Dogmatix

The other side of the coin is that most have already tried relationships with Thai men in their own age group and decided they don't want another Thai man.

Probably not married. The Thai word "faen" means anything from girlfriend or boyfriend to legally married spouse.

Parcels sent by mail are exempted from Thai taxes, if the value is less than THB 1,500. There is no exemption for parcels sent by courier and import duty and VAT must be charged on the total landed cost including freight and insurance. Send your gear by mail and declare at less than THB 1,500 and you have reasonable chance of them coming to your door with no tax charged. 2kg is a tad heavy though and might encourage them to open it up and assess tax based on what they think the maximum possible value could be. So personally I would suggest breaking up into two parcels sent a week or two apart.

Less dangerous if you are 100 metres away. I doubt your wife could hit anything with a 9mm Beretta at even 25 metres but with a .17 HMR or .17 WSM and a decent scope she might hit something 100 metres away.

Also very peripheral civil servants qualify for the welfare scheme, including local defence volunteers in villages, as well as state enterprise employees. Some years ago a US embassy report of an investigation into welfare guns imported from the US and found re-exported to neighbouring countries was leaked on Wikileaks. Here it is. http://www.scoop.co.nz/stories/WL0911/S00555.htm. The embassy investigators visited a Thai Indian owned firearms importer and gun shop owner involved in the welfare scheme. The interviewees gave the impression that 80% of the welfare guns were bought by law enforcement and military officials for use as duty pistols and emphasised the need for officials to have guns in the Deep South. It sounds a rather sanitised version of the welfare scheme but I would guess the US embassy officials were not so dumb as to believe all of it. However, the US is happy with the business which includes a lot of European brands like Glock, Sig Sauer, HK etc which cannot be exported directly from the EU due to a directive caused by perceived Thai government human rights abuses in the South. So the US exports the European brands either from Glock and Sig factories in the US or US wholesalers import the guns from Europe and re-export them, presumably with fudged end user certificates given to the European manufacturers, which is exactly what the US embassy was investigating in Thailand. As an aside, the Europeans are somewhat hypocritical in this area anyway as HK exported assault rifles to the Mexican government with approval from the German government on condition they signed end user certificates that the rifles would not be sent to Mexican provinces with the worst records of human rights abuses. Of course the HK products went to these provinces and have been documented being used in human righst abuses. Back to the welfare scheme. I'll leave aside the obvious criticism that the Thai government should equip law enforcement and military with firearms necessary for their jobs and take them back when finished. Accepting this nonsensical situation, the most sensible reform of the welfare system would be let officials but not state enterprise employees, buy guns they need for duty from the welfare scheme. In most cases this would be a single handgun which should be mandatorily sold when they leave the job. Any more guns officials want for sport or collection purposes, they should buy at the retail prices like all other Thai citizens. The reason this won't happen is that there is just too much money being made from the welfare scheme. Profit from it must be well in excess of 1 billion a year and a lot of palms are greased all the way up the chain. If it were purely to provide service weapons, why not sell them to the officers at cost which would be about half the welfare price?

Maybe a low income province. I have heard of 20k paid for being found with a licensed gun but no carry permit found in car in central Bangkok at night. I think a 1,000 baht fine is optimistic for deciding to accept being charged and to to court instead of paying an on the spot bribe, if that option is offered. That might be the fine for a licensed gun in a locked box in the boot of your car with ammo in a separate locked box on the way to or from a range but I think it would be over 10k for a loaded handgun within reach. It would also be advisable to be represented by an experienced criminal lawyer to make sure police and prosecutors follow due process and don't get you on trumped up charges. Finally, it is quite common for police to get their armourer to remove or damage some some difficult to replace (in Thailand) part of the gun out of spite. So when it is returned to you after being acquitted or getting a modest fine, you can only use it as a paperwork - to teach you a lesson not to be a smarty pants and refuse to bribe the cops. So you may be out of pocket another 80-200k for a new gun.

I know some guys with Thai wives who would be delghted to have an excuse to let the partner card go.

Numbers 1 and 3 on the list of gun murders, Brazil and Mexico have very strict gun control laws that make it extremely difficult for civilians to buy legal firearms but there are huge quantities available to criminals on the black market. Thailand would be like that, if they intraduced stricter control of legal guns but failed to control the thriving black market in guns which is fueled by the nonsensical civil service welfare scheme. Unlike licensed gun shops the scheme has no quotas and regularly imports more guns in a year than the combined quotas of all Thailand’s gun shops. Many of these weapons are reported ‘lost’ and show up at crime scenes or in neighboring countries. I recall a quote from a Bangkok senior policeman some years ago about gang violence. He said that previously vocational school delinquents used only homemade single shot guns, either .22 pen guns or 12 gauge pistol shotguns, but since the ramping up of the welfare scheme, they were increasingly using ‘list’ welfare guns which significantly increased their fire power. There is no restriction on buying more discounted guns after ‘losing’ them. The scheme is also a money spinner for officials into the billions. So they will not stop it. Apart from ‘lost’ welfare guns a big source of black market weapons is strangely enough inheritance. Thailand’s slack officials are too lazy to close the loop on deceased permit holders. There is actually a system to allow heirs to inherit guns and get permits with less restrictions than regular applicants in order to encourage heirs to come forward and re-register inherited weapons within 30 days. But there is little education and awareness of this and there is no linking of death certificates to firearms permits which are issued for life. As a result of this muddled approach thousands of formerly legal guns become illegal, held by heirs or sold into black market. So much of the black market is actually created by government policies and ineptitude. But officials reports like Thai PBS gloss over a lot of details.

