By Thai Newsroom Reporters
THE ELECTION COMMISSION is being pressed to suspend its secretary-general Sawaeng Boonmee from officially performing, pending probe into last year’s senatorial rigging scandals about which he has reportedly done nothing as yet.
A group of reserve senators plans to call on the Election Commission at the headquarters tomorrow (March 12) to immediately suspend Sawaeng from working as the secretary-general of the polling agency since he had evidently failed to stop an alleged electoral fraud among a large number of senatorial contestants including as many as 138 winning ones.
Sawaeng has been accused of unduly allowing a number of senatorial candidates to bring paper scripts into the polling units as part of the alleged bloc-voting conspiracy perpetrated at the national level of the triple-tiered, complicated elections.
The petitioners would insist that the secretary-general be suspended from work until the ongoing, in-depth investigation into the bloc-voting, vote-buying and money-laundering plots has been finished by the Department of Special Investigation which has been handling them as a special case.
The DSI has not only tracked online transfers of money worth some 400 to 500 million baht in cash payoffs from politically-connected rigging organizers to those senatorial candidates including the winning ones but also some 10 million baht in monthly pay worth of the taxpayers’ money for persons formally hired as “advisers” to the 138 senators to a yet-unnamed partisan person.
Each senator is legally provided with five advisers to work at their command in return for 15,000 baht in monthly pay each, plus one expert, one specialist and one secretary.
But none of those “advisers”, viewed as persons of such an honourable position only assumed by name, has practically done anything to earn the taxpayers’ money to which the suspected senators literally have access to allegedly transfer online to the partisan person in question.
In addition to encountering criminal charges pertaining to such electoral rigging, vote-buying and money-laundering conspiracies, those senators who may be formally suspected by the DSI could possibly have a sum of 113,560 baht in monthly pay each, plus all their personal and matrimonial assets seized and withheld in retroactive fashion at the orders of court, pending court proceedings and subsequent rulings.
However, some of the suspected senators who have been more or less associated with the Bhumjaithai, the second largest coalition partner, albeit in discreet, hush-hush fashion, have categorically dismissed the allegations and planned to take legal action against Justice Minister/Prachachart leader Thavi Sodsong who directly takes command of the DSI.
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Top and Front Page: Election Commission Secretary-General Sawaeng Boonmee. Photos: Thai Rath
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