THE owner of an electrical company hired by a subcontractor of the State Audit building that collapsed in an earthquake on March 28 said in a video clip shared online that that he suffered a loss of over 3 million baht after working on the unfinished building for a year and not been fully paid, Naewna newspaper said today (Apr. 6).
Mr. Thitipong, or Chang Bird, said he accepted the job from a subcontractor of ITD-CREC joint venture (Italian-Thai Development Plc and Chinese Railway Number 10 Engineering Group Company), the contractor that was building this building, without a contract being signed because this was a big state project worth billions of baht and he trusted them.
He was assigned to oversee the entire electrical system and brought in 80 workers to do the work from January 2024 till January 2025.
Initially the company paid him normally but from June last year onwards they started to either pay less or not pay at all, such as 500,000 baht per month only paying 250,000 baht, saying they would pay up at the next job.
In this video clip he also ran another video of an ITD representative saying all subcontractors had been paid but Thitipong said he does not know whether they were fully paid or not but he had not been paid a single baht of over 3 million baht owed to him. This led to him having to mortgage his house, car and land because he did not have cash for payments and now had to bear interest burden.
On Feb. 19 he and some other companies working for subcontractors went to this building in the hope of meeting the Auditor-General who was to come over that day but instead met the project manager of the company he took the job from, a representative of ITD and Mr. Lin Yang, the CREC project supervisor.
The conclusion of talks that day was that CREC would deduct 5,795,613 million baht from the 23rd payment to the subcontractor to pay the six companies owed this total sum. However from that day till today he has not received a single baht.
He added that there are other companies who took jobs from the subcontractor and have not been paid with the total owed being over 10 million baht.
When asked about the condition of the State Audit building Thitipong said when he started working he saw people from the Office of the Auditor-General and CREC coming in to inspect the project many times.
However he became suspicious because when he set up camp to work there he found that the walls were fragile, with the cement panels falling off and inside hollow, not solid like normal cement.
When hammering it did not stick well but he did not know what caused it.
He added that he did not know whether it was good or bad luck as he took his workers out of this project in Feb. because if they had stayed on they might be stuck in the rubble.
Today subcontractors are to hold talks with ITD-CREC about outstanding payments and he still hoped to get his money back but no one had contacted him since he last talked to them.
CAPTION:
The State Audit building that collapsed during the March 28 earthquake and rescue work continuing there. Photos: Naewna
Also read: 52 buildings shut down nationwide after quake
\Collapsed building’s Chinese contractor, steel supplier linked to 37-company network
Chinese embassy says don’t slander Chinese companies
Trio of coalition partners mutually compete for southern MP seat
Foxes very likely to be relegated again
US stocks plunge, suffer biggest losses since Covid-19 crash amid escalating trade war
