Testifying as a witness against Jatupat and six other students, Captain Apinan Wanpetch, who arrested the activists, said the 2014 coup to scrap the 2007 constitution and topple the elected civilian government was an admirable mission.

“There is no reason to oppose the coup. Although holding a banner against the coup is freedom of expression, the act is destroying democracy, therefore they deserve arrest and attitude adjustment,” he told the court. A military prosecutor yesterday sought a ruling that Jatupat, also known as Pai Dao Din, serve his full time in jail if he is convicted, and not have the jail time included in the sentence he is already serving for lese majeste.

Jatupat and six other student activists were charged with breaching the National Council for Peace and Order’s ban on political gatherings of five or more people on May 22, 2015 – the first anniversary of the coup -– when they held banners with messages against the coup.

The ban carries the punishment of up to one-year imprisonment and a fine of up to Bt20,000.

The prosecutor yesterday sought permission from the military court in Khon Kaen to amend the indictment, asking the court to hand down a prison sentence on top of the term Jatupat is serving for the royal defamation charge.

Court defers decision

The defendant’s lawyer, however, objected to the request. The court deferred the amendment, according to the Thai Lawyers for Human Rights group.

Earlier this month, Jatupat was sentenced to two years and six months in prison for lese majeste after sharing a BBC article.

The activist is also facing other charges as a consequence of his activism against the military junta. Among them are charges of sedition and violation of a political ban, which are ongoing in courts.

Yingluck started by giving alms to 17 monks at her residence in Bangkok before travelling to Wat Rakhang Khositaram to release fish and pray to the statue of the sacred Somdet Phra Buddhacarya, famously known as Somdej Toh.

Yingluck is to receive the court’s ruling on her alleged negligence in the controversial rice-pledging scheme, which allegedly inflicted financial damage on the state budget on Friday.

LEGAL EXPERTS have outlined three major points that Supreme Court judges in the negligence case against former prime minister Yingluck Shinawatra are likely to focus on.

In order to reach a common verdict as to whether Yingluck is guilty or not, the experts said that the nine judges individually should first try to answer these |questions. Did her government actually “pledge” rice from farmers? Was rice from government stocks sold through government-to-government deals? And was the then-PM aware of irregularities?

The prosecution has argued before the court that although the programme was called a “rice-pledging” scheme, farmers who had their rice pledged under the |project would never have bought it back because the pledge price offered by Yingluck’s government was much higher than the market value of the rice. This resulted in large quantities of harvested rice ending up in government stocks.

That administration’s policy of |pledging “every grain of rice” was blamed for a lot of irregularities that together cost over Bt400 billion in taxpayers’ money. The graft scams making up many of the irregularities involved pledging low-quality rice and cheaper rice from neighbouring countries, and allowing non-farmers into the project. The judges would also have to determine whether rice under the project was sold to any foreign country through government-to-government deals.

In a separate case also stemming from the rice-pledging scheme, Yingluck’s |former commerce minister Boonsong Teriyapirom and his ex-deputy Poom Sarapol are charged with malfeasance for the alleged sale of rice from state stockpiles to the Chinese government.

The deals were claimed to have been made with a local Chinese state enterprise, but investigators found that the rice “sold” had never been exported. The enterprise cited was not certified by the central Chinese government. Also, the claimed representative of the Chinese firm was found to work for a Thai |company with close connections to |certain figures in Yingluck’s government.

The Supreme Court is also scheduled to deliver its verdict in the case against Boonsong and 27 others in the “fake” |government-to-government rice sale case on August 25, the same day as Yingluck’s verdict is handed down.

A “guilty” verdict in that case would confirm charges of irregularities in the rice-pledging project and that certain government figures and policy-makers were involved.

Regarding the question as to whether Yingluck was aware of the irregularities, the prosecution argued that the Finance Ministry at that time reported to her Cabinet on three occasions about |problems stemming from the project, including a massive loss and damages caused. As chairperson of the National Rice Policy Committee, Yingluck would certainly be aware of all those problems, the prosecution argued.

Public prosecutors also introduced |evidence that Yingluck seemed to have ignored warnings of irregularities from the Auditor General’s Office and the National Anti-Corruption Commission.

