Andrew Drummond

on August 17, 2008

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From Andrew Drummond, Bangkok
16th August 2008

Pictures by Andrew Chant

A British man who faced a seven-year prison sentence in the Philippines for adultery is being allowed to return to the UK with his girlfriend and baby this week.

David Scott, 37, has had his application for partner Cynthia Delfino to accompany him granted by the Home Office on humanitarian grounds.

The couple’s daughter Janina has been given British citizenship following her parents’ ordeal, which began when they were arrested and flung into a squalid cell in Manila when Cynthia was eight months pregnant.

They were charged with adultery, which is illegal in the strictly Catholic Philippines, despite Cynthia having separated from her husband.

After four days the couple were bailed and they fled to live in a jungle and derelict houses before Janina, now seven months old, was born in a tiny clinic.

David, from Swindon, Wiltshire - who met Cynthia on the internet in 2006 - paid £12,000 in legal fees and bribes to get them to Thailand.

After the long and emotional journey, they picked up Cynthia’s visa from the British embassy in Bangkok last week.

David said: ‘It’s been a long fight having to pay bribes everywhere I go. But every time I look at my daughter I just know it was worth everything.’

Cynthia said: ‘I am so relieved. I am a little scared about going to Britain, but everybody is so kind.’

Coming home at lastFrom Andrew Drummond,
Koh Samet, Thailand
Saturday August 16 08
In the sea off the Thai island of Koh Samet David Scott takes his first ever dip with is new born baby and Filipina wife.
He has been in the tropics for nine months but has not even seen so much as a swimming pool in an ordeal which began with his arrest and jailing in the Philippines for adultery and a threatened sentence of seven years.
But yesterday David Scott, 37, his girlfriend Cynthia, 28, and baby Janina, seven months finally found time to celebrate after learning that the Home Office had granted them permission on humanitarian grounds for the whole family to return to Britain.
David and Cynthia are on the run after escaping from Philippines Police. A court official in Coolocan, Manila, confirmed last week that a warrant had been issued for their arrest or adultery.
This week they will be flying back to Swindon, Wilts, where Scott will introduce his new born baby to his grandmother.
Said David: “If it had not been for you guys (the Mail on Sunday) and my local M.P. Anne Snelgrove, I have no idea where I would be now, but probably in jail or worse. I cannot thank you enough.”
David Scott, 37, from Swindon, Wilts., spent last New Year in jail in Manila, after he was arrested with 8 month pregnant Cynthia Delfino, during a night-time swoop by Philippines police and officers of the National Bureau of Investigation.
Accompanying the police was Cynthia’s Filipino husband Noriel Delfino, who was demanding the couple be jailed for the maximum seven years in the Philippines for adultery unless they paid him the equivalent of £7,000.
There is no divorce in the Philippines, a strictly Catholic country, but rich families can seek costly annulments on the grounds of the mental incapacity of one of the partners.
The couple were thrown into a police cell and that’s when how they spent last New Year. They even had to bribe police to be allowed to share a cell.
The couple fled while on bail and were forced to live in the jungle, derelict houses, and finally a room provided by friends, before their baby girl Janina was born in secret in a tiny clinic south of Manila.
All in all David Scott had to legal fees and bribes over £12,000 using his savings and finally cash sent by his mum and friends in Britain, to pay for documentation for Janina and his wife and get smuggle them out of the country.
Although the warrant was out for their arrest, they were able to board a flight to Bangkok, Thailand.
“The Immigration policeman took my last £25,” said David.
Back in Thailand journalists chipped in and provide food and accommodation for the family for four months while David attempted the hardest - part to get them all home to Britain.
With the help of local M.P. Anne Snelgrove, Mr. Scott was able to get British citizenship for baby Janina in Bangkok a month ago, and this week an official from the British Embassy in Bangkok informed David the Cynthia’s application to travel with her baby to England was granted on humanitarian grounds.
On the holiday island of Koh Samet, 150 miles south east of Bangkok David Scott said: “When I flew to the Philippines to visit Cynthia for the birth of our baby her husband had already agreed to go through an annulment. But I walked into a trap. It’s been a long fight having to pay bribes every where I go. But every time I look at my daughter I just know it was worth everything.
“I have learned a lot from this trip. The biggest lesson of all is that one is not automatically going to get help or even just advice from a British Embassy if one gets into trouble. You are very much on your own.
“The first advice I got from an Embassy official in Manila was that legally Janina was not my baby and I should leave the country without her.
(Technically as there is no divorce in the Philippines the government would recognise Janina as being the daughter of Noriel Delfino).
“That’s not the sort of advice one forgets. Then when I got to Bangkok they would not even let me and Janina into the Embassy – until my M.P. called them – all because we had ticked the wrong box on a visa form.
(Cynthia has been given a visa even though technically she is still married to Noriel Delfino and has known David under the statutory two years. Thus they were not even allowed to join the visa queue).
Said Cynthia: “I am so relieved. I am a little scared about going to Britain but everybody has been so kind so far.”

