Thai Airways : Tales Of The Daily Corruption

[Boater]

Apichai Sangsasi, director of Thai Airways International’s Crew General Administration Department, yesterday filed a complaint with the National Anti-Corruption Commission against a selection committee chaired by Finance Ministry permanent secretary Suparut Kawatkul.

The NACC the day before rejected Suparut’s appeal against a ruling he had violated the law by appointing deputy director-generals at the Finance Ministry.

Apichai said the committee changed the list of nominations for two key executive positions at THAI without the president’s endorsement, in order to benefit certain committee members who had a conflict of interest.

He said that last September 4, the selection committee named himself and Montri Chamriang as executive vice president for operations and business administration, respectively.

However, at another meeting six days later, the committee cancelled the nominations and instead named Porpong Sanpakit and Norahuch Ployyai for the positions.

Upon investigation, the new appointees were found to be connected to some of the committee members, as a brother-in-law and classmates.

Apichai said that prior to the selection committee’s meeting, there had been an attempt to distance himself through charges he caused more than Bt10 million in damage to the company via the rental of crew accommodation in Rome. (

Nation

)

Thai Airways is like a crashing airplane. First the oil prices, then the economic crisis… A loss of 21 billions THB in 2008, an investment plan cut, the inability to renew an old fleet, a board in total disarray with the changes of government…

But all airlines in the world face many challenges… How come Air France/KLM for instance is (still) able to make profits ?

Thai Airways can no longer hide the uggly truth : this company is not a company. It’s a bordello. An economic bordello.

For long, Thai Airways was the whore of the military… Generals, colonels, retired or not… you have a ridiculous rank and an obscene uniform ? And a sister, a cousin, a buddy, a classmate without a job ? Send them to Thai Airways… That will do the trick…

Then of course the politicians arrived… they wanted also a piece of the milking cow. And they had also sisters, brothers, cousins, maids, classmates etc.

Everything was cool : tourism was boosting… the airline received awards… the hostesses were an object of fantasy… Those were the golden times…

But it was smoke and mirrors.

Now that we have a real, and I mean, a real economic global crisis… the whore has no clothes anymore. Naked.

Her pimps are going to face some serious troubles…

And the poor suckers (AKA the thai tax payers)… will pay. Eventually.

It’s interesting to remember that Abhisit, as a payback for his election, gave the Transports Ministry to a member of the Newin’s MPs gang (Newin is the ex-friend of Thaksin who changed allegiance and gave his support to the Democrat Party, creating the Frankenstein Coalition)…

UPDATE

Thai Airways International has witnessed a 20-per-cent drop in bookings since the government imposed a state of emergency on April 13, a move that has scared away Asian tourists - mostly from China, South Korea and Japan. (

Nation

)

And minor shareholders are complaining…

http://thaicrisis.wordpress.com/2009/04/24...ily-corruption/

[rogercw]

I saw a list once of catagories of people who were entitled to free trips on the airline. I forget where but basically any one who is anyone in the airline, government, politics, or military plus their families plus anyone travelling with them. I imagine it totals up to several thousand people who fly free anytime they feel like it. They probably bump paying passengers if a flight is full. God only knows how much corruption and kickbacks there are in contracts awarded by the airline. Add in all the un-needed employees hired as favors to "influential persons" and it is a wonder the airline is not in a worse state.

[thaimate]

Gave up flying Thai years ago,as they have gone so far downhill

[john b good]

If the name has Thai in it you can take it to include corruption.

Every person who works in one of Thai's airport restaurants has paid for the priviledge of doing so.

And, I too will avoid flying TG unless my life depends on it.

They don't even have attractive female air hostesses any more. You can see better ones on QANTAS (and that's gotta be saying something)

[noahvail]

UPDATE

Thai Airways International has witnessed a 20-per-cent drop in bookings since the government imposed a state of emergency on April 13, a move that has scared away Asian tourists - mostly from China, South Korea and Japan. (

Nation

)

And minor shareholders are complaining

http://thaicrisis.wordpress.com/2009/04/24...ily-corruption/

Hmmm...interesting. I'm heading to the States for a visit in July...best price I found to NYC was 42,000 inclusive. Then I tried Thai Air. Supposedly, *ALL* the seats in economy going only to LAX were taken, so they were touting premium economy - at over 99,000 baht. Shameful. But perhaps typical. I'd like to fly on the flagship airline of my adopted country, but really.....

[bonobo]

Yet I am stuck in Manila because they are supposedly booked solid until May 3.