In response, the ex-PM argued that her government had to continue with the rice-pledging project because it was one of her political party’s election campaign promises. Yingluck said a budget loss should not be taken into consideration for a government project that benefits |farmers. And she claimed she had taken measures to prevent and stop irregularities at “every stage”, including setting up a committee to investigate graft claims.

The judges will have to determine whether irregularities actually took place and if she should be held responsible for the graft, according to the legal experts. And the court will need to judge whether she acted sufficiently in her capacity as government head to stop or prevent those irregularities.

The judges – Cheep Julamon, Wiroon Sangtian, Slaikate Wattanapan, Thanarirk Nitiseranee, and Pison Pirun – will help make a final decision in both Yingluck and Boonsong’s cases. Cheep, Thanarirk and Pison were on the panel that heard the case over the deadly crackdown on yellow shirts against former prime minister Somchai Wongsawat from the Pheu Thai Party, who is a brother-in-law of controversial former prime minister Thaksin Shinawatra. The trio were among the majority of judges who acquitted Somchai and other defendants in the case.

Thanit Ketsawapitak, a senior judge sitting in the panel judging Yingluck’s case, was also a member of the judges’ panel that ruled in 2010 to confiscate Bt46 billion of Thaksin’s assets, for benefiting from corrupt dealings while he was prime minister.

Prior to that, Thanit had also voted to dissolve the Thai Rak Thai Party in May 2007, after the coup in September 2006 that ousted Thaksin’s government. Thanit, however, was among the minority of judges to vote against the imposition of a five-year political ban on Thaksin as a consequence of the ruling.

He was also a member of the panel that heard Pheu Thai’s ex-deputy interior minister Pracha Maleenont’s malfeasance case in connection with the fire vehicle scandal.

Slaikate and Ubonrat Luiwikkai were on the panel ruling on Surapong Suebwonglee, a former information and communications technology minister, who was found guilty of dereliction of duty and malfeasance for changes involving a concession contract. The amendments enabled Shin Corp, then owned by the Shinawatra family, to reduce its shareholding in Shin Satellite from 51 per cent to 40 per cent. He served 10 months in jail and was released earlier this year.

There have been changes in the panels. Two judges, Veerapol Tungsuwan and Sirichai Watanayothin, were selected in 2015 to rule on both cases, but Veerapol was then promoted to Supreme Court president and Sirichai Wattanayothin resigned from his post after failing to win a nomination to head the Supreme Court.

They were replaced by Pison and Sophon Rojanon. The latter was also on the panel ruling in the case against former PM Somchai and voted that he was not guilty.

Another judge in the panel, Thanasit Nilkamhaeng, also sat on the ruling panel that heard Somchai’s case.

All members of the ruling panels are senior judges at the Supreme Court and most are presidents of the court’s divisions and vice president of the court. In order to be assigned a seat on the panels, judges would have been supported by all Supreme Court judges.

However, like “those politicians” that Prayut looks down on, the premier always manages to turn the spotlight on himself wherever he goes.

His recent two-day trip to Nakhon Ratchasima for the mobile Cabinet meeting is no exception, filled as it was with his roller-coaster talks full of jokes, sarcasm, flattery and no-nonsense utterances.

“Please miss us, ‘der’”, Prayut told Korat residents, using Northeast-style lingo to catch their attention. “We soldiers can’t lie. We have to keep our promises to the people. Have you listened to my song that says ‘we won’t take too long?’

“But still, we remain here [in power]. We just follow it step-by-step,” the premier said, hinting at the junta’s “road map to democracy”, which has had at least three detours.

“If I can go, I will. Just don’t shoo me away. The more you do, the more I’ll stay on,” he said.

Since taking power after the 2014 coup, Prayut has enjoyed his one-man show at least twice a week – the Tuesday Cabinet meeting and his talk show every Friday. Occasionally, he gets ruffled by the media and makes himself scarce, but that never lasts longer than a couple of weeks.

The government seems keen to push the mobile Cabinet meeting in Korat into the spotlight. They even prepared a plan for the media to cover every minister. That plan, though, came under heavy criticism and had to be effectively shelved.

But that hasn’t stopped Prayut from garnering attention; he played around with a tractor and even chatted with cows and frogs. “Please be a female frog in your next life so I can be a frog prince,” he told a frog while observing a village development project.

“You live in the same shed, so don’t fight with each other,” he told some cows as he fed them.

