Thaksin slapped with $500m tax bill

BANGKOK: Thai tax officials slapped ousted prime minister Thaksin Shinawatra with a $500 million bill on Tuesday, resurrecting a dispute at the centre of the kingdom’s decade-long political rift.

The controversy centres around whether Thaksin, who currently lives in self-exile, should have paid taxes on the sale of his telecoms company Shin Corp to Singapore’s Temasek Holdings in 2006. The furore over the deal, which netted the Shinawatra family a $1.9 billion windfall, was a lightning rod for opposition to his government.

Protests culminated in a coup that booted him from office and sparked years of debilitating political infighting between his supporters and opponents. On Tuesday tax officials accompanied by police posted the bill on Thaksin’s former home in Bangkok, although he has not set foot there for nearly a decade to avoid jail for a graft conviction that he insists was politically motivated. Denying it was an act of political theatre, Thai junta leader Prayut Chan-O-Cha said tax officials "posted the summons at his house like they would in every other case."

Prayut is a former army chief who became prime minister after leading a 2014 coup against Thaksin’s sister Yingluck.

"This is about a violation of the law and has nothing to do with reconciliation," he told reporters, referring to a recent junta-backed push to launch talks between Thailand’s political factions.