Dogmatix

Don't watch violence on Squid Game watch it in nightly videos of RTP brutal treatment of Thalu Gas protestors.

Gradually stop worrying. When you are dead of COVID already, no need to worry any more.

They never make clear whether 17% is the top marginal tax rate or a flat rate, as in HK. If the latter, they would end up paying more on lower salaries. The most important thing is going to be the overall package. Thai companies don't to hire expats at expat rates and would rather hire several unqualified Thais for the same money. Will lowering the tax rate change this mindset?

I like car rental companies the business model is to use franchisees. I once met a Thai guy at a chamber of commerce lunch who had the master franchise for one of the international courier cos.

I feel sorry for Rudolf. It may be lying through his teeth but he gives the impression of being an honest and decent, if somewhat naive, guy who got caught up it in something he couldn’t understand while pursuing his dream of retirement in an idyllic village in the Isaan boonies. Trouble is you have no idea what is going on in these villages, if you are not fluent in Isaan and well plugged into the local grape vine and it is well to have good connections with the puuyai Baan and BiB. Relying on Thai wifey for everything doesn’t cut it. Farang and Mia farang are likely to be objects of both envy and derision - a dangerous mix. With her keenness for partying Lakh probably has a beer bar background and it is quite possible she was playing around with Sathien and others before him. Farangs are easily taken in by Thai hookers who persuade them they are not really hookers but just simple country girls at heart eager to settle down with a kind hearted farang. But taking the bar out of the of the girl is not always successful, as seems to have been the case with Lakh’s partying. If you compare with European prostitutes the problem is more obvious. How many Swiss guys would feel confident marrying one of the East European street walkers or strippers from their home towns and going to live in a remote village in Poland or somewhere. And yet the motivation and mindset of the Thai hookers is the same.

The family said the BiB found 6 baht in his pocket.

I also find it suspicious that the evidence fence of Lakh and Sathien being an item and having steamy sessions in the rice field shacks appears to come only from his family. Sathien doesn’t seem to have been much of a catch and self-respecting mia farang normally go for a toy boy younger than themselves but choices in the sticks may be more limited. On the other hand, Sathien’s wife did apparently return to CM with the kids because he was carrying in with someone snd Amarin TV showed a selfie of the two together looking pretty much like an item.

i think Gecko’s advice to Rudolf to get himself a decent English speaking lawyer without using his wife as an interpreter is very sound. From the little I have heard of her English it is poor and who knows what involvement she has with the case or what her agenda might be. Although all Swiss are taught passable English Rudolf’s own English sounds only average and he clearly knows very little Thai or Isaan. So he needs to give himself the best chance. I have seen a farang in court using a not very good interpreter to talk to his own not very good Thai lawyer who was instructed by a hopeless Australian lawyer practicing illegally in Chiang Mai. Unsurprisingly he lost. Rudolf deserves better than that.

I think theories of the bail money and fingerprints on it are a red herring. If there was some monkey business between Lakh and Sethien over the 250k, it is unlikely that Rudolf knew anything about it. If she had it, why would she let on to Rudolf when she can get him to pay 300k for himself. Anyway it would make more sense to have a record of withdrawing the 300k and stash the 250k somewhere. The two most likely possibilities are: 1) Rudolf was allowed his phone to transfer 300k to Lakh (with commission to BiB) ; 2) they had a joint account with enough in it; 3) she used title deeds to post bail from land generously donated by Rudolf. it is possible that Lakh swallowed the 250k and perhaps the BiB should have borrowed one of those portaloos from the Customs Dept and sat her on it.

We don’t have the forensics of the gun confirming Sathien was the registered owner, if that was the case, or the match of the bullet in the wall and the angle it was fired from. The police must have already checked the registration which only takes a few minutes but haven’t shared that. What we do have are statements from Sathien’s family that he owned a second hand .38 revolver he bought a couple of years back and his nephew said on Amarin TV it was a registered gun. the Thai Firearms Act 1947 actually provides a weird exemption for people who carry a concealed registered gun without a P.12 carry permit, if they are carrying large sums of money or valuables. 200k has often been used as the cut off. People caught with a loaded registered gun in their car often argue they were going to an ATM machine to withdraw more than 200k and, if they have money and connections, they can get the case thrown out of court. Sathien may have had this mentality. A Thai friend once claimed he took a loaded gun to the land office because he had to carry over 500k cash. When I expressed surprise. He said it’s normal. Everybody does it. If that’s true, I am surprised there are not more Wild West shoot outs there. Hopefully the police will be getting a toxology report on Sathien. His blood alcohol level and whether he had any speed in him might have a bearing on on what might have happened. To be fair they should also have tested Rudolf and Lakh too since she claimed to be so plastered she was woken up by the gunshot.

It’s a Smith & Wesson .38 revolver. Bog standard 4” model without adjustable sights that used to issued to police forces all over the world. It is fairly old because they stopped producing the black ones in early 2000s and now only produce them in stainless. The .38 rounds are fairly loud and they look like full power round nosed rounds. About as loud as a 9mm round.

