Former Thai PM Yingluck Shinawatra impeached over rice plan

Thailand’s legislators have voted to impeach former prime minister Yingluck Shinawatra and ban her from politics for five years. The vote relates to her involvement in a controversial rice subsidy scheme. Earlier on Friday, the attorney general also announced that Yingluck, the kingdom’s first female premier and the sister of former leader Thaksin Shinawatra, would face criminal charges and up to ten years over her role in the same scheme. She was toppled from office by a controversial court ruling shortly before the army staged a coup in May 2014. If found guilty by the junta-stacked parliament hearing her impeachment case, she faces a five-year ban from politics.

We agree that the case substantiates a criminal indictment charge against Yingluck.

Surasak Threerattrakul, Director-General of the Office of the Attorney General

Experts say the impeachment and criminal charges are the latest attempt by the country’s royalist elite, and its army backers, to nullify the political influence of the Shinawatras, whose parties have won every election since 2001. Both Thaksin and Yingluck are loathed by many Thais in the upper and middle classes, but still command huge loyalty from much of the rural poor -particularly in the Shinawatras’ northern strongholds, where rice farming is a mainstay of the local economy, in what is one of the world’s largest rice exporters.

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