SGD

Sorry but that is absolutely wrong. There is a quota and there is a price difference.

Not sure that is either correct or practical. A father would need to have been legitimised or he is not recognised by the Thai legal system as having any part in the child's life and if one of the father or mother were dead then the argument would be that this could not be done which is illogical, even for Thailand. I'm not saying some offices might make all kinds of nonsense up but I don't think there is a blanket "mom and dad" requirement.

I'm coming back for a longer stay of a few months and I need a gym, either inside a hotel (unlikely) or outside (probably). I have not decided on exactly where I will stay yet so I guess I'm considering Jomtien (not too far down), Pratumnak, central Pattaya and north Pattaya up to about the Dolphin roundabout, maybe a little higher. I won't have transport so no mega difficult routes off the beaten track etc. I'm not looking for cheap or best value, I'm looking for the best. Thanks.

A minor can own the property, the land, the chanote etc. but until they are aged 20 they cannot manage it themselves as they are minors and the Juvenile Court would need to approve any transaction. However, I do not see where there is a need for the mother (or another Thai) to be involved.

Risk anything to the Thai legal system and you are a fool. I have been down the road to court before, I've seen wills "disappeared", I've seen corruption in the legal fraternity and nothing will stop them if you make life easy for them to steal, only 1 in 10,000 is half decent. As for investments, then not everything is about capital appreciation. Yields are actually far more important and consequently higher on cheaper property.

Clearly but sometimes you do not have an option or quite simply, the discount for Thai ownership is so great as to make it a far better proposition. Equally, there is estate planning with anything in my name which would not occur if the property were already in my child's name.

Both perhaps. I am not going down a company route and I would prefer to remove the potential influence of my child's mother. In an ideal situation, it would be put into my child's name and no-one would ever know, only to find out when either I chose to divulge it or upon my death. I appreciate my child may need to go to a land office but that trip would be forgotten in the fullness of time even aged 15. What I do not want is the mother aware of the situation.

Thanks but to reiterate, I do not want to use a company. I am very familiar with the bogus / illegal company structures and I have used them but not here. No dodgy nominee directors, no legal filings every so often, just simple direct ownership.

I once asked a few builders about a pool of 20m+ even if it was perhaps with only one lane out to 25m and the rest a freeform 15m or so and they thought I was insane. It really was think of a number, triple it, then multiply by another random number and then hope the stupid westerner will fall for the scam and pay it. Figures of 4/6/8m baht to build it. I worked out it would be cheaper to buy an excavator and dig the hole myself than pay them the extortionate fee for installing a hole ! I looked at a house with a 14m x 10m pool which is oversize compared to the average but in the end, it simply wasn't long enough and it meant I couldn't buy the house.

I am a non Thai looking at purchasing some condos which are in the Thai quotas and I do not want to use a company. I have a teenage daughter who will eventually inherit anyway and my limited understanding of Thai law is that she can own property in her own right. However, I am concerned about the influence her mother, my ex wife, might have, if it became known that her daughter owner property. In the west, I would simply have this covered off with a private mortgage / loan charged on the deed (chanote) and that would make getting further loans or a sale impossible but as a minor cannot enter into a legal agreement, that option is not available in Thailand. Does a minor have to have a Thai looking out for the property or can a westerner do that, i.e. me ?

If 6.9m was declared, how much went missing ? 69m ? 690m ? More ?

Yeah, another of those man boys the world is propagating. In my day, we'd have been able to go off grid for weeks if not more likely months and in truth, I reckon if we'd wanted to simple disappear they would never have found us. As digitised and tracked as we are today, I still think I could drop totally off radar and if required, reappear under a new ID without very much trouble and a modicum of planning.

No-one upsets the apple cart because they are waiting for their turn at the trough and like the police, people have to pay to get into a position where they can abuse the system. There is no end to it because for example, take the police. The official salary is nothing, 10/20k a month but they have to pay hundreds of thousands to get into the police. So say you've paid yesterday and they end corruption today, how do you pay back the money you borrowed to get into the police ? If you are already on the gravy train, making a few million a year, how do you get out because you cannot go back to a salary of 20k a month. There is no way out of this.

Absolutely. If asked for her number he wouldn't know. Not a chance. Very little chance of him knowing his phone number until he had spoken to the wife. He's robbed or spent the money and is pretending there was a thief.

I've spent about 3 months in Phuket across a few trips and I fall into the hate and don't hate camps, perhaps on the fence. I should add that I have also lived in the South Andaman, Bangkok, Pattaya and Buriram. Strip out the beach life and would you live in Phuket ? No, I would not because I think other places are better. Is the beach life enough to overcome that ? Possibly but I wonder if living there all the time wouldn't exacerbate the negatives rather than accentuate the positives. I am often in the south and I think about Phuket and seeing more of the island but as a visitor it is truly the worst of Thailand and I don't think I want to go through that to try to find something else because 99% of Phuket is tainted with some degree of tourist rip off.

Or could it be Lennie, as in Steinbeck's classic ? Phuket - one of the top 5 Thai murder islands with hardly an honest person anywhere.

Explain how they became a "former" employee and enlighten us

No, just don't get in one. Pay more and plan better to not leave that as the only option.

There are few facts in this case and no evidence of sexual activity. However, we do know that this woman and her friend are used to going to parties with strange men they do not know. They admit knowing that drug taking would happen and they admit drugs were freely offered and taken. I suspect nothing would be heard from this girl if she had woken up with some money in her purse and that her claims stem from not being paid. She now accuses her friend of possibly being paid but not passing on her share and her friend responds by telling her that the guy involved is rich. There is a word for girls who get paid for sex and that word is prostitute; someone who exchanges sexual favours for money and there is an old (and inappropriate for woke folks) joke about how does a prostitute know she has been raped and the answer is when the cheque bounces. For the uninitiated, that means that the "rape" is only claimed when the payment doesn't materialise and that had the money been paid, then there would have been no "rape". This is a story of a hooker who has not been paid or her also hooker friend didn't pass on her share. In so far as you can believe any of it of course.

Pre covid I was paying circa £1800 business class from LHR-BKK on Etihad and about £1250/1500 LHR-BKK on Swiss / Austrian / Lufty etc. I could also skiplag and go from OSL or ARN to BKK for about £1000 and I have had it under £900. In August 2022 it was £4500, today it is £6500 and through most of next year it is also £4000-5000 with Swiss sometimes coming down to £2250/2500. I won't travel in economy and I won't pay over about £2000, maybe £2500 in business. Sure, my choice but the idea of £5k return to Bangkok is not happening.

Same in Pattaya and everywhere else by the look of it. The whole tourist industry is turning into a drug based mental asylum.

So the whole Thai economy is not dependent on pot ? 1m Thais have asked to grow pot. In a land of some 70m people with maybe 20m under 21 and 10m too old, that is 1 in 40 people who are going to make their business growing pot. Right !

You need to remember George Orwell. Four wheels good, two wheels bad.

I prefer house life but it is only safe if you are there all the time. If you leave a house even for just a short time, the thieves will be in unless you have armed guards and the friends and relatives are the first suspects. In a condo, get one high enough up so Somchai cannot get a ladder up to it and over 7 floors keeps the mosquitoes away as well. Good locks on any balconies and preferably internal grills that simply cannot be gotten through without heavy cutting equipment. Front door is high security steel in a steel frame with a secondary security grill. But year, if I was living there full time, a house and my own pool would be the right way to enjoy life.

I think the Thai ID card says "male". No doubt he referred to himself as a ladyboy, not a ladygirl. Let's stick with DNA eh ?