Bar girl and the expat: a killing foretold - Observer 17 Aug 08

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on August 17, 2008

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Every year hundreds of Britons leave the UK to marry Thai brides. The perils of such liaisons were revealed last week when retired engineer Ian Beeston was murdered by his wife and her lover. Ian MacKinnon and Andrew Drummond in Suwannaphum investigate a ruthless marriage market in which money can buy beauty but not necessarily love.

Ian MacKinnon and Andrew Drummond

The Observer, Sunday August 17 2008

Andrew Herrington, a retired Birmingham lorry driver who now lives in Thailand, lowered his voice and turned to his companions: ‘Well, you know, he married a bar girl. What did he expect?’

Sitting on the ground floor of his home - a two-storey house squatting in a rice paddy in Isan, north-east Thailand - Herrington, aged 51, was talking about his friend and neighbour, Ian Beeston, who was found murdered last weekend after predicting that his Thai wife would kill him.

Beeston, 69, a retired design engineer, had been beaten and stabbed in his house - police say he took seven hours to die. His wife, Wacheerawan, 42, and her Thai lover, Somchit Janong, 48, confessed and have been charged with murder. In bizarre and macabre fashion, Janong even re-enacted for police and photographers the manner in which he had clubbed Beeston to death.

This was no isolated romance that culminated in a tragedy. The British embassy in Bangkok processes the wedding documents of up to 70 couples each week. The requests are almost exclusively from older British men - among 860,000 UK tourists each year - hoping to marry younger Thai women. But for any British man hoping to follow in Beeston’s footsteps and build a new better life in Thailand, his death was a stark reminder of how badly things can go wrong.

Three of the group of worried farangs - the Thai term for foreigners - who had gathered in Isan, have invested a hefty chunk of their life’s savings building houses nearby on the fringes of Suwannaphum village, deep in Thailand’s poorest province, Roi Et. Beeston’s house, which swallowed up all of his £250,000 retirement nest egg, was described locally as ‘palatial’. Unsurprisingly, in the wake of the killing, a siege mentality has taken hold.

‘Wanna’ was indeed a bar girl, a prostitute. She met Beeston in a bar in Beach Road, Soi 2, in Pattaya, the garish beach resort in southern Thailand, when he was still coming to the country on holiday. The resort is notorious for go-go and hostess bars with a ’sin city’ reputation that surpasses that of Bangkok. Eventually, his marriage having fallen apart, Beeston took early retirement from his job at the Ford motor plant in Dagenham, Essex, and moved to Thailand. In 1999 he married Wanna and paid for her two grown-up children to be put through university.

The good life hit the buffers when he discovered Wanna had secretly sold his Suwannaphum property. As foreigners are barred from owning land in Thailand, he had put everything in her name. All his savings from working as a design engineer, first at Perkins and then at Ford, had gone. Worse, the new owners of his house were agitating to move in. Four months ago a furious Beeston banished Wanna to a corrugated shack in the back garden. Friends feared then that he had signed his own death warrant.

In a letter left with lawyers, Beeston predicted his own grisly fate. ‘It is just a matter of time now,’ he wrote. ‘I am in real fear for my own life.’

Beeston’s romance, like so many others involving Western men escaping loneliness at home, began with a stroll down one of the hundreds of neon-lit strips in Thailand’s tourist-friendly sex quarters. The ratio of male tourists to Thai women is almost two to one. Walk down Bangkok’s Soi Cowboy or Patpong any evening and it is easy to see how masculine fantasy can take flight. Ageing, unprepossessing foreign men are fawned over by lithe young Thai women wearing broad smiles and revealing clothes. The prospective clients are beckoned through curtained doorways to a dimly lit world where bar girls dance suggestively on a tiny stage and strip.