Please don't post nudes online. You must go and look at and interact with real nudes at designated venues that pay monthly protection money to the police.

The cops probably got Sathien's phone which might show a close link with Lakh in the photoa and LINE messages. Amarin TV showed a selfie of the two of them with Sathien's arm draped around her neck. Of course it could have just a friendly pose but did look more than that.

If the deceased and Rudolf's wife plotted to murder Rodolf, would they plan to use Sathien's own gun? It was well known he had the .38 revolver and his nephew actually said it was registered? Surely they would have bought another gun in another caliber on the black market that could not be traced to him and could be disposed of after the murder or used another murder weapon, such as a knife or an axe.

Lawyer is a reserved occupation under the Royal Decree of, I think, 1970. There was some foreign lawyers before that who were grandfathered in and allowed to continue practising indefinitely. But most foreign lawyers just get WPs as management consultants or trainers or something. They don't want to plead in court anyway, so not a big deal for them. Tileke & Gibbons is an old law firm that pre-dates restrictions on foreign lawyers.

I had second AZ on 5 Sept and have booked and paid for Morderna boosters in two different hospitals. I think they will come in 1Q 22. I am planning to get at least one of them, if not both one month apart. Jab, jab, jab.

Unusual for cases to plateau like this. Nornally they move in one direction or the other. It looks like it is pausing before another leg up but I hope not.

Going to visit people he couldn't give a monkey's about to prepare for elections.

A friend of a friend did it in Phuket. You probably could switch back after the oath. I would check with SB before doing it in case they say your application has to be moved to your province. You never know with Thai officialdoom.

Maybe she was happy with the prestigious mia farang status in the village. Her affair with Sathien seems to have been going on for 2-3 years and he was maybe not her first or only toy boy. Rudolf tolerated and funded her party girl life style, boyfriend and probably a compulsive gambling habit for a long time. There was no suggestion that this was an unhappy marriage. If she had Rudolf murdered and moved Sathien in, her life would have gone downhill rapidly and she may well have been smart enough to figure this out. She would have just become the property of a typical drunken Thai peasant who has already abandoned his own family and would be giving her pressure to hand over her supposed inheritance so he could dole it out to his own bit of fluff on the side.

Are you suggesting they should raise money for the defence on Only Fans?

I am still not a buyer of the family assertions that Sathian was a man of substance based on a sale of cows last year and the sale of land. Aside from these two one-off transactions I see no evidence that he was of higher financial status that the run of the mill subsistence farmers in the area. He was also apparently a drunk and a partyer and probably not a hard worker. If he had 12 cows, it is very likely that he had borrowed money to buy them, maybe at loan shark rates, and had to pay that off. They say he gave 40k to Lakh from that amount but perhaps that was repayment of a loan. Behind many land sales upcountry is a debt to be repaid, even if it was not formally registered on the title deed. Lakh must have enjoyed flaunting her new found mia farang status when she came back to the village with a farang in tow and built a house. They all refer to her as mia farang, not by her name, in the videos and she was drunk and probably a doper and a gambler. Sathian was prepared to abandon his children to be a mia farang's toy boy. So it is logical that he was well supported by her by village standards.

The point about the missing 250K and the bail money is interesting. You would think that, if Lakh got the 250k from Sathien, she would hide it somewhere and get Rudolf to transfer 300k to her and withdraw it from a local bank. Of course, she could argue that they had 300k sitting around the house for whatever reason or even that Sathien gave her the 250k, in the event the land buyers' prints are found on the notes. The buyers may not have touched the notes, if they just withdrew the money from bank in an envelope and didn't count it themselves. But Sathien's prints would be on them, or whoever he had to help him at the Land Office, as everyone counts the money in the Land Office, as it is easy to remove some of the notes from those 100k paper binders that come from the banks and it might not have come straight from a bank. We didn't get the chance to see the back of the title deed to know whether it was unencumbered or whether Sathien had to pay of a mortgage or khai faak contract with the 250k. In my experience of buying land in Isaan, at least half the transactions I have done where with mortgaged or khai faaks that had to be paid off immediately, often leaving almost nothing for the seller. The second Amarin TV video was very interesting but still raises more questions than it answers. It does seem to cast more doubt on Rudolf's story but doesn't prove that he was lying or that he, at least, wasn't acting in self defence, even if the story about the attempted robbery is not true. He looks like a mild mannered retired architect, not like one of those farang Hell's Angels types that go around murdering people in Pattaya or Samui. So I would go with the self defence argument, even if robbery was the motive for Sathian's visit and Lakh is lying through her teeth. Now he is out on bail and preparing his defence, Rudolf may well be reading this thread himself. Perhaps he will share his own theories about what happened and what was going on behind his back.

The Chinese mindset over the last 20 years is to invest their cash in condos. Those who needed mortgages obviously bought at home. Thailand has been a great place for them to park money earned in the black economy.

Thailand has a lot of anti-vaxxers. They were just not very prominent when most people were stepping over each other trying to get vaccines.