A court in Thailand yesterday sentenced one of the kingdom's most controversial political figures, media mogul Sondhi Limthongkul, to 20 years in prison for corporate fraud.
Sondhi is the founder of the royalist "Yellow Shirt" protest movement, which has played a major role in Thailand's colour-coded political conflict and helped to topple fugitive former premier Thaksin Shinawatra in 2006.
The Criminal Court in Bangkok convicted Sondhi of violating the Securities and Exchange Act in a case dating back to the mid-1990s, and gave him the maximum sentence possible, a court official told AFP.
He was accused by Thailand's Securities and Exchange Commission of falsifying documents used as collateral for a loan of almost 1.1 billion baht (36 million dollars) for his ASTV/Manager media empire.
Mass protests by the Yellows, formally known as the People's Alliance for Democracy, helped trigger the 2006 coup by royalist generals who ousted Thaksin, then seen as Sondhi's arch-enemy.
Thaksin now lives in self-imposed exile overseas to avoid a jail term imposed in his absence for corruption, but his younger sister Yingluck Shinawatra is the current prime minister.