By Thai Newsroom Reporters
DE FACTO PHEU THAI BOSS-cum-convict on parole Thaksin Shinawatra is anticipated to leave Bangkok for Chiang Mai next week to stay there for a few days, according to a partisan source.
The politically powerful, privileged Thaksin will fly a private jet from the capital to his northern home province on Mar. 14 to visit his relatives and pay homage to a stupa containing remains of his forebears.
The de facto Pheu Thai boss has planned to stay in Chiang Mai until Mar. 16 and fly back to Bangkok on the same day, the partisan source said.
However, Prime Minister Srettha Thavisin is scheduled to leave for Chiang Mai on Mar. 15 and proceed to pay an official visit to Payao on Mar. 16.
Thaksin, who was granted parole after he had spent a six-month period at Police Hospital in lieu of Bangkok Remand Prison where he had been originally meant to be literally put behind bars for a curtailed, one-year sentence, is more or less expected to revive the popularity of the ruling Pheu Thai among Chiang Mai constituents though most of the 10 MP seats for the northern province had been won by the Move Forward in last year’s election.
Meanwhile, deposed prime minister Yingluck Shinawatra is largely believed to follow in the footsteps of her “sickly” brother Thaksin to return home from self-exile abroad without being literally put behind bars.
The former woman prime minister who had been sentenced to five years in jail for convicted negligence of duty pertaining to a previous Pheu Thai government’s rice subsidy project is more or less speculated to come back either after Songkran festival next month or after August 22 – the date on which her brother will have finished his one-year sentence without literally spending a single day in jail.
It will be very unlikely, if not downright impossible, for Yingluck to come back only to be thrown in jail, given the remarkable precedent in which Thaksin had managed to keep himself from jail, according to the partisan source who only spoke on condition of anonymity.
Without a secret deal having been earlier made between Thaksin and the powers-that-be to the extent that his sister’s ultimate freedom be concretely assured, she would by no means seek to return home at all, the partisan source said.
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Top and Front Page: De facto Pheu Thai boss Thaksin Shinawatra. Both photos: Thai Rath
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