Others chat up the punters in rudimentary English. The price of all this attention is just the cost of a drink for the girl, perhaps a tip. The often unspoken element is that the girl will go back and spend the night at his hotel. Cash is rarely mentioned, and there is no unseemly haggling, but the going rate is little more than a ‘present’ of £20.

‘[The men] are often not the most handsome of all, they are usually in the latter years of their life, they are bald, unattractive and quite lonely in their own little society,’ writes Thai anthropologist Dr Yos Santasombat in Hello My Big Big Honey!, an anthology of love letters penned to Bangkok bar girls. ‘When they come to Patpong, they’re struck with girls who are all over them.’

The appeal of easy, cheap sex is evident the next morning. The same men hold hands with their bar girls skipping down the pavements of Bangkok’s tourist haunts. ‘Often they extend their relationship for a number of days or weeks or even years,’ writes Yos. ‘Sometimes the farang himself ends up spending the entire vacation with one girl and sometimes comes back. Sometimes she becomes his mistress or even a wife.’

Romance with a Westerner in such circumstances can come perilously close to a game of mutual exploitation. Nearly all of the girls have flocked to the cities and resorts to escape their own prison: an impoverished existence in Thailand’s rural expanses, whereas a night’s takings from the city bar could sustain a family for a month. From Isan’s desperately poor, rice farming villages, where hunger is the norm, the bars of Bangkok or Pattaya are a welcome escape. For girls with little education they provide an opportunity to shine and have the honour of providing for their families by sending new-found riches back home.

‘They do it because it’s an easy life,’ said John Burdett, a British lawyer-turned-novelist who has interviewed hundreds of bar girls for books such as Bangkok Haunts. ‘You don’t want to be a subsistence rice farmer. It’s very, very hard. Village life’s claustrophobic. Bar girl work isn’t dirty. It’s not strenuous. They don’t have dozens of partners; maybe one or two a week. The rest of the time they’re getting men to buy drinks and existing on tips. In the village there’s a kind of omertà, where no one talks about it. But they send money home to care for people, so they’ve big status.

‘A bar girl in her early or mid-twenties has a 10-year window of opportunity to get out of poverty,’ said Burdett. ‘So if she spends time with a guy she is using up her chances. She sees that as an investment and she’s entitled to something in return. The car and the house may be in her name. In the West we’ve lost our intuitive understanding of how poverty shapes thinking. So, if after 10 years together the foreigner decides to move out, leaving her with little to show for it, that’s a problem. She’s lost face and that’s terribly important. Her image has been damaged and it might even lead people to kill.’

Stephen Treharne Jones, 63, (left) was a former neighbour of Beeston. Jones met Lamyai, then 32, in a Pattaya bar and sought to ‘rescue’ her and send her home to Isan. ‘When I met my wife, Lamyai , she had nothing,’ said Jones. ‘I paid her out of a sex bar in Pattaya and told her to go home. When I visited her home she was living in a room with her two children. There was no bathroom or toilet facilities, no doors, no tiles, no electricity, just a mattress and blankets on the floor. So I bought a big home for both of us and bought the land off her relatives.’

Jones’s world collapsed when he asked his wife to sell a piece of land he had bought. Lamyai refused, saying it was impossible. Only when he went with a lawyer to the land registry did he discover he never owned it. He bought it from Lamyai’s family, but allowed them to keep it in their names because of foreign ownership prohibitions. When challenged, Lamyai threw him out of their luxury villa in Kalasin, an hour from Suwannaphum. Penniless, he scuttled back to King’s Lynn, Norfolk, two months ago. He now lives there in sheltered accommodation.

‘Looking back now, I know my Thai wife had set me up from day one,’ said Jones last week. ‘In Kalasin I know of three other foreigners who were kicked out by their wives after they completed property purchases. They say there’s no fool like an old fool. But I did genuinely love Lamyai. I was sold a dream, I guess. A quiet life in the country where food and drink was cheap, the women attentive and the weather warm. But that’s not the reality. The reality is that one becomes a captive.’

