High cost of royal security

The Business Times has an AFP report that states:

Thailand plans to allocate more than US$251 million for monarchy “security” in the 2020 budget, a hike of more than 13 per cent year-on-year, according to figures confirmed by a government spokesperson on Thursday.

That’s significant, especially as the king and son, his main wife and concubine seem to spend a lot of time out of the country. Perhaps the figure includes overseas security as well, but we don’t know.

At present exchange rates, the USD figure is about ‭7,690,640,000‬ baht. The last official figure we saw was for 2019, at the Budget Bureau in the late 2019 publication “Thailand’s Budget in Brief,” for 2019. In that, the budget for National Security, the amount allocated for the monarchy was 5,651,000,000 baht. We are not sure if our figures are those used by AFP, but if they are, then the increase is ‭2,039,640,000‬ or more than 36%.