Corruption, Yingluck and rice scheme

The National Anti-Corruption Commission (NACC) and the Office of the Attorney-General (OAG) were last week locked in a face-off over a historic case that could have far-reaching consequences for the country.

The NACC’s investigation of the rice price-pledging scheme found that Yingluck was guilty of negligence in not halting the project despite various warnings from the NACC and National Audit Council. There was also corruption “every step of the way” in the implementation of the project.

The probe alleged that the country had suffered a loss of Bt500,000 million as a result – and that somebody must take responsibility for the misuse of public funds.

The OAG studied the NACC report and declared last week that it was full of loopholes. It wasn’t going to indict Yingluck and, following legal procedure, would ask the NACC to form a joint committee to look into the case again to determine whether there was sufficient evidence to press charges against the former premier.

The NACC’s spokesman, Vicha Mahakhun, who also headed the probe, was plainly exasperated. He publicly challenged the OAG’s competence and suggested that the Attorney-General’s Office might be suffering low morale.

The OAG posed several questions suggesting the NACC might not have done a thorough job. One of the questions was whether the NACC had tried hard enough to find out what Yingluck had done after she had been given warnings about possible corruption.

The big, and highly controversial question, posed by the OAG was: Did the premier have the right to roll back a scheme that the Pheu Thai Party had pledged to the people before the election? In other words, can politicians renege on their election-platform promises once they are elected to run the country?

Also, the OAG wanted the anti-corruption commission to provide more detailed evidence to support its “corruption-at-every-step-of-the-way” allegation: Just how did corruption take place at all those steps?

The chief public prosecutor also faulted the NACC in citing the Thailand Development Research Institute report on the issue without providing the full report. “There was only the cover page of the research in the report submitted to the OAG,” it said.

The NACC hit back, arguing that it had covered all the areas of the case and that perhaps the OAG wasn’t paying attention to the main points of the issue. One senior official from the anti-graft agency pointed out that the probe was focused on Yingluck’s failure to halt the corruption, rather than on the detail of the corrupt practices themselves.

The existing law provides for a joint panel in instances where there are questions about a particular case. In this case, both sides will nominate their representatives to thrash out any remaining questions before deciding whether to proceed with the allegations.

But even if the joint effort fails to come to a consensus, the NACC is still empowered by law to file charges directly with the court anyway. And time is running out. The joint committee must be formed in 14 days, after which it has 14 more days to reach a conclusion on whether indictment is possible.

Quite apart from the legal arguments, analysts will probably point to the highly political nature of the issue. That was proved almost instantly when one of Yingluck’s close aides, former deputy premier Surapong Tovichakchaikul, came out immediately to accuse the anti-corruption agency of being biased against the previous government, adding that some NACC board members had prejudged the case anyway.

Whatever the outcome of the joint probe, the outcome of the proceedings will be crucial to the political future of Yingluck – and, by implication, the Pheu Thai Party.

The rice scheme was one of the major vote-getting platforms in Pheu Thai’s election campaign. The idea was to woo farmers’ votes. That mission failed miserably. What’s worse, it has wrecked Thailand’s rice export market with an impossibly high pledging price.

The widespread corruption in the implementation of the project was the last straw – and no matter how Yingluck tried to distance herself from the fraudulent practices, it’s hard to see how she can avoid being held responsible for such a major political debacle on a national scale.