Lamyai (right) has a very different account of the breakdown in relations. ‘If Stephen had been a good husband I would not have asked him to leave,’ she said. ‘But when he argued he called me a thief and a prostitute. We were quite happy for four years, even though he spent a lot of time going out drinking with his farang friends in the area. Stephen had a house he could have lived in all his life if he respected me as his wife, but at the end I was just his servant.’

As his own marriage became a bitter property dispute, Beeston saw trouble coming. Exiled to the garden shed, his wife had installed her lover, Janong, and they kept Beeston a virtual prisoner in his own home with taunts and attacks.

In a letter to his lawyers, Beeston told how his wife had started a money lending business - lending his money - and had paid off local police so she could run an illegal lottery. ‘My wife threatened me with a gun,’ he said in the letter, detailing a series of attacks on his house involving ’stones, lumps of wood, fireworks and even a tin of paint’. The house was also frequently burgled, he said.

Like so many Britons and other expatriates living in rural Thailand who are unable to converse in Thai, it appears Beeston may have been the unwitting victim of a sting his wife had been waiting for years to bring off. According to his friends, the whole town, even the police chief, knew but nobody said anything. ‘I thought she loved me, but she only wanted my money after all,’ Beeston had told his Australian neighbour, Bill Lamb.

‘He told me he thought his wife was about to kill him,’ said Lamb. ‘My feeling is that Ian had been paying for Wanna’s daughters from a previous marriage to go to university. This year they both graduated. I just don’t think he was needed any more. She had it all. To be honest - the life of a foreigner isn’t worth much around here.’

Back in Herrington’s Suwannaphum house, fists were clenched as the group discussed a fitting revenge for the perpetrators of the callous act. The palpable sentiment was: ‘It’s them or us.’ But the bitter consensus was also that after all the publicity had died down Beeston’s wife would be granted bail and freed. ‘She’s got the money, and with money cases just get dropped,’ said Herrington.

Then the conversation turned to the future and who was ‘next for the bullet’. They agree they know the identity of the marked man. He lives about 20 miles away and is having some major problems with his Thai wife. ‘Yep,’ they chorus, ‘for sure.’

About this articleClose Bar girl and the expat: a Thailand killing foretold
This article appeared in the Observer on Sunday August 17 2008 on p8 of the News section. It was last updated at 00:02 on August 17 2008.

Police to meet Gary Glitter in London - The Times Aug 14 08

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on August 14, 2008

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From Andrew Drummond,

Bangkok

Gary Glitter, the former rock star who was jailed for three years for abusing children in Vietnam would be deported back to Britain next, his lawyer said yesterday.

The statement appeared to contradict an earlier statement by lawyer Le Than Kinh that Glitter would be unaccompanied and free to go anywhere after leaving Vietnam.

But it is understood Glitter, real name Paul Francis Gadd, has been only provided with a one way travel document back to Britain, since his passport expired a year ago.

On his return to Britain it is understood that Gadd will be put on the paedophile register before being allowed to travel abroad again.

He has indicated in an interview with a Vietnamese journalist that he needed to seek medical and dental treatment in Britain as a matter of priority, although in that interview he said he would like to go to Singapore or Hong Kong where he had friends.

The Vietnamese Foreign Affairs department has politely declined work visas for foreign journalists intending to cover his release and asked that they respect Gadd’s wishes.

Le Than Kinh said last week that the fallen star, who had a cult following with songs such as ‘Leader of the Gang’ , would be escorted directly onto an aircraft by police and with a British official from the Consulate in Ho Chi Minh City.

He confirmed yesterday: “Police booked his ticket from Ho Chi Minh City to London and I have already paid for the ticket on his behalf.”

Glitter was arrested in the southern province of Baria-Vung Tau after journalists from a Sunday newspaper spotted and photographed him with young girls there.

A subsequent police investigation resulted in four charges of ‘lewdness with children’ aged 11 and 12, being brought against him.

An investigation into child rape was dropped after the parents of the two victims demanded US$10,000 and US$5,000 respectively.

Lawyer Le Than Kinh negotiated the compensation down to US$2000 each and the families then petitioned the People’s Court to stop the case in order ‘to avoid further damage to the girls’ families’ honour and to the privacy of the victims.

