By Thai Newsroom Reporters
PRIME MINISTER SRETTHA Thavisin today (July 16) declined to respond to rumours that the fugitive former prime minister Yingluck Shinawatra has been seeking royal pardon so she could return home sooner or later from self-exile abroad.
Srettha smiled and walked away when asked by reporters at Government House to comment on speculation that Yingluck, sister of de facto Pheu Thai boss Thaksin Shinawatra, has been looking for royal pardon to grant her, among others, on occasion of His Majesty King Maha Vajiralongkorn’s 72th birth anniversary which falls on July 28.
The Pheu Thai-attached Srettha, largely viewed as personally close to Yingluck, has remained non-committal to hush-hush moves on the part of her billionaire, powerful brother to manage to bring her back home after seven years in self-exile overseas.
Thaksin has earlier said his sister would probably join next year’s Songkran festival in their home province of Chiang Mai.
The former woman prime minister who had been ousted in the 2014 coup orchestrated by then army chief-turned-prime minister Prayut Chan-o-cha had been sentenced by the Supreme Court to five years in prison due to duty-negligence charges pertaining to a previous Pheu Thai government’s corruption-riddled rice subsidy project. The court verdict was delivered in her absentia after she had escaped a week earlier in 2017.
Thaksin who had been deposed from power in the 2006 coup by then army chief Sonthi Boonyaratkalin had fled the country and remained in self-exile abroad for 17 years until he returned last August without being literally put behind bars for a single day to otherwise serve a royal pardon-curtailed, one year in jail due to court-convicted power abuses perpetrated during his previous premiership.
But the de facto Pheu Thai boss/convict at large who had been granted contentious double-standard privileges of staying for six months at Police Hospital for mystery-shrouded “critical illnesses” and been given parole last February is scheduled to be legally freed next month.
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Top and Front Page: Former prime minister Yingluck Shinawatra. Both photos: Thai Rath
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