By Thai Newsroom Reporters
DE FACTO PHEU THAI BOSS Thaksin Shinawatra who had been released on parole earlier this year was today (Aug. 17) given complete freedom among 50,000 royally-pardoned convicts nationwide.
The royal pardon was today declared in a royal decree with immediate effect to the extent that the billionaire, politically powerful Thaksin be one of the 50,000 freed convicts including inmates and those who may have been earlier released on parole.
Thaksin had practically served a royal pardon-curtailed, one-year term without being literally put behind bars at Bangkok Remand Prison and been contentiously granted privileges to stay for a six-month period at Police Hospital where his “critical illnesses’ had been categorically alleged by his critics as a fake-out until he was released on parole last February.
Given today’s royal pardon for those convicts among whom the de facto Pheu Thai boss was one, his legal freedom was finally provided sooner than the earlier scheduled Aug. 31.
Thaksin’s legal freedom occurred one day after his daughter/Pheu Thai leader Paetongtarn Shinawatra had been voted prime minister by a majority of coalition MPs plus some renegades from the opposition bloc to replace former real estate mogul-turned-prime minister Srettha Thavisin who had been deposed of power by the Constitutional Court.
The de facto Pheu Thai boss had allegedly played a pivotal part in the power play since he returned from 17-year self-exile abroad last August by manipulating the dumping of the Move Forward as the largest elected party following last year’s general election from a Pheu Thai-led coalition government and allocation of cabinet portfolios among coalition partners.
Thaksin’s next challenge was about how soon he could manipulate, either in hush-hush or overt fashion, to bring home his fugitive sister/former prime minister Yingluck Shinawatra who was deposed in the 2014 coup and has been living in self-exile overseas. Yingluck had allegedly quietly pushed for the court-impeached Srettha’s one-year rise to power.
Last Wednesday, leading figures of all coalition partners, namely the Pheu Thai, Bhumjaithai, Palang Pracharath and Ruam Thai Sang Chart, scrambled to the de facto Pheu Thai boss’s Chan Song Lah residence for an urgent meeting with successful schemes to keep the Pheu Thai core of the current coalition and to name Paetongtarn the country’s 31st prime minister and second woman prime minister after her aunt Yingluck.
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Top and Front Page: De facto Pheu Thai boss Thaksin Shinawatra. Photos: Thai Rath
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