Thailand awaits verdict that could send former PM to prison

BANGKOK (AP) — Friends and foes alike of former Prime Minister, Yingluck Shinawatra, are anxiously awaiting a verdict Friday by the Thailand’s Supreme Court on charges that she was criminally negligent in implementing a rice subsidy program that is estimated to have cost the government as much as $17 billion and could now cost her 10 years in prison.

Supporters are expected to appear outside the courthouse to show support for Yingluck, but Thai authorities have threatened legal action against anyone planning to help transport her supporters to the scene.

The verdict is generally seen as a political judgment as much as a criminal one. The case against Yingluck is the latest in a decade-long offensive against the political machine founded and directed by her brother, former Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra, who was ousted in a 2006 coup for alleged corruption and disrespect for the monarchy.

Thaksin, a telecommunications mogul, has been in self-imposed exile since 2008 to escape a prison sentence on a conflict of interest conviction. The 2006 coup triggered years of sometimesviolent battles for power between his supporters, mainly the less well-off rural majority who delivered him thumping election victories, and his opponents, royalists, much of the urban middle and upper classes and the military, who in 2014 ousted Yingluck’s elected government as they had her brother’s.

Yingluck has appeared calm in the days leading up to the verdict, making merit at Buddhist temples and reportedly praying for a “victory” in Friday’s ruling.

However the Supreme Court rules, the ruling junta is set to lose face, one analyst says.

If the court rules not guilty, “the generals will have egg on their face,” said Paul Chambers, a political scientist at Naresuan University in northern Thailand, since the military’s reasoning for staging the 2014 coup that ousted Yingluck’s government was, in part, to rid the system of corrupt politicians. If she is found guilty “then the generals will have to deal with what comes next and that could be a martyr figure.”