It tells you something about the personality and culture of your employer, if they refuse to help foreign employees apply for PR, knowing this is very important to them. The company I worked for helped quite a few foreign employees apply for PR and citizenshp and never grumbled about it.

I buy a lot stuff from the US. There are quite a few that only accept PayPal, both on Ebay and stand alone welbsite, although I think the number is declining as PayPal's market share and current relevance of its business model declines.

Why did she try to escape before she was caught? It would have been much easier to wait to be caught before attempting to escape.

Definitely the murders of these people in the name of Thaksin's war on drugs made no difference to the drug situation: the 9 year boy murdered by police in the back of his mum's car, the 15 year old girl murdered on her way to school and the 70 year old woman murdered while drinking a sprite on her porch, the couple who won big on the lottery and decided to keep it quiet which resulted in them being murdered by police for being unusually wealthy presume to be from drug dealing & etc & etc. RIP to all those brutally murdered in Thaksin's fake war on drugs that was really just a way for police to murder anyone they felt like with impunity.

Sounds like a lawyer who was happy to give a legal opinion citizenship without reading the Nationality Act first. In fact the Act is somewhat ambivalent about dual citizenship, neither specifically prohibiting nor permitting it. There are certain provisions that allow for revocation of Thai citizenship from naturalised Thais and Thais who obtain citizenship through birth in Thailand to two alien parents for making use of or taking an interest in (neither term is defined) another nationality.

Barclay Spencer, the forerunner of this shyster’s Platinum Financial Services ponzi management group in Pacific Place was one of my first experiences of cold callers by fake financial advisors in the late 90s. Young Brits would call up claiming to be operating as UK licensed IFAs which was impossible because the UK doesn’t license anyone to operate outside the UK and they weren’t licensed in the UK anyway. They would burble away reading from their scrips trying to get a meeting. At first I would ask them questions about their Thai securities license for which a knowledge of Thai was required in those days or their work permit or sometimes a tough question about investments but they always batted it off with answers from the script like saying they would arrange a meeting with their boss to answer that one or call over the supervisor. Eventually I used a trick learned from the book Liar’s Poker. Just put the receiver in the desk drawer and leave the idiots burbling away to themselves. One of them called back and lost his rag with my secretary.

The Thai Revenue Department should also go after the fake expat financial advisors for tax like Al Capone. Their business model was to set up companies in Bangkok that ostensibly provided administrative services for offshore financial advisors and funds. But actually they were selling the Ponzi schemes and fake funds in Thailand with income booked offshore that should have been declared for Thai tax, since it was generated in Thailand. 40m is a very low ball estimate of the scams they have done over the years. I remember stories of people being threatened they would be kicked out of the country, if they didn’t stop asking for their money back. Obviously they did have good police connections in those days but their luck seems to have run out, since the SEC started to take complaints by foreigners seriously. Good for them.

Nope. platinum Financial Services, Barclay Spencer etc were scamming expats for two decades. Thai SEC only took action against them in 2016 for operating without securities licenses. Going back to the early 2000s people were complaining to the SEC about them and other unlicensed fake financial advisers but the SEC always refused to take action because they were careful to avoid targeting Thais. One of the other directors, Andrew Wood, used to run a financial advice column in the Bangkok Post. Complaints to the Post board went unanswered. Good to see he is being asked to account for a fraction of the scams.

So he joined the police at the Yannawa station in 2012, presumably through connections and/or paying a bribe. After 7 years in Bangkok he was transferred to Isaan which was presumably a punishment. Yannawa is a lucrative area in the centre of Bangkok. It is unlikely that a cop would volunteer to undergo a drastic cut in bribe money by moving to the boonies of Isaan. All the information about his poor behaviour is from his 3 years in the force in Isaan. How about some information about what he did in 7 years in Bangkok and what he did to get transferred to the boonies. The police should also shed some light on this practice of punishing police by sending them to low income parts of the country where they can't make so much money. People have to live in those places too.

They probably keep them on because they know too much about the corruption. This guy was obviously caught with drugs in such a way that it could no longer be covered up.