Since the offences the girls have been returned to the care of their parents, and of two older girls who procured the children for Gadd, one was now married and another has been sentenced and released from custody at the Baria-Vung Tau Social Labour Centre, a rehabilitation unit.

When Gadd was sentenced to three years in prison the Chief Prosecutor of the People’s Procuracy of Baria-Vung Tau noted that in 1999 he had been ‘taken into police custody for two months by British police on a charge of storage of forbidden sexual photographs in a laptop’ and that in 2003 he was expelled by police from Cambodia.

After he was sentenced officers from Scotland Yard visited Paul Gadd in prison in Vietnam and examined the hard disk of his computer which contained images of children involved in sexual activity. The case had not been proceeded with in Vietnam because Gadd claimed in his defence that he had borrowed the computer from a friend and there was no evidence that he intended to ‘widely propagate’ the material.

It is understood there is no plan to prosecute him in Britain for these offences.

Pictures: Andrew Chant

Jungle Brit gets Home Office permission to bring family home -Aug 14 08

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on August 14, 2008

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Jungle Brit gets permission to fly home with Filipina and baby

From Andrew Drummond, Bangkok, Wednesday August 14

A Briton who fled to the jungle in the Philippines after being told he faced seven years in jail there for adultery has been given leave to return to England with his girlfriend and seven month old baby.

David Scott, 37, from Swindon, Wilts., spent last New Year in jail in Manila, after he was arrested with his 8 month pregnant Filipina girlfriend Cynthia Delfino, 28, during a night-time swoop by Philippines police and officers of the National Bureau of Investigation.
Accompanying the police was Cynthia’s Filipino husband Noriel Delfino, who said David, was demanding the couple be jailed for the maximum seven years in the Philippines for adultery unless they paid him the equivalent of £7,000.
There is no divorce in the Philippines, a strictly Catholic country, but rich families can seek costly annulments on the grounds of the mental incapacity of one of the partners.
The couple fled while on bail and were forced to live in the jungle, derelict houses, and finally a room provided by friends, before their baby girl Janina was born in a tiny clinic south of Manila.
A warrant was issued for their arrest but by paying bribes they were able to board a flight to Bangkok, Thailand.
With the help of local M.P. Anne Snelgrove, Mr. Scott was able to get British citizenship for baby Janina in Bangkok a month ago, and early today an official from the British Embassy in Bangkok informed David the Cynthia’s application to travel with her baby to England was granted on humanitarian grounds.
In Bangkok David Scott said today: “Obviously we are both delighted. It’s been a nine month ordeal. We would like to thank our M.P. and journalists and everybody who helped us fight to get our baby home to Britain.

“When I flew to the Philippines to visit Cynthia for the birth of our baby her husband had already agreed to go through an annulment. But I walked into a trap. It’s been a long fight having to pay bribes every where I go. But every time I look at my daughter I just know it was worth everything.”
Said Cynthia: “I am so relieved. When the Embassy called this morning I just knew it was going to be good news. I am a little scared about going to Britain but everybody has been so kind so far.”

The Thaksin debate. Did he jump or was he pushed?

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on August 12, 2008

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Was Thaksin Shinawatra deliberately allowed to leave?

From Andrew Drummond

Request: Times Sport.

Monday 11^th August 2008

Thaksin Shinawatra’s decision to flee to Britain was not only predicted but almost invited and today only his staunchest supporters seemed genuinely surprised in Thailand.

Two weeks ago on July 29^th both he and his wife Pojaman had applied to the courts to travel not only to Beijing for the Olympics but also to Britain for the start of the football season.

They had been granted permission only to travel to Beijing after which the courts would consider their British trip.

No sooner had they left than the Bangkok press predicted that they would not return. This was immediately vehemently denied at the weekend by people representing Thaksin saying not only would Thaksin and his wife return to Thailand but also giving the flight number and arrival time from Beijing.

A crowd of cheery supporters waited in vain at the airport.

Pojaman had already been convicted of a massive tax fraud and although she had been granted bail and could delay any imposition of sentence for years while on appeal, there was no appeal for the cases the couple were about to face.

Thaksin and his wife were due today to return to the Supreme Court in Bangkok in Bangkok to face the first in a series of other corruption charges. They were accused of corruptly buying government land at a knock down price in the centre of Bangkok, while Thaksin was in power, something akin to Gordon Brown ordering the acquisition of 16 acres of Whitehall for personal development.

