Word: sarit
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...drawback to the government's efforts at capital formation. Not long ago, Bangkok carried out a little-publicized roundup of leftist-oriented monks to prevent any Communist infiltration of the clergy. But by and large, in peaceful, prosperous Thailand, the golden mean rules. Bangkok is still rocking from the Sarit scandal?the tough, able late Prime Minister is charged with misappropriating vast government funds?and King Bhumibol has been urged to strip Sarit posthumously of his title of field marshal...
...deathbed in a Bangkok hospital, Thailand's Premier Sarit Thanarat held his comely wife in his arms and sang to her the old Thai ballad that begins: "The love of 100 mistresses could not be compared to the love one has for his own wife." Sarit may have been altogether too modest. After his death last December (of cirrhosis and other ailments of hard living), Bangkok papers carried the names of more than a hundred women who claimed publicly to have enjoyed his favors and hoped to get a piece of his estate. Among an inner circle...
Indeed, thanks to the energetic strongman's flair for financial wheeling-dealing, his fortune turned out to be even more spectacular than his dalliance balance. Contesting Widow Thanpuying Vichitra's claim to the marshal's estate, Sarit's two sons by a previous wife estimated that their father was worth at least 2.8 billion tickels, or $143 million. That seemed a lot of baht for a career soldier. So, before allowing his estate to be distributed, Sarit's successor, Thanom Kittikachorn, appointed a five-man committee to see if any government funds had lodged...
...investigating committee published an interim report disclosing that it had unearthed 400 million tickels ($20 million) in various bank accounts maintained by the late strongman. Even that was peanuts compared with the total value of his nationwide commercial empire, which included a controlling interest-mostly in the names of Sarit's relatives-in at least 15 specially privileged companies. Among them: the only merchant bank allowed to import gold; the only sales agency for the government plywood monopoly; a brewery with a heady share of the government beer monopoly; two companies with concessions to print and sell tickets...
...whether Sarit had actually dipped into the till, the committee said that to date it had traced $17.8 million of government money to Sarit's estate. Committee Chairman Phra Manuvej Vimolmath said that part of a state fund of 12 million tickels ($600,000) had gone exclusively to Sarit's minor wives. The money, he said, came from a special government account known as the Funds for Secret Work...