ASIA

Thai ports overtime scam uncovered

9 years ago

Investigators have discovered a multi-million Thai bhat graft scam involving potentially 560 employees, many of them high-ranking officials, at the Port Authority of Thailand (PAT), the country’s The Nation newspaper has reported.

According to chief investigator Pinit Tungsakul from the Department of Special Investigation (DSI), part of Thailand’s Ministry of Justice, it had been found that PAT employees claimed overtime payments despite having not actually worked, and that supervisors agreed to the overtime requests without properly examining them.

Mr Pinit said that the discovery of the scam, which he claimed had cost the state-owned enterprise between around $9m and $12m a year, has been referred by the DSI to the country’s National Anti-Corruption Commission (NACC).

“We believe that this kind of irregularity has taken place for a very long time. We can’t tell how long,” he said of the revelation.

The chief investigator said that the DSI began investigating the alleged scam, which he claimed involved “almost all departments” of PAT and over 420,000 pages of documents, in 2014 following complaints from PAT officials.

According to Mr Pinit, many PAT employees had even taken sham overtime-pay requests to court when seeking compensation from the organisation.

“Between 2002 and 2012, as many as 1,200 PAT officials petitioned the Labour Court for compensation of [around $98.9m] in total,” he explained.

“Some of them got the money, but others did not because the court was not convinced by their cases.

“Some plaintiffs claimed they worked as much as 22 hours a day.”

At least 10 director-level officials have been found to be involved in the scam and have been noted in the DSI investigation report submitted to the NACC, Mr Pinit added.