And in this case three of their lawyers have already been jailed for trying to bribe a judge.

Thaksin is also due to face other corruption charges. One is that he brokered a deal with the Burmese military junta enabling them to get very cheap credit from the Thai government Export Import Bank – provided they invested in business with his Shin Communications corporation.

He is also accused of improperly running a government lottery.

“He was given the chance to leave. His permanent departure would bring an end to a lot of trouble in Thailand. He has massive support but also a section of the population is very angry at what he has done. They even suspect than on his recent trip he smuggled more money out,” a former Thai diplomatic official told me yesterday, before rushing off to join an anti-Thaksin demo.

“This is a Thai solution. But it’s not a good one.“

Last weekend it was reported that Pojaman boarded a flight to Beijing with nine cases, if so its of course rather a lot for such an Olympic opening ceremony, now matter how smart one wants to look.

In affect even though Thaksin has massive amounts of money frozen in Thailand nobody really knows his real wealth. If there is one thing he is good at it is moving his assets in and out of countries and banks. He has been acquitted once of concealing his assets, which he claimed was a genuine mistake. Another such charge is in the pipeline.

At the moment he is playing the ‘democracy’ card and he is citing Britain and a wonderful example of such.

Sweet talk? Opponents say that particular card was only dealt him when he was ousted in a military coup in September 2006.

Previous to that he had publicly stated that western styled democracy was not the answer for a country like Thailand and when he was criticised at in the United Nations over misleading the world when he claimed that Thailand did not have bird flu he famously retorted: “The United Nations is not my father.”

Opponents also claim that he was not so concerned about justice when hundreds of innocent people, if not the 2,500 quoted by Human Rights organisation, were injudicially killed in the ‘War against Drugs’ which he initiated in 2003. Nobody went through the courts for those offences perhaps because its a racing certainty that the police were the major offenders.

At any rate Thaksin’s hasty, or long planned departure, believe what you will, was good for the Thai Stock market which rallied on hearing the news of his departure.

It may also put an end to daily demonstrations against him throughout Thailand by the other ’champions’ of democracy the ‘People’s Alliance for Democracy’

At the moment however Thaksin Shinawatra probably needs Manchester City as much as the club needs his money. It is a major conduit of his cult of his personality to the rural people of Thailand, from where his major support comes.

And without the fame and exposure City gives him he could just fade into the background completely as just another oriental politician. There are no shortage of politicians in Thailand in the past, who have allegedly robbed the country and then had to spend a considerable time in exile – until they are forgiven, of their crimes forgotten.

Thaksin is not expected to return to Thailand in the near future. As one of his biographers, British academic Chris Baker, noted in Bangkok. “ He has defamed the court. So he has gone for good.”

Judges here are not addressed as ‘My Lord’ but when lawyers address them they usually end the sentence with the equivalent of ‘I am merely dust under your feet’.

The fact is that the judiciary is much the same as when Thaksin was in power . And he made full use of the judiciary to suppress his enemies. Although the investigations against him were done by committees set up by the military rulers who ousted him it was the judges who accepted the cases against him as worthy for trial. Hoisted by his own petard? We’ll have to leave it to other refs.

But the British government is going to be hard pressed to support him even though it disapproved of the coup. When Brits are in the mire in Thailand, often claiming they have been framed by Thai police, the standard operating proceduce from the British government is a rather muted: ‘We will not interfere in the judicial process of another country’. Sauce for the goose?

British pensioner awaited his own murder armed with a tazer - Daily Mail -Daily Telegraph - Daily Express

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on August 12, 2008

British pensioner killed in Thailand predicted his own death - Daily Telegraph edit

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British man murdered by Thai bride and her lover after he predicted his own death - Daily Mail edit

Link to SUN

Link to SKY TV News

From Andrew Drummond
Suwannaphum, Thailand- September 11 08

Photographs: Andrew Chant
A retired British design engineer predicted his own murder and sat helplessly in his tropical ‘palace’ waiting for it to happen.

