BANGKOK: Four months after he was re-elected by an unprecedented majority, Thai Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra faces a corruption scandal the outcome of which could define the tone of his second term in office. The question this has given rise to is: will Thaksin and his party become absolute rulers? Thaksin’s Thai Rak Thai (Thais Love Thai, TRT) party has sufficient seats in the 500-member parliament to avoid being subject to a censure motion by the opposition Democrat party. Such motions launched by the opposition have traditionally served as a pivotal mechanism to check the power of the government.

The current edge enjoyed by the TRT — it has 377 seats in the legislature — means that for the first time in this South-east Asian nation’s young democracy a governing party will be above this parliamentary form of accountability. “It is a very dangerous situation,” a professor of political science from Bangkok’s Chulalongkorn University told IPS, speaking on condition of anonymity. “We have never experienced a government like this before, which is beyond censure.”

The smugness that such political security brings was evident all this week as Thaksin and a senior government minister declared that there was no trail of bribes paid during the purchase of expensive security equipment for the country’s new airport.

On Tuesday, Thaksin told reporters that a report by a government-appointed team to investigate the airport security-scanners scandal would exonerate government officials and politicians of the alleged corruption charge. And when the contents of that 800-page report were revealed on Thursday, Deputy Prime Minister Visanu Krue-ngarm supported its conclusions by making public a letter from the US Justice Department. The letter stated that there was no evidence of kickbacks to Thai officials during the sale of 26 CTX9000 explosive-detection scanners.

Yet critics of the government are not convinced, since a fundamental issue at the heart of this scandal remains unresolved: the discrepancies in the prices of the equipment offered by InVision, the US supplier of the equipment, and the amount officials at the Suvarnabhumi International Airport paid to Patriot Business Consultants Co. Ltd., a Thai firm that brokered the deal.

InVision had offered the 26 security machines for 35.8 million US dollars to Patriot, which resold the equipment to the new airport’s authorities for 46 million dollars. “There has been some price rigging. The government has still to provide answers why there is a difference in price,” Nirand Pithakwatchara, a ranking member on the Senate committee conducting an independent investigation into the scanner deal, told IPS.

“The US Justice Department may have no evidence of corruption on their side, but we have a lot of evidence about what happened in Thailand,” he added. “This case is far from over. Something went wrong and the system must be exposed.”

Such pressure from the Senate could help strengthen the only available alternative for the Thai public to hold the Thaksin administration accountable in this scandal. That is to launch a campaign to secure at least 50,000 signatures to introduce a motion in parliament aimed at impeaching Suriya Jungrungreankit, the minister of transport, whose name has been linked to this alleged corrupt deal.—Dawn/IPS News Service