Senator Tuang Untachai said today he wonders how the government can tell the Thai people that Thailand is currently in a crisis, to justify a loan bill to fund its digital wallet scheme, while Prime Minister Srettha Thavisin, during his recent overseas trips to woo foreign investors, was telling foreign investors that the Thai economy is healthy.
After the Council of State made its legal observations about the plan to issue a loan bill, for the 500 billion baht needed for the digital wallet scheme, Tuang said that the government should now be aware that it will be very difficult to press ahead with such a funding method.
He recalled that the previous Abhisit and Yingluck governments had tried to issue similar bills to borrow for its major projects, but they ended up in the Constitutional Court which ruled against such bills.
If the government goes ahead with the loan bill, he said someone will inevitably take the matter to the Constitutional Court and it will probably suffer the same fate, said Tuang.
The senator said he has sympathy for the government, because it has promised the people that each of them will receive 10,000 baht from the scheme, but now it may not be able to realise the scheme and may try to find a soft landing.
Regarding the council’s response, Tuang said, in the past, the council had never given a binary answer as to whether a project can be done or not, but has made legal observations, leaving it to the government to judge whether to proceed with such project.
