Bangkok – Thailand’s former leader Yingluck Shinawatra will face a criminal trial for her role in a botched plan to steer global rice prices higher, costing the country billion of dollars.
The Supreme Court on Thursday said it would accept the case after state prosecutors charged Ms.Yingluck with dereliction of duty in February, nine months after Thailand’s military seized power in a coup.
The case revolves around a contentious rice subsidy that Ms.Yingluck’s government designed in 2011 to buy up grain from Thai farmers at up to double the market price and then hoard it in warehouses in an attempt to drive up global prices. Thailand was the world’s largest rice exporter at the time
Instead, Vietnam and India stepped in to fill the void in the market, and rice prices actually fell, leaving Thailand with a paper loss of more than $15 billion; millions of tons of rice are still sitting in government warehouses.
State prosecutors accuse Ms.Yingluck of failing to scrap the policy once its problems became known. Her supporters say, she shouldn’t have to stand trial for an economic policy that helped get her elected in a landslide in 2011.
Political analysts and academics said the moves demonstrated how Prime Minister Prayuth Chan-ocha’s administration has largely abandoned its earlier efforts to present itself as a broker between supporters and opponents of Ms. Yingluck’s older brother, telecoms billionaire Thaksin Shinawatra, who was overthrown as Thailand’s leader in an earlier coup in 2006.
Ms.Yingluck, 47 years old, didn’t attend Thursday’s court session. She acknowledges the rice policy was a key part of her government’s platform but denies that it amounted to any wrongdoing and says she is the victim of a political purge.
In statement on her verifled Facebook page, Ms.Yingluck said her prosecution was the first example in Thailand of a politician being tried for an economic policy. “The policy was designed to benefit the people and help the farmers. “I’m confident in my innocence and that the truth will come out