But beyond the metaphors to the animals, it was the local people that the prime minister courted. “I prioritise the northeastern region and holding the mobile Cabinet meeting here will enable me to listen to the people directly. This province is also where I was born,” he told people.

Irrigation management, local economic development and the railway construction project were the key items on the agenda for the Cabinet meeting yesterday, when ministers brainstormed after having observed the situation in 33 areas in the Northeast.

After promising people upcoming development projects, Prayut took the opportunity to size up their mood.

“Who wants an election, put your hands up,” he said, to be greeted by silence from the crowd.

“Don’t be afraid of me. I am always in favour of an election. But we have got only bad people so far because good people didn’t go to vote,” he said. “It’ll be the people’s decision whom they want to vote for. But don’t go back to the wrong guys again.”

With the next general elections still many months away, Prayut appears content to continue to indulge himself in the limelight.

As the party’s so-called “Shadow Cabinet” member for commerce, Warong already knew from talking to people involved in the rice trading that the then-government’s rice-pledging scheme had flaws, not least of which was that it opened doors for corruption both large and small.

Warong was convinced that every rice grain mortgaged under the scheme would be plagued by potential corruption.

“Generally, it was widely perceived that a rice mortgage is corrupt in principle,” he told The Nation. “As the government introduced the scheme to take every grain of rice, it was a sure bet that it [corruption] would happen,” said Warong. “My view was that it’s not farmers who would benefit from the scheme as claimed by Pheu Thai Party, but traders and distributors of rice who would instead.”

And he assumed that there would be flaws in the programme that would inevitably lead to corruption.

Warong decided he had to closely watch how the scheme was rolled out and run. And thus began his “detective” work into the Yingluck government’s rice mortgage scheme as he began to seriously investigate the government-to-government deal with a Chinese firm claiming to represent the government of China.

For months, Warong travelled extensively to meet farmers, rice traders, millers, exporters and many others to study the rice cycle in detail, and organise and test his ideas. He came to understand the rice cycle, dividing it into three stages: rice production, rice stocking and rice distribution, the most problematic part.

Warong focused on monitoring activities involving the second and third stages of the cycle, and eventually stumbled upon irregularities, some due to his team’s efforts, others by luck.

“One day I received a call from some millers who informed me that there would be rice moved from one province to another. So I sent my team to accompany a truck driver for a few days so that they would not be suspected, and they were able to collect evidence for me,” said Warong.

What his team discovered was that some degrading rice was being transported from one silo to another to allegedly benefit from the prices guaranteed under the scheme. One team member was discovered, but he narrowly escaped the scene by telling silo owners that he was with them and had come to check their silos to ensure they would take degra-ding rice from his boss. Recognising the danger of the undercover work, Warong chose men that he could trust who were close to him as they had to be able to keep the secret, he said.

Along the border, irregularities involving the transport of rice from neighbouring countries also took place as poor quality rice was transported across the border in order |to claim benefits from the scheme.

Warong did not hesitate to look into the details after being tipped off by some Thai-Khmer residents who had called him. They also helped film the activities, which showed many trucks transporting rice across the border before ending up at silos inside Thailand.

Warong personally went to Prachin Buri to observe the cross-border transport and confirmed the truth of claims. Along with that evidence on the ground, Warong by chance received related documents and contracts from people he calls “citizens with good faith”. To get the documents without putting informers at risk, Warong drove past the sources without stopping while they threw the papers into his car.

“It was just like a detective movie,” recalled Warong, who later got help from friends to decode the documents. He then used that information to kick-start a motion in Parliament to expose irregularities in the scheme.

After he and his team put together the jigsaw puzzle of evidence, Warong says he found corroborating details about alleged irregularities in the scheme. In particular, he said the documents gave him insights into rice distribution and trade that he saw as allegedly linking irregularities to government ministers and to their boss, the then-prime minister Yingluck Shinawatra.

To this day, Warong does not talk about many of the details around his detective work.

“I must say it was a dangerous task,” he said. “Everything had to be kept in secret and done in a secret manner. Even today, I have not yet disclosed all of my informants as they would definitely be targeted if exposed.”

And now? It is up to the court to rule after seeing all the documentary evidence, and hearing all the witnesses that have appeared before the judges, he concluded.

