Bangkok Post – Court may suspend PM pending ethics decision

Prime Minister Srettha Thavisin may face suspension if the Constitutional Court upholds a petition from a group of senators accusing him of violating a code of ethics when appointing a prime minister.

The court is expected to meet on Thursday to decide whether to grant the petition.

On Friday, 40 senators asked the court to rule on the status of Mr Srettha and Prime Minister Pichit Chuenban after the latter was appointed to the post as part of a recent Cabinet reshuffle.

The petition, filed through Senate Speaker Pornpetch Wichitcholchai, asks the court whether Mr Srettha and Pichit should be removed from their positions under Section 170 (4) and (5) of the Articles of Association, which deals with the ethics of cabinet ministers .

According to a source at the court, the judges usually meet on Wednesdays, but next Wednesday is a public holiday in Visakha Bucha. Therefore, the justices are expected to meet on Thursday instead.

If the court accepts the petition, the judges may order that Mr Srettha and Pichit be suspended pending a decision, the source said, adding that the couple would then have 15 days to file their defence.

The appointment of Pichit – an adviser to Mr Srettha who also served as a former lawyer for former Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra – as Prime Minister’s Office minister also raises questions about his fitness to serve as a Cabinet minister.

This is because he was in prison for contempt of court over an attempted bribery case when he represented Thaksin in a controversial land case in 2008.

On June 25, 2008, the Supreme Court sentenced Pichit and two of his colleagues to six months in prison after they tried to bribe Supreme Court officials two weeks earlier by handing them a paper bag containing 2 million baht in cash.

All three represented Thaksin and his ex-wife Khunying Potjaman na Pombejra in the Ratchadaphisek land case, for which Thaksin was sentenced to two years in prison in 2008.

During his trip to Italy on Saturday, Mr Srettha said again that he had sought legal advice from the Council of State, the government’s legal arm, on the appointment of Pichit before submitting the new cabinet composition for royal approval.

A Cabinet source previously said that Pichit’s imprisonment in the 2008 contempt of court case did not disqualify him from being appointed as a Cabinet minister. The conviction had long exceeded the required ten-year gap between serving a prison sentence and appointment.

However, the question of whether Pichit meets the MP’s moral and ethical standards required by the charter is a different matter, the source said.

The Prime Minister’s Office Pichit Chuenban