Updated: Thammanat’s never ending lies I

Convicted heroin dealer and deputy agriculture minister Thammanat Phrompao never ceases to amaze. Since his crime and prison term in Australia was revealed, his approach to the media, parliament and the Thai people is to lie to all about everything. We understand that, these days, members of powerful elites are prone to lying and often get away with it as political cynicism becomes ubiquitous (leaving aside, for the moment, the idealism of Thai students).

Yet Thammanat’s lies are so obvious that it also seems he thinks Thais are all morons or, as with all military royalists, he feels suitably protected and untouchable.

Convicted heroin smuggler

In a speech to parliament, the man who was arrested, entered a guilty plea and served time in an Australian jail continues to “insist [ie. lie] he never pled guilty [lie] and served jail time for drug charges in Australia [lie], despite evidence that he did.”

Thammanat is a protected species. He’s been protected by the regime. But some suspect he has higher support. Ask who might be doing this and one might look to his pleas to police in Australia.

Thammanat’s latest denial came in the no-confidence debate in parliament. The crook declared: “I did not admit to importing, exporting, producing, or selling heroin…”.

The Future Forward Party responded: “Whoops! Dropped some files…. Giving out files of evidence to rip off Thammanat’s mask, who lacks the qualifications of being an MP.” The Party “published a court ruling it obtained from Australia on its Twitter account, confirming Thammanat’s guilty plea and jail sentence for heroin trafficking.”

In parliament, the “opposition said Thammanat’s criminal record effectively barred him from serving in the Cabinet…”.

Going full-on bonkers seems to be increasingly common among royalist dolts, with Thammanat accusing “the Future Forward of misleading translation” of the documents it released. He declared: “Your translation which says that I had confessed to trafficking charges is not true because there is nowhere in a certified translation that says I did.”

As he’s done before, he continued to make stuff up, saying: “That charge [heroin smuggling] only carries a life sentence, so if I had been sentenced as the debater says, I must have died and reborn again.”

His brain has certainly died. In Australia: “Importing or exporting a border controlled drug is a Commonwealth offence and the penalties that can be imposed are found in the Commonwealth Crimes Act. Given that the vast majority of offenders sentenced for drug importation receive a jail sentence, we have not included details of other penalties that the court may (although unlikely) impose.” There are also many aggravating or mitigating factors that courts take into account, such as when Thammanat provided useful information to police.

In Australia, the maximum penalty for importing commercial quantities of heroin – as Thammanat did – is life imprisonment. The average sentence is around 6-10 years.

With the opposition attacking Thammanat, the regime’s Palang Pracharath Party tried to shut the opposition down and prevent the documents being used in parliament. A case of political criminals defending convicted criminals?

As a mafia figure, Thammanat claims “he had already gone through the vetting process and maintained that his eligibility is not affected since he is not being prosecuted by the Thai judiciary.” That is also a sideways admission of his crime in Australia, used as a half-arsed defense. The criminal figure then went hyper-nationalist:

Thailand was never a colony…. The debater is speaking as if we are surrendering our sovereignty to Australia. The reference to a court order from another country is not applicable to the Thai government.

Presumably that allows all kinds of international crimes not to apply in Thailand.

And on he went: “Thammanat also said he only served eight months behind bars, spending the rest of his sentence “on a farm with a lightened punishment because they let me use my military experience to train kids and farm.”

We don’t think we have heard this before. Earlier Thammanat claimed he worked for a sanitary-ware store. That seems to have gone down the toilet and we guess he’s now turning a rural prison into a “farm.” One wonders how it could be that the Australian corrections system would allow convicted drug dealers to “train kids.”

The lies flow like sewerage through sanitary-ware.

Update: As before, when he said he’d sue journalists – and didn’t – Thammanat has threatened to sue “MPs of the disbanded Future Forward Party (FFP) for making false accusations against him during the censure debate.” This time he claims “he would file complaints against the speakers in Muang district of Phayao, his home province, after the censure debate finished.” Given that he’s a mafia-like figure in his area, he probably has influence there with judges and police. Based on track record, this threat is simply to put people off his trail of deceit. One court document is clear: