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Transfer comes a day earlier than the parliament votes on Pita Limjaroenrat’s bid to change into the subsequent prime minister of Thailand.
Thailand’s election fee has requested the nation’s Constitutional Court docket to rule on whether or not the chief of the progressive occasion that received probably the most seats in a latest vote ought to be disqualified from parliament, in keeping with media reviews.
The referral of the case in opposition to Pita Limjaroenrat, who heads the Transfer Ahead Social gathering, got here on Wednesday, a day earlier than the bicameral parliament is scheduled to vote on the 42-year-old businessman’s bid to change into the subsequent prime minister of Thailand.
Pita has the backing of eight events in an alliance searching for to type a brand new authorities.
The election fee’s transfer was reported by the Reuters information company and three native media retailers.
The physique has been trying into whether or not Pita was knowingly unfit to register as a parliamentary candidate due to his possession of shares in a media agency, which is prohibited below election guidelines.
Pita has downplayed the problem, arguing the shares within the agency, iTV, have since been transferred and the corporate was not an lively media organisation. He faces disqualification, as much as 10 years in jail and a 20-year ban from politics if discovered to have damaged the principles.
Transfer Ahead, in an announcement, accused the election fee of speeding its referral of the case and mentioned Pita ought to have been given an opportunity to reply and refute the allegations.
Transfer Ahead and one other opposition occasion, Pheu Thai, trounced rivals allied with the army in the Could 14 election, in what was broadly seen as an amazing rejection of 9 years of presidency led or backed by the nation’s generals.
The occasion’s anti-establishment agenda – which incorporates lowering the army’s political position, undoing monopolies and reviewing a controversial regulation in opposition to insulting the monarchy – clashes with the pursuits of the royalist military and old-money enterprise elite that has influenced politics for many years in Southeast Asia’s second-biggest economic system.
Pita has since confronted a number of complaints from rivals, three of which the election fee has dismissed for late submission. 4 different complaints in opposition to his occasion have additionally been thrown out.
