Thaksin Shinawatra - the tycoon who would be premier

publiziert: Sonntag, 7. Jan 2001 / 13:03 Uhr

Bangkok - Thaksin Shinawatra, reputed to be Thailand's richest man and likely to be its next prime minister, once likened himself to Genghis Khan, the Mongol leader who conquered China.

"I'm the Genghis Khan type of manager," Thaksin told Asian Business magazine in an interview published in November 1995. "When you start a company, you need someone to propel it, to set a vision and force everyone to work like barbarians. But after a certain point you need a builder, who must be professional, so they don't need someone like me anymore, who might push too hard," he explained.

Thailand seems likely to get a Genghis Khan-type prime minister after Thaksin's Thai Rak Thai party won the greatest number of seats in the general election held Saturday. Thaksin, 51, between 1987 and 1994 set up Thailand's Shin Corps, now the country's leading telecommunications group with government concessions to operate three satellites and a host of pager and mobile phone networks. His swiftly constructed empire has made him Thailand's richest man, with a family fortune estimated at 60 billion baht (1.4 billion dollars).

Not bad for a civil servant who started his career as a Police Lieutenant Colonel in Thailand's police department back in 1973. Thaksin, who earned a Doctorate Degree in Criminal Justice at Sam Houston State in the United States, left the police force in 1987 to become a distributor of IBM computers and software, targetting primarily government offices and state enterprises.

His big bussiness break came shortly thereafter when he won the first government concession to set up a pager service and mobile phone network for Bangkok. He later won a government concession to operate the kingdom's sole satellite system. In 1994, leaving his businesses operations to professional "builder" types, Thaksin jumped into the dynamic world of national politics.

Under the Palang Dharma party he became foreign minister between November 1994 and February 1995, and thereafter led the party (now basically defunct.) In July 1995, Thaksin became deputy prime minister under the government of Prime Minister Banharn Silpa-archa on the campaign boast that he would solve Bangkok's traffic nightmare after six months in office.

His approach to the problem was perhaps indicative of things to come. He threw money at it, by offering traffic cops special bonuses for keeping their sections unclogged and providing them with 2,000 free wheel clamps to pester illegally parked cars. Six months later Bangkok's traffic was arguably as bad as ever. It took the country's economic collapse in mid-1997 to really improve the situation.

In late 1997 Thaksin was called in to act as deputy prime minister again by former Prime Minister Chavalit Yongchaiyuth. The job lasted for three months until Chavalit was forced to resign in November that year, paving the way for a takeover by the Democrat Party, the leading party of the incumbent government.

But the short deputy premiership was long enough to hurt Thaksin's political future. Under Thailand's new tough-on-corruption constitution, passed in 1997, all politicians must declare their assets before and after assuming public office. On December 26 last year the National Counter Corruption Commission (NCCC), also set up by the 1997 constitution, indicted Thaksin for intentionally concealing his wealth from the public when he transferred several million dollars worth of company shares to his servants, supposedly to act as proxy holders, after leaving office in 1997.

The indictment, if upheld by the Constitutional Court in coming months, could cost Thaksin the premiership as a guilty verdict would bar him from national politics for a five-year period. Meanwhile, Thaksin, with the help of his Thai (Thai Love Love) party, has about half a year to fix Thailand's economic problems better than he fixed Bangkok's traffic.

It is a big job, well suited for a Genghis Khan type of guy. First, he will have to deliver on his party's campaign promises to provide each of Thailand's 70,000 villages with 23,000 dollars in direct development funds while granting a three-year moratorium on farmers' debts to the Bank of Agriculture and Cooperatives (BAAC), which total an estimated 300 billion baht (6.9 billion dollars).

Second, he will need to make sure that Thailand doesn't go bankrupt in the process of fulfilling his promises to the poor, since many economists wonder where the money will come from.

(la/dpa)

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