BANGKOK – Thailand’s former prime minister Thaksin Shinawatra has submitted a request for a royal pardon, Justice Minister Wissanu Krea-ngam said on Thursday.

The 74-year-old billionaire, Thailand’s most famous politician, began serving an eight-year prison sentence after he returned last week in a vaunted homecoming from 15 years of self-imposed exile.

After landing in a private jet, he was transferred to prison to serve his sentence on charges of abuse of power and conflict of interest from his days in power.

Hours after his arrival, Mr Srettha Thavisin of the Shinawatra family-backed Pheu Thai party sailed through a parliamentary vote to become prime minister, fuelling speculation that Thaksin had struck a deal with his former enemies among the country’s conservative and royalist military that ousted his party’s governments in 2006 and 2014.

Thaksin and Pheu Thai have denied this.

During his first night in Thailand, he was moved to a police hospital because of chest pains and high blood pressure.

Mr Wissanu said Thaksin had applied for a pardon.

“We have received (the request), the rest will be according to the procedure,” the Justice Minister told reporters.

Asked how long the process would take, he said: “It is purely based on royal grace. The procedure from the government is not long, but it depends on the length of (King Maha Vajiralongkorn’s) consideration.”

Under Thai law, prisoners can submit a pardon application that is passed from the justice minister through the prime minister to the Privy Council before going to the King.

Officials say the process takes one to two months, if all the paperwork is in order.

On landing in Bangkok last week, Thaksin’s first public act was to prostrate himself in homage before a portrait of the King at the airport.

Thaksin is one of the most influential but divisive figures in modern Thai history.

Loved by millions of rural Thais for his populist policies in the early 2000s, he is reviled by the country’s royalist and pro-military establishment, which has spent much of the past two decades trying to keep him and his allies out of power.

The Thai media reported that Thaksin had been installed in a private VIP suite on the 14th floor of the Police General Hospital in downtown Bangkok.

A small anti-Thaksin group gathered in Bangkok on Thursday afternoon to demand that he serve his jail time.

Before last week, he had not set foot in the kingdom since 2008, living mostly in Dubai to avoid criminal cases that he long maintained were politically motivated.

But earlier in 2023, he said he was willing to face justice so that he could return home and see his grandchildren.

Mr Srettha heads a controversial coalition that includes parties linked to the coup-maker generals who ousted Thaksin and his sister Yingluck.

The alliance shuts out the progressive Move Forward Party (MFP), which rode a wave of youth and urban discontent at nearly a decade of military-backed rule to win most seats in the May election.

But MFP’s reformist push to amend royal defamation laws and tackle business monopolies spooked the kingdom’s powerful elite, and the party’s leader, Mr Pita Limjaroenrat, was blocked from becoming prime minister. AFP, REUTERS