'War room' set up ahead of grilling

'War room' set up ahead of grilling
Bangkok Post (15 October 2007)

Directors allegedly profited from dealFormer directors of TOT boards have unofficially set up a ''war room'' to prepare for questioning by investigators looking into the affairs of deposed prime minister Thaksin Shinawatra, his family and the telecom business he founded. The executives want to defend themselves in the event the Assets Scrutiny Committee (ASC) links previous TOT boards to deals that benefited the Shin Corp empire at the expense of the state telecom enterprise. One strategy the directors have in mind is to highlight the introduction of prepaid mobile-phone service in 2001, with TOT's blessing. They point out that the service helped create a mobile-phone boom and enrich TOT through higher revenue-sharing payments. A former TOT director confirmed that the ASC was focusing on the Thaksin government's conversion of part of the concession fees paid by mobile operators to an excise tax, which allegedly enriched Shin's cellular flagship, Advanced Info Service. The ASC sees the move as an abuse of authority and a violation of the law and therefore wants the directors' testimony to indict the former prime minister. The committee has also highlighted the reduction in the revenue-sharing payment from prepaid service to 20% from 25%, and a roaming agreement between Advanced Info Service and Thai Mobile, the stillborn cellular joint venture of TOT and CAT Telecom. The former director said that TOT's own investigations had calculated the financial damage inflicted on TOT from agreements with Shin companies at almost 100 billion baht, and forwarded its findings to the ASC. The damages include:

F42 billion baht from excise tax collection;
F32.3 billion from amendments of concession agreements with AIS;
F7.6 billion from the Yellow Pages concession with TeleInfo Media, another Shin subsidiary;
F210 million from the iPSTAR satellite concession.

The source said that several former directors and ministers had already testified before the ASC, raising concern that some testimony might contradict other versions. As a result, they talked and agreed to set up a ''war room'' to gather evidence and review facts and testimony to ensure everyone was speaking the same language. For example, he said, the ASC claims changes in prepaid revenue sharing caused TOT's revenues in the 11th year of the AIS concession to drop by 32.33 billion baht. He said that the war room has prepared documents to counter this claim, highlighting how the huge jump in prepaid users had helped TOT, which earned more than 20 billion baht from prepaid revenue sharing last year _ four times as much as in 2001.
In addition, he questioned an ASC claim that AIS gained an advantage from airtime fee reductions since the lower costs were passed on to customers and that all operators benefited, not just AIS. Former TOT union president Mitr Charoenwal said he was also invited to testify four times, focusing on project approvals by former TOT boards, amendments of the AIS-TOT concession, roaming agreements and third-generation service.