Cambodia Spokesman Denies Country Gave Passport to Former Thai PM Yingluck

A spokesman for the Hun Sen government on Thursday denied reports that fugitive former Thai premier Yingluck Shinawatra had been given a Cambodian passport, but a critic of the Cambodian strongman said it couldn’t be ruled out in view of his ties to Yingluck’s billionaire brother.

Media in Hong Kong, citing business records, have reported that Yingluck had used a Cambodian passport to register a company in the former British colony, now an autonomous Chinese city.

The AFP news agency said the document lent weight to reports that Yingluck, deposed in a coup in 2014, went through Cambodia when she fled Thailand in August 2017, after a graft conviction for running a rice subsidy scheme that cost Thailand billions of dollars.

Cambodian Council of Ministers spokesman Phay Siphan said that Yingluck’s name did not appear on the list of registered passports kept by the country’s ministry of interior and that the Hun Sen government was not involved in granting a passport to Yingluck.

“The ministry of interior doesn’t recognize the passport as reported in the media,” he said. He declined to comment further on the case.

Special to BenarNews