[siam2007]

Yet I am stuck in Manila because they are supposedly booked solid until May 3.

which actually is no wonder due to the long extended weekend

[scorecard]

Very recently flew from Bkk to Shanghai and back on TG:

- Check-in staff polite enough but when I said "Any chance of an upgrade on this flight" (I have TG Gold Card) I got the cold and usual reply "Oh we don't need to upgrade." ( I've always though an answer which was more focused on the customer rather than focused on the airline would be more user friendly.)

- Staff in lounge unfriendly. Questions from lady wearing muslim headscarf about the content of various snack items was handled quite rudely by two TG waitresses. 90% of internet computers out of order. Comment from TG lounge supervisor: "Oh it's not important and I'm sure they will be OK next week".

- Staff at departure lounge cold and unfriendly, I asked if the flight was departing on time and was told to wait whilst TG lady finished her personal conversation with her colleague (she assumed of course that the farang would not be able to comprehend Thai language) and then curtly told me "of course it's on time, like all TG flights", then quickly turned away to look busy with something else.

- Check-in staff at Shanhgai Pu Dong very coutreous and good listeners.

[rick75]

Wanted to book a Bkk-BNE flight online for a friend at the Thaiairways site, get to checkout, it states, you must be present at check in with your credit card, I call there brisbane office and say whats the deal?, due to credit card fraud you must present your card at check in, I say this is not possible, can I come to Brisbane office and verify the card, answer no, you could however buy your ticket through our office, online ticket $1450au in there office $2450au, they say there is no way around it. I say to guy this makes no sense, he says "its a Thai company we get a lot of that".

In the end i booked it through Thai Visa travel and this fixes the problem.

Edited May 6, 2009 by rick75

[njpski]

If the name has Thai in it you can take it to include corruption.

Every person who works in one of Thai's airport restaurants has paid for the priviledge of doing so.

And, I too will avoid flying TG unless my life depends on it.

They don't even have attractive female air hostesses any more. You can see better ones on QANTAS (and that's gotta be saying something)

Cynical

In US, some restaurants staff pay to work which is why thet are so insistent on tips

Qantas still has worse lookers

[longstebe]

Wow I didn't realise they were that bad.

The last and only real flight I had was from LHR-BKK back in 2000.

I've done a few domestic flights all business class though (single back then) and they were fine.

[verydumbubba]

Its real easy when the economy is humming along at a decent rate of knots, the bean counters are very busy with free lunches and fixing spreadsheets to show how smart it is to commingle lousy mortgages with good, give it a AAA rating and sell if for 10x any value one can think of.

Now that reality has set in, and everything has been cut to the quick, everyone is in a flat spin.

The worst hit will be those who were never prepared, nor qualified to run anything, as they were never trained.

Thats why the wheels came off.

Bubba

[mca]

Only flew Thai Airways International once. Never again. Business Class long haul to London and the bloody seat wouldn't recline. Rest of Business Class full and no offer of alternative seating so it was all the way sitting upright. 747 was so old I swear they had a tail gunner. I wrote to Thai Airways 3 times to comment about their shoddiness and never received the courtesy of a reply.

Now I use Emirates or Qatar Business Class. They know how to take care of folks.

[phazey]

Regarding the staff discounts, employees or ex-employees(retirees), along with their spouses fly for free, but standby seats only. Siblings receive a 75% discount.

[spidermike007]

The aspect that is not getting mentioned much, is why Thailand has so little interest in addressing it's staggering level of corruption. Malaysia has set up a corruption commission, and is making DAILY arrests of top officials, ministers, local politicians, and businessmen. Indonesia has set up a corruption commission, and so far their antigraft commission has achieved a 100-percent conviction rate in 86 cases of bribery and graft related to government procurements and budgets. And where is Thailand in all of this. Why aren't men like Newin, and others, who are coming up with expensive schemes to line their pockets being arrested, and tried? Why is the CEO of King Power still employed? Why is the Police Captain in charge of the airport security, who appears to be involved in the King Power scam, still in his position? Does anyone really think there is even a chance that the King Power scheme is not real? That they are arresting only guilty shoplifters? Does all King Power have to do is post one video on the internet, of a guilty party, for all of us to let them off the hook? Is that all it takes? Even India is getting actively involved in tackling corruption, as this article indicates. When was the last time he heard of a government minister, or top official, or corporate CEO being arrested on corruption charges?

In India, New Crusade on Corruption

By HEATHER TIMMONS

Published: July 30, 2009

NEW DELHI —When Ashwani Kumar took over as India’s top anticorruption official last year, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, his new boss, advised him, “Follow the righteous path.”

Sanjit Das for The New York Times

Under Ashwani Kumar, the Central Bureau of Investigation has arrested dozens of bank officials, engineers and contractors suspected of crimes. Yet the job before him had frustrated many others. India ranks 85th in a corruption perception index created by the nonprofit antigraft group Transparency International, worse than China, Mexico or Brazil. Mr. Kumar, 58, a career policeman and director of the Central Bureau of Investigation, has taken his Sisyphean task head on. In just a few months, he has heightened the visibility of India’s fight against complex corporate crimes and enlisted public support for his programs to battle corruption in the government.

