Former Thai PM Yingluck Shinawatra has been indicted over a controversial rice subsidy scheme.
If found guilty on the charge of negligence, Yingluck Shinawatra could be jailed for up to 10 years.
The anti-corruption agency has also called for Yingluck Shinawatra to be personally liable for losses to state coffers.
Yingluck Shinawatra was removed by a court in May 2014, shortly before the military ousted her elected government.
She was later impeached over the rice subsidy scheme and banned from politics for five years. Thailand, meanwhile, remains under martial law in the wake of the coup.
Yingluck Shinawatra was not at Bangkok’s Supreme Court to hear the indictment.
Photo Reuters
Under the rice subsidy scheme Yingluck Shinawatra’s Pheu Thai-led government bought rice from Thai farmers at above the market rate, costing the government billions of dollars.
Critics accused Yingluck Shinawatra of funneling money to her core supporters. She said the policy was aimed at helping farmers and denied any day-to-day involvement in the running of the scheme.
The Supreme Court will decide on March 19 whether to pursue the criminal case.
Additionally, Finance Minister Sommai Phasee said on February 18 that the ministry had received a letter from the national corruption watchdog urging it to pursue civil suit against Yingluck Shinawatra to recover losses of 600 billion baht ($18.4 billion) related to the scheme.
“The finance ministry oversees damages to the state and is ready to take action,” he said.
The military seized power in May 2014 in what it said was a bid to restore public order after months of occasionally violent street protests against Yingluck Shinawatra’s government.
Thailand has been embroiled in a cycle of political instability since the military ousted Yingluck Shinawatra’s brother, billionaire Thaksin Shinawatra, as prime minister in 2006.
The Shinawatra family are hugely popular among Thailand’s rural population but are hated by the urban middle-class and elite who accuse them of corruption.
Thaksin Shinawatra-linked parties, under various different names, have won every election since 2001.
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Texas Governor Rick Perry has been booked at the Blackwell-Thurman Criminal Justice Center in Austin, for two felony indictments of abuse of power on August 19.
Rick Perry told dozens of cheering supporters outside the Texas courthouse that he would “fight this injustice with every fiber of my being”.
Showing no hint of worry on his face, Rick Perry flashed a thin, confident grin beneath perfect hair in his mug shot. He then headed to a nearby Austin eatery for ice cream, even gleefully documenting his excursion via Twitter.
The Republican, who is mulling a second presidential run in 2016, was indicted after carrying out a threat to veto funding for state public corruption prosecutors. He has dismissed the case a political ploy, and supporters chanting his last name and holding signs greeted him upon arriving at a Travis County Courthouse in Austin.
“I’m going to fight this injustice with every fiber of my being. And we will prevail,” Rick Perry said before walking inside the building, where he set off a metal detector but didn’t break stride, heading straight to a first-floor office to have his fingerprints taken and stand for the mug shot. In it he’s wearing a blue tie but shed the glasses that have become something of his trademark in recent months.
The longest-serving governor in Texas history was indicted last week for coercion and official oppression for publicly promising to veto $7.5 million for the state public integrity unit, which investigates wrongdoing by elected officials and is run by the Travis County district attorney’s office. Rick Perry threatened the veto if the county’s Democratic district attorney, Rosemary Lehmberg, stayed in office after a drunken driving conviction.
Showing no hint of worry on his face, Rick Perry flashed a thin, confident grin beneath perfect hair in his mug shot (photo Austin Police Department)
Rosemary Lehmberg refused to resign and Rick Perry carried out the veto, drawing an ethics complaint from a left-leaning government watchdog group.
Rick Perry was indicted by a grand jury in Austin, a liberal bastion in otherwise mostly fiercely conservative Texas.
“I’m going to enter this courthouse with my head held high knowing the actions I took were not only lawful and legal, but right,” Rick Perry told supporters before heading inside the building located just steps from the governor’s mansion.
In less than 10 minutes, Rick Perry was outside again, telling those assembled that he was confident in the rule of law.
“We don’t resolve political disputes or policy differences by indictments,” he said.
“We don’t criminalize policy disagreements. We will prevail. We will prevail.”
If convicted on both counts, Rick Perry could face a maximum 109 years in prison – though legal experts across the political spectrum have said the case against him may be a tough sell to a jury. No one disputes that Rick Perry has the right to veto any measures passed by the state Legislature, including any parts of the state budget.
However, the complaint against Rick Perry alleges that by publicly threatening a veto and trying to force Rosemary Lehmberg to resign, he coerced her. The Republican judge assigned to the case has assigned a San Antonio-based special prosecutor who insists the case is stronger than it may outwardly appear.
Rick Perry has hired a team of high-powered attorneys, who are being paid with state funds to defend him.
Top Republicans have been especially quick to defend the governor, though, since a jail video following Rosemary Lehmberg’s April 2013 arrest showed the district attorney badly slurring her words, shouting at staffers to call the sheriff, kicking the door of her cell, and sticking her tongue out. Rosemary Lehmberg’s blood alcohol level was also three times the legal limit for driving.
Rick Perry is the first Texas governor to be indicted since 1917.
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Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, the surviving Boston Marathon bombing suspect, has been formally charged with killing four people and using a weapon of mass destruction.
Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, 19, faces 30 total charges in the April 15 Boston Marathon blasts, which killed three and injured more than 260 others.
A fourth victim, a policeman, was shot dead by him and his brother during the hunt for them, federal prosecutors say.
Seventeen charges could bring life in prison or even the death penalty, US prosecutors said.
In Boston, US Attorney Carmen Ortiz described the Tsarnaev brothers’ preparation for the attack.
They went to a firing range to take target practice, bought electronic material online that could be used to make bombs, and downloaded a publication that could provide instructions on building explosives, Carmen Ortiz told reporters.
Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, the surviving Boston Marathon bombing suspect, has been formally charged with killing four people and using a weapon of mass destruction
Dzhokhar Tsarnaev also faces charges for a carjacking days after the attacks and for interfering with commerce, prosecutors said.
His brother, Tamerlan Tsarnaev, 26, was killed in a shoot-out with police days after the twin blasts.
Dzhokhar Tsarnaev was injured in the manhunt and has been held in a prison hospital near Boston since his capture on April 19.
He was found hiding in a boat parked in a residential garden in Watertown, Massachusetts, where according to the indictment, Dzhokhar Tsarnaev wrote a message reading: “The US Government is killing our innocent civilians” and “I can’t stand to see such evil go unpunished.”
According to the indictment, the Tsarnaev brothers made bombs from pressure cookers, low-explosive powder, ball bearings, nails, adhesive, electronic components and other material.
It adds that Dzhokhar Tsarnaev aided and abetted his brother by planting and detonating one of the bombs.
Tamerlan and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev are from a family of ethnic Chechen Muslims from Russia and had been living in the US for about a decade.
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