Old guard is the new guard

Earlier this month, along with North Korea and Indonesia, Thailand’s National Anti-Doping Organization was declared non-compliant by the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) meaning it was “ineligible to be awarded the right to host regional, continental or world championships during the suspension.” In addition, no representative from Thailand could “sit as members of the boards on committees …[the country was] reinstated or for a period of one year, whichever is longer.”

Importantly, the ban also means that athletes from Thailand can only compete in regional, continental and world championships without their national flags.

WADA said “Thailand’s non-compliance stems from a failure to fully implement the 2021 Anti-Doping Code.”

Thailand’s peak body, the Sports Authority of Thailand, rushed to cover its exposed posterior. As far as we can tell, no one took responsibility for this failure.

The Sports Authority of Thailand is a state enterprise under the Ministry of Tourism and Sport and, like many state bodies, has long been something of a sinecure for military types, senior bureaucrats and their cronies. It provides meeting fees and lots of travel and other freebies.

Gen Prawit Wongsuwan is the deputy prime minister responsible for the Sports Authority of Thailand (SAT) and sits on its board. He’s also president of the Thailand Swimming Association, although we are unsure that he floats in water even if his power means he floats above all manner of troubles.

Of course, such higher ups can never be held responsible for major cock-ups like this one with WADA.

Indeed, under the military-backed regime dumb-asses are rewarded. As the Bangkok Post recently reported, Gen Prawit Wongsuwan “was re-elected unopposed as president of the National Olympic Committee of Thailand (NOCT)…”. The aged Prawit “will be in office for a second term which ends after the 2024 Olympics in Paris.”

At the same meeting, other near-dead and equally useless tools were rewarded for loyalty, with “secretary-general Charouck Arirachakaran, 89, and former president Gen Yutthasak Sasiprabha … appointed as honorary presidents for life.”

Nepotism is never far away when Gen Prawit is waddling about, and “Gen Wit Devahastin na Ayudhya, Prawit’s close aide, succeeds Maj Gen Charouck as secretary-general.” Gen Wit is also chairman of Prawit’s Palang Pracharat Party’s strategic committee.

Like all elections, the NOCT “election” of Gen Prawit and 24 other people to the NOCT executive was rigged: “Eligible voters unanimously agreed to their nominations without casting ballots. The 25 elected executive members then selected Prawit as the NOCT president.”

Other executive members included the fabulously wealthy former police boss Pol. Gen Somyos Pumpanmuang – accused in several corruption cases – and well-connected billionaire Harald Link.

In no are of administration is a “new guard” permitted. It is all the old guys grabbing all they can get.

Obscene inequality

Agence France-Presse has an interesting report on the fabulously wealthy in Thailand. It begins by noting that Thailand “has 50 billionaires – ninth in global rankings – [while] 14.5 million people live on welfare…”.

It adds that wealth – or inequality – was “a hot election issue this year…”. In fact, PPT can’t think of an election this century where the inequality of wealth has not been an issue. Thailand has long been at the top of Southeast Asia’s inequality rankings, going back to when estimates were first made in the early 1960s.

The hook for the AFP story is the absurdity of the ridiculously rich playing and watching polo that witnesses “teams of jodhpur-clad Argentines and moneyed Asians gallop onto the flawless field in Chonburi as spectators spill from a pavilion – glasses of champagne in hand – for the final chukka.”

The so-called sport of kings is obscenely expensive limited to royals and the obscenely rich. We have mentioned it in a couple of posts. As well as the King Power Srivaddhanaprabha family others in jodhpurs include naturalized billionaire Harald Link. Polo allows Thailand’s hugely wealthy to hobnob globally with royals and the obscenely rich. That includes the British royals, Brian Xu, of Shanghai Marco Stationery and Sultan Abdullah Sultan Ahmad Shah now the Malaysian king.

The article notes that Thailand is home to polo because “royalty, wealth and elite networks are cross-hatched into the social fabric.”

Interestingly, the article cites Kobsak Pootrakool of the junta’s  Phalang Pracharath Party, lamenting the huge inequality in the country. He states that “[t]he top 20 per cent own 80 per cent of wealth…”. He should know as most of the very wealthy support his side of politics.

It’s actually even more skewed that that. The Credit Suisse Global Wealth Report had 1% of the richest Thais controlling 66.9% of the country’s wealth in 2018. And that probably doesn’t include a calculation for the obscenely rich monarch.

In contrast, as the report observes, “[m]ore than 14.5 million Thais qualify for welfare, with most of them earning less than US$1,000 a year.”

The report also notes that a feature of Thailand’s politics is the military coup, usually “with the support of much of the Bangkok-based elite, who underpin the kingdom’s sharp hierarchy and bristle at economic and political challenges from below.”

It is wryly observed that “[c]ash … cascades down family-run businesses, whose monopolies are inoculated against competition by friends and family in politics and generous tax breaks, while generals sit on company boards.”

The military’s task is to ensure the poor do not rise. When they have, it has jailed, beaten and murdered them.

Future Forward’s Thanathorn Juangroongruangkit, himself a scion of huge wealth, declares: “Inequality won’t be solved … unless that clot of power and money is removed,” warning that inequality is “a threat to stability in the country.”

We doubt that many in the polo set and their hi-so brethren care much at all, recognizing that their wealth depends on the state’s largess and the capacity to exploit workers at will and destroy the environment.

That allows the obscenely wealthy to party obscenely, collect palatial condominiums and super cars by the score, travel the world and buy a “justice” denied the poor.

Thailand’s billionaires in 2019

Forbes has released its 2019 billionaires list. It includes 31 Thai individuals and families.

To make matters a little easier, we have constructed a table where all persons with the same family name have been combined and we have listed just the top 10.

That aggregating mainly impacts the Chearavanont family who have several scions listed this year. Putting all of those individuals together reveals how vast the clan’s wealth is, expanding at a rate that means it rivals the king for economic power.

But, as usual, the king is missing from the list. This year that does seem rather odd as laws have been changed to make King Vajiralongkorn the personal owner of all crown property. Essentially, that is as it has been for a long time, but the current king just got rid of the quasi-legal mechanism to allow the government and the Crown Property Bureau to protest that the king’s property was not really his.

That charade is now gone, so Forbes should list him at number 1. A rough estimate of the king’s wealth would be at least $60 billion (using data from 2005, and estimating changes in stock and land values since then).

The table reveals how the top 3, including the king and his crown property, have moved well ahead of the rest in terms of measurable wealth. We do acknowledge that the fabulously wealthy are adept at hiding their personal wealth, so all those listed are probably a lot wealthier than these figures allow.