Thai tycoon Thaksin tastes freedom in homeland, 15 years after fleeing

BANGKOK: Thailand’s billionaire former Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra was released on parole on Sunday after six months in detention, his first day of freedom in his homeland 15 years after fleeing in the wake of his overthrow in a military coup.

Thailand’s best-known and most polarising premier, the influential Thaksin has loomed large over politics during the years spent mostly in self-imposed exile to dodge jail for abuse of power, charges he maintained were cooked up by the country’s old guard to keep him at bay.

The 74-year-old tycoon, whose family’s party is back in power, was granted parole despite having not spent a single night in prison for a sentence that had in August been commuted from eight years to one year by the country’s king.

Due to health reasons, Thaksin was incarcerated in a luxury wing of a hospital, from which he made an uncharacteristically low-key departure before dawn on Sunday, slipping out in a convoy of tinted-windowed vehicles that was chased by a phalanx of media that had gathered overnight.

Wearing a check shirt, protective mask and with his arm in a sling, Thaksin was pictured in the vehicle beside youngest daughter Paetongtarn Shinawatra, leader of the ruling Pheu Thai party, and arrived at his Bangkok residence 25 minutes later.