AUTHORITIES have employed different measures to block supporters of former prime minister Yingluck Shinawatra from appearing at the Supreme Court on Friday to hear the reading of the verdict in the negligence case against her, a key red-shirt leader said yesterday.

Thida Thavornseth, a leading opposition figure and former chairwoman of the United Front for Democracy against Dictatorship (UDD), said strict scrutiny and restrictions were being applied to Yingluck’s supporters “all the way” – when they are at home, on the road to Bangkok and even after arriving at the court.

Meanwhile, Prime Minister Prayut Chan-o-cha yesterday asked members of the public if they would allow unrest to occur after the verdicts on Friday, which will be read in separate cases against Yingluck and officials from her government.

“If the Thai people all over the country find it acceptable for unrest to happen again, I will not stand in the way,” he said.

Prayut added that it would be the responsibility of all people, including members of the media, to set the future course for Thailand and to make sure that the country moved forward peacefully.

The prime minister was responding to a reporter’s question whether his government had planned any measures “in case of an emergency” after the court’s verdict.

Prayut was speaking at the Suranaree University of Technology in Nakhon Ratchasima after chairing a mobile Cabinet meeting.

Thida yesterday claimed officials from the defence and interior ministries had been deployed to suppress red-shirt activists in the provinces from travelling to the Supreme Court for the Yingluck case verdict.

“Activists literally in all areas are being visited and are receiving phone calls from authorities who ask them not to make any moves. People who wish to go to the court must travel on their own,” she said. “But it doesn’t end there. All the public transport – be it passenger vans or shuttle buses – have been made unavailable for people who want to rent them for trips to Chaeng Wattana [where the court is located].”

Although she said she thought people in the provinces would not travel to Bangkok until today or tomorrow, Thida added that she was confident there would be checkpoints conducting searches along the way as an attempt to stop people from travelling.

She added that she expected measures against Yingluck supporters outside the court as well, and what concerned her the most was the limited area at the court provided for red-shirt supporters. “Only 1,500 square metres will be provided for the crowd. I’m not sure it will be sufficient. And if by accident the crowd oversteps the area into the street, will they get arrested?” Thida asked. She added that she expected at least 10,000 people to turn up, and such a large number could not be accommodated in the space provided.

All the measures showed that the government was overreacting, which would ultimately raise the political temperature unnecessarily, the UDD leader warned.

People had been provoked and were tempted to show their support for Yingluck, especially when the government told them not to, Thida said, adding that if the government thought that its treatment of Yingluck was proper, authorities should not be afraid of anything.

Other red-shirt leaders and Pheu Thai Party politicians in the Northeast said yesterday they would travel to Bangkok individually to offer moral support to Yingluck. However, they denied organising free trips to the capital for the purpose.

Former Pheu Thai MP Thanik Maseepitak yesterday said there were many Yingluck sympathisers, although he did not think many people would travel all the way to Bangkok.

He claimed that military officers had recently visited “target villages” in the Northeast and told local community leaders to make sure residents did not travel to Bangkok at this time.

In response to concerns about possible violence, the politician said such incidents could happen after the reading of the verdict but he did not think it would be instigated by red-shirt supporters.

“A third party may start violence and blame it on the red shirts. The hardcore red shirts now have no potential to carry out violence,” he said.

Meanwhile, security checkpoints manned by police and military officers as well as administrative officials are being set up starting today on the Friendship Highway in Northeastern provinces.

A security source in Khon Kaen said that given recent “conversations” with red-shirt leaders in the Northeast, authorities’ latest estimate put the number of Yingluck supporters who would arrive at the court on Friday at a little more than 1,000.

In a related development, Supreme Court officials said yesterday that all communication devices would be banned in the courtroom during Friday’s reading of the verdict.

Yingluck will attend the court’s verdict reading on Friday, her lawyer Norrawit Larlaeng said yesterday. “She is well prepared, whatever the verdict will be,” he said, adding that her legal team has also been ready for “every possibility”.

The former prime minister has been in good spirits due to the strong moral support from many people, the lawyer said.

The story started circulating on Monday when he asked people to pay attention to government updates rather than to gossipy news.

“Don’t just care about which stars are together or breaking up,” he told locals during his field trip in Nakhon Ratchasima.

