Långt fängelsestraff för Sondhi

Läste pappersupplagan av Bangkok Post nu på morgonen där nu dom fallit för Sondhi och han är nu i fängelse 20 år framåt.

http://www.bangkokpost.com

En viktig dom som visar att rika och framförallt inflytelserika i Thailand numera inte kan smita undan straff för sina brott. Det är nya tider Thailand nu...

Intressant krönika om Sondhi i dagens Bangkok Post. Särskild läsrekommendation till forumets  Thaksin-kickers.

http://www.bangkokpost.com/opinion/opinion/1083288/a-complicated-man

Sondhi's fall was different from many other businessmen. He planned it meticulously, treating employees as rubbish even as he set up funds and accounts through Hong Kong shell companies. Then he took the axe to the employees who had made him a "media mogul". Then he declared bankruptcy so they couldn't sue.

Of course cheating and literally impoverishing employees doesn't earn 20 years in the joint. Sondhi faked his paperwork, hoodwinked his directors and cheated his way to a loan of 1.078 billion baht from Krungthai Bank, and that is why the judges ordered him locked up immediately last Tuesday.

Essentially, Sondhi was unable to maintain his lifestyle and pursue his business goals -- later his societal and political goals -- on his income. So he stole.

It's certain that he met and entertained, and at one point quite handsomely enriched the future Lord Voldemort na Dubai, a man Sondhi alternately stroked and punched.

"I realised he was a free rider," he wrote in his autobiography One Must Know How to Lose Before Knowing How to Win. He told the tale of how the man from Chiang Mai bought stock in Sondhi's monopoly Nokia mobile phone shop at 10 baht, then sold it weeks later when the stock price ballooned by 2,500%.

But the book was written after the PAD was formed, after the die was cast, after the enmity was assured and after any objectivity was gone.

When the complete Book of Sondhi is written, it must examine how involved Thaksin was in Sondhi's crooked loan from Krungthai. How much the up-and-coming prime minister leaned on Krungthai to help his then-friend in 2000 is murky.