Blaming Thaksin and his minions
When faced with political problems associated with the sufficiency economy projects, how woudl the Democrat Party reduce the heat? Blame Thaksin of course. And that seems to be the plan.
In the Bangkok Post (23 August 2009: “Thaksin graft flaws echoed in new plan”) it is reported that Auditor-General, Thaksin foe and supporter of the 2006 coup and the military regime Jaruvan Maintaka is on the job.
She says that the Democrat Party government’s suffiiciency economy projects seem to be corrupt, but that this is a “similar pattern of alleged corruption … in the Thaksin administration’s village development fund.”
Jaruvan doesn’t reveal anything about the Democrat’s scheme that is new, but points to the Thaksin government’s SML scheme that began aalmost a decade ago. Moreover, Jaruvan sees Thaksin acolytes as responsible for the Democrat government’s corruption, alleging that “the conduct of some staff who are closely associated with the old power clique.” The ever vigilent Jaruvan says: “They used to work on similar schemes. We are collecting information…”.
According to Jaruvan, this siphoning of state budgets goes back four to five years “as corruption mechanisms were established.” It is the fault of previous regimes!
All of a sudden, Jaruvan “unveiled the findings of the probe into the SML project, which were handed over to the secretary-general to the prime minister in August last year. According to the report, the SML scheme failed to achieve its goals and reap anticipated benefits. The villages did not follow the project’s procedures involving bidding, book-keeping and contract signing.”
PPT has no doubt that there was corruption under previous regimes. In this case – the SML/village fund – the value of the corruption is said to have “amounted to 16.196 million baht.” If this isn’t mis-reporting, then the amount is remarkably low in a nationwide scheme.
The amounts in the sufficiency economy project are potentially far more, but if official associated with previous governments are blamed, the Democrats may smell sweeter. A neat plan, but can the Democrats and Abhisit deflect the criticisms that seem inevitable?
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