Seems things could have been done better by TRTP to avert this. They hired a known drug user, probably because of family connections or he bought his way in or both. The police were very proud of the huge project of importing Sig 365 9mm handguns to sell to cops at discounted but still very expensive price vs US MRSP, meaning lots and lots of profit as they buy at a big bulk discount to MSRP and pay no Thai taxes. The police chief at the time allegedly massively enriched himself with this project, as did many interior officials. The ex cop used one of these guns. It's fine for police to order guns but they should pay for them and issued them to cops as service firearms, not sell them for big profits. Then when cops leave or are fired they has to return them to the armourer. Also having a standardised weapon to train police on and have armourers maintain and order police spec ammo for would makes sense. But the system of getting cops to buy expensive firearms to make profits for big shots starts them off on the corruption path. They borrow from senior officers' wives who are loan sharks to buy the guns and extort the public to repay the loan sharks who obviously must be repaid.

Many farang countries have similar PR systems. The US green card is almost the same. If you stay outside the US for more than a year, your green card is cancelled. The UK has developed an ugly racist side that manifested itself with Brexit and is put into practice by Tory governments. There was a nasty case of a Singaporean woman who was deported, despite having Indefinite Leave to Remain (PR) and living for 25 years in the UK with her British husband and son. Of course she had never applied for British citizenship because she was reluctant to give up Singaporean citizenship. She fell foul of the PR residence requirements because she had to go on an extended trip to Singapore to take care of her terminally ill mother and returned to her family in the UK when her mother died. She started receiving notices that her PR would be cancelled and tried to appeal to no avail. Then one day the police showed up at the house and dragged her off to a detention centre a couple of hundred miles from her home, making hard for her family to visit her without letting her pack a bag. Two weeks later she was put on a plane to Singapore with only the clothes she stood up in and 5 pounds in her pocket. She had only a sister left there, with whom she wasn't close, and had to beg to stay with her and sponge off her. Her crippled husband in the UK had no one to take care of him, as theire son had had to move to another city for work. I am not sure if she ever got back to the UK. The family had no money to pursue an expensive legal case against the Home Office. I have never heard anything as horrible as that happening in Thailand. But the UK courts make rulings that foreign rapists can't be deported after finishing their sentences because it would cause undue suffering to their families in the UK.

A drunk cop poked his maskless face through my car window at a check point when I was driving my 1 year old son to the emergency room late at night with a high grade fever that turned out to be COVID. His face was bright red and grinning as he swayed about asking, "You ding bir mai." The Thai missus gave his colleague a tongue lashing and the drunken idiot was called off when the message got through to him. Don't mess with a mother protecting her baby. Hopefully the caught COVID like the rest of us. Farangs have a choice but most Thais have to stay here and put up with the disgusting drunken, corrupt, murderous rabble in uniform that passes for a police force. It's a wonder they don't rise up and burn down police stations more often like they did in the student power uprising in 1973 that led to the ousting of the military dictators for a few short years.

What happened to the drunk police captain with a collection of Lambos who killed a street vendor? Nothing!

I think banks in most civilized countries would have an exhaustive system of checking before they did anything like this. Seizure of someone's home and possessions is difficult to do in most Western countries. In Thailand the laws are designed to protect the wealthy and large corporations.

It is a requirement that PR applicants should be contributing to Thai society or somesuch and they do sometimes ask that. I wasn't asked that question but had already set it out the answer in my covering letter which they never referred to in my two interviews. It does seem to be a very broad requirement with a very low bar. I have never heared of anything being rejected for not contributing enough. It just seems to be a hoop that they like to make you jump through. Perhaps it is just a deliberate trap to encourage people to say they do volunteer work and then catch them for working without WPs. I know someone who was asked that question in the panel interview. He said his contribution was having a wife and Thai kids which seemed a rather feeble answer to me, as anyone can get married and reproduce without making any contribution to Thai society at large. Citizenship is a lot more pragmatic. They just want to see receipts for your hard cash contributions to Thai society in the form of chartiable donations. Most easier to assess.

Well done for also passing the Por. 6 exams. It was quite a sweat, I thought, having to write a essay in Thai and do dictation etc. Of course you will never be penalised for submitting too many documents and you never know what might make a difference. I was just thinking from the point of view of overseas documents that might be difficult to get certified. I wouldn't bother, if they are not that important. When I applied for PR, I didn't have a case officer at Immigration like you do at Special Branch for citizenship. I had two formal interviews with different officers just verifying all the information submitted on the application form and my documents. They were not particularly friendly. For citizenship I had quite a few informal meetings with my case officer before the final formal meeting to do the tests and finalize the information on the application form and scrawl my name in Thai. Plenty of time to develop a rapport and the case officer also follows up with you after the application which was not the case with PR. Of course things change in both processes.