisations that had allegedly received ill-gotten funds from the Krisada Mahanakorn Group, but they are not being investigated.