“It [celebrity gossip] has nothing to do with you. You want them to get back together, even when your own husband leaves you. Let me know if your husband does that because it breaks the law. A [new] law says that you must have only a wife, and no ‘sidechicks’. And it is on the way,” he continued.

While only monogamous marriage is recognised in Thai law, the Penal Code does not automatically punish the act of adultery, unless a complaint is filed by the damaged party.

But if committed by state officials, adultery is still subject to punishment, according to bureaucratic regulations.

His remarks, unsurprisingly, caused an Internet sensation because it would be the first law of its kind in the Kingdom if it were actually realised.

On Tuesday, however, Prayut denied the existence of the said law, saying that he had merely been joshing around with the locals the previous day.

“I’m actually kind and funny,” he said to reporters. “When I’m serious, you think I’m being funny. And when I’m actually funny, you make it in the other way round. I don’t get this. I just wanted to entertain people from my lengthy talk.”

However, like “those politicians” that Prayut looks down on, the premier always manages to turn the spotlight on himself wherever he goes.

His recent two-day trip to Nakhon Ratchasima for the mobile Cabinet meeting is no exception, filled as it was with his roller-coaster talks full of jokes, sarcasm, flattery and no-nonsense utterances.

“Please miss us, ‘der’”, Prayut told Korat residents, using Northeast-style lingo to catch their attention. “We soldiers can’t lie. We have to keep our promises to the people. Have you listened to my song that says ‘we won’t take too long?’

“But still, we remain here [in power]. We just follow it step-by-step,” the premier said, hinting at the junta’s “road map to democracy”, which has had at least three detours.

“If I can go, I will. Just don’t shoo me away. The more you do, the more I’ll stay on,” he said.

Since taking power after the 2014 coup, Prayut has enjoyed his one-man show at least twice a week – the Tuesday Cabinet meeting and his talk show every Friday. Occasionally, he gets ruffled by the media and makes himself scarce, but that never lasts longer than a couple of weeks.

The government seems keen to push the mobile Cabinet meeting in Korat into the spotlight. They even prepared a plan for the media to cover every minister. That plan, though, came under heavy criticism and had to be effectively shelved.

But that hasn’t stopped Prayut from garnering attention; he played around with a tractor and even chatted with cows and frogs. “Please be a female frog in your next life so I can be a frog prince,” he told a frog while observing a village development project.

“You live in the same shed, so don’t fight with each other,” he told some cows as he fed them.

But beyond the metaphors to the animals, it was the local people that the prime minister courted. “I prioritise the northeastern region and holding the mobile Cabinet meeting here will enable me to listen to the people directly. This province is also where I was born,” he told people.

Irrigation management, local economy development and the railway construction project were the key items on the agenda for the Cabinet meeting yesterday, when ministers brainstormed after having observed the situation in 33 areas in the Northeast.

After promising people upcoming development projects, Prayut took the opportunity to size up their mood.

“Who wants an election, put your hands up,” he said, to be greeted by silence from the crowd.

“Don’t be afraid of me. I am always in favour of an election. But we have got only bad people so far because good people didn’t go to vote,” he said. “It’ll be the people’s decision whom they want to vote for. But don’t go back to the wrong guys again.”

With the next general elections still many months away, Prayut appears content to continue to indulge himself in the limelight.

The premier and Government Spokesperson Lt-General Sansern Kaewkamnerd had previously locked horns with the media after Sansern asked them ahead of the Cabinet meeting last week for “cooperation” by reporting the work of Cabinet members as they tended to focus heavily on the PM.

Sansern, who is also head of the Public Relations Department, said he viewed the work done by other Cabinet members as also worth disseminating to the public, so that the public could learn more about the government’s work.

His proposition was slammed by some media members as intervening in the media’s work.

Prayut said he could not however accept this excuse, stressing that while the media tended to claim that they work for the public interest, they apparently fail to report on the government’s work when asked to do so.

He said he had not asked the media to “advertise” the government or try to convince people to love him, as he did not like “sweet words”, but he merely wished the media would cover what his Cabinet members had been working on, so that people would better understand the situation.

If the media failed to deliver this information, would the public interest be truly served in the way that they claim to pursue, he asked during the media interview.

The tense mood during the session seemed to subside, however, when he walked towards the group of media representatives and took photos with them.