Most notably, his agency’s business investigative skills gained acclaim internationally, after the founder and chairman of one of India’s largest information technology companies, Satyam Computer Systems, confessed to falsifying $1 billion in cash on its balance sheet in January, India’s largest and broadest modern fraud. Just 45 days after taking the case, the Central Bureau of Investigation had charged six people and produced a thorough account of how investigators suspected the fraud had occurred, based on hundreds of interviews and backed by thousands of pages of documents. The bureau even described the minutiae of the accounting tricks and dual-invoicing tactics used to commit the fraud.

In contrast, the United States Department of Justice took years to put together a compelling case against top executives of Enron, the now-bankrupt energy company. The comparison may not be completely parallel, because a confession revealed the fraud at Satyam. But the scale of the accounting scheme has led analysts and academics to label Satyam “India’s Enron.” Sudhakar V. Balachandran, an assistant professor of accounting at Columbia Business School, said the United States could learn a lot from India’s rapid response to Satyam. Foreign investors “know that swift decisive actions were taken,” Mr. Balachandran said. “If I’m an investor looking at an emerging market, I’m going to look for signs that it functions well.” That includes undertaking a swift criminal investigation at the first sign of corruption or fraud, he said.

Some rights advocates say that the bureau has been overzealous and has ignored due process. Under the bureau’s guidance, two of Satyam’s outside auditors have been in jail for seven months without trial, held on charges of criminal conspiracy. They have been denied bail, even though they maintain their innocence and have yet to be convicted of any crime. Mr. Kumar’s office, however, contends that their incarceration is justified.

Beyond Satyam, Mr. Kumar has big ambitions for the bureau. With just 5,000 agents, it is less than half the size of its closest American equivalent, the F.B.I., although India’s population is more than four times that of the United States. But India’s bureau is trying new ways to fight graft and bribery that may help make up for what it lacks in numbers. For example, the bureau is embarking on a countrywide campaign to curb corruption that enlists support from the public by asking for people to use their cellphones to text in details of corruption. Economic growth, increasing industrialization and globalization mean that economic crime is rising, Mr. Kumar said. “Traditional crimes are fading into the background” in favor of digital crimes and credit card fraud, he said. Since Mr. Kumar took office, the bureau has arrested dozens of bank managers, bureaucrats, engineers and contractors on suspicion of crimes including accepting bribes, forging documents and stealing petroleum. A recent investigation into top officials at the All India Council for Technical Education, a group created by the government to improve the vocational skills of India’s youth, uncovered 36 bank accounts that were used to hide illicit cash. At a meeting this year with private sector bankers, Mr. Kumar pledged that the bureau would act as a “facilitator in the growth of the financial sector,” by curbing something that United States regulators had failed to stop — mortgage fraud and risky lending.

Mr. Kumar seems at first like an unlikely crusader against complex financial fraud. He spent much of his 35-year career in the forests of the mountainous state of Himachal Pradesh, fighting illegal logging and poaching. But he quickly rose through the ranks of India’s civil service, becoming director general of police in the state. His success there caught the eye of the Singh administration.

The law has played a big role in the Kumar family. His father was a policeman, and he is married to the daughter of a policeman.

Discussing respect for the environment gets him fired up, and he is thrilled to point out that the bureau’s new headquarters will be a “green” building. His office is spotless, he is scrupulously polite and he sticks to a rigorous schedule that involves waking at 4 a.m. for two hours of work, then an hour of exercise. Mr. Kumar says his prominent cases have earned him enemies. And he cautions that the bureau cannot halt corruption on its own. The bureau deals with the investigation, “but the punishment is given by the courts,” he said. And he willingly acknowledges that corruption sometimes occurs within the bureau.

“Human beings are always frail, and such incidents do happen,” he said. “The question is, ‘Do we tolerate this kind of behavior?’ The answer is, ‘Absolutely no.’ ” Corruption specialists say that his fight can be effective, even if he is surrounded by a corrupt system. “One person can make a difference, just as all leaders can make a difference,” said Christiaan Poortman, global programs director for Transparency International. In Mr. Kumar’s case, his anticorruption efforts may bear fruit, Mr. Poortman said. “If he has the ear of the prime minister, who knows? It might work,” Mr. Poortman added.

[CaptHaddock]

Cynical

In US, some restaurants staff pay to work which is why thet are so insistent on tips

I have heard of a lot of abuses of restaurant workers, but have never heard of that one. What is your source?