Friends said today they armed 69-yr-old Ian Beeston with a tazer gun to protect himself. But it was not enough.
Last Saturday they found body his body. The pensioner who worked at Perkins and Ford’s Dagenham had been beaten and stabbed to death. Police said it took him seven hours to die.
Today Beeston’s wife and her Thai lover were arrested and charged with the murder as horrified onlookers ,shocked at the callousness of the deed, jeered and shouted ‘hia’ (Monitor lizard) – a strong Thai insult.

(Crowds outside Beeston’s home await the murder reconstruction)

Neill James a consular official of the British Embassy in Bangkok who attended the murder scene in the north eastern Thai province of Roi-Et called on local police for a transparent enquiry, said local police.

(Ian Beeston and his wife present water heaters to local police)

Beeston had predicted his own death in writing. He wrote a letter saying ‘It is just a matter of time now. I am in real fear for my own life. I need things to proceed quickly”. He left the letter with lawyers.
Trouble started just four months ago when Beeston, married nine years to his 42-yr-old Thai wife, Wacheerawan, nicknamed ‘Wanna’ discovered that she had cashed in all the property he had bought in Thailand at a local bank.

He had invested all his life savings in over an acre of property and built his marital home, a guesthouse and a restaurant near a village called Suwannaphum, meaning ‘Golden Land’. Thai newspapers this week described him home (above) as ‘ palatial’.
But under Thai law, as foreigners cannot own property he had put it in his wife’s name.
“I thought she loved me but she just wanted my cash,” penniless divorcee Beeston , who arrived in Thailand with £350,000 told friends at the time. He then asked his wife to leave the marital home and live in a shack with corrugated iron roof nearby. (below)

And he began selling all moveable objects in the house and restaurant piece by piece to survive until he could legally get the funds to return home.
“It was like he has signed his own death warrant,” said neighbour Andrew Herrington, 51, a retired HGV driver from Sheldon, Birmingham.
“His wife (pictured below right) lived behind the main house with her Thai boyfriend. Every time we went to visit she would come out and scream and order us away. ‘This is my house. This is my land’, she would shout.

“I was due to meet Ian on Sunday. We had to meet on the main road near his village, because his wife would create a fuss if any westerners came. But he never turned up. I was very suspicious.
“Ian knew that he was going to be murdered. He had already complained that while he was away she had put something inside a beer in his fridge.
“He had felt ill. So he sent the beer away for analysis to a local hospital. He was awaiting the results.
“But it was an open secret in the area that Ian was going to be murdered.
“When she arrived in the village she took her husband bearing gifts to all the police and local dignitaries. But she had a secret police lover too.
“When I recently went home to Birmingham a policeman told me ‘ Perhaps your friend will not be alive when you come back’.
“So when I went to his house on Sunday and saw his car was there and the house locked up, I knew then his time had come. His wife came out shouting at me and my wife to go away. We decided to call the police.
“When they came they found his badly beaten body. I identified him. Only the week before he had been at my house to collect a box of Mars chocolate bars. He did not like the ones made in Asia.
“Ian was a nice and charming man, always helping others. He helped me with the wiring in my house and he designed my stairs, but he would not take a penny. But secretly he was broke and he had nowhere to go once his home had been taken away from him.”
Another neighbour Australian Bill Lamb, from Woolagong, nr Sydney said: “Ian was a lovely chap. But whenever we visited his wife would come out from behind the house and shout at us. She complained to the village chief to keep us away.
“Ian was helping me with some welding. He was a jack of all trade. He told us all he was going to be murdered, and quite frankly we believed him, and thought so too.
“Friends had brought him a stun gun, a tazer, to use to protect himself. We wanted him to go home to England but he was spending his last pennies trying to get his property back. He was due in court today.
“For the last three months he had been a prisoner in his own house. We have been bringing him food, but he has been living on mashed potatoes.
“The grass around his house has grown because his wife has chased the gardeners away. He was a very tidy man.”
Police Captain Patapong Patniboon of Suwannaphum Police said: “Ian Beeston’s wife and a Thai friend from Petchabun Province, Somchit Janong, 48, have both been arrested for her murder. We have assured the British Embassy that the investigation will be thorough.”

Yesterday Province, Somchit re-enacted the crime saying he did it for ‘Wanna’.
A British Embassy official said that attempts were being made to trace Beeston’s grown up children, whom had moved abroad, and his ex-wife.
*Three years ago Briton Toby Charnaud, a gentleman farmer aged 42, was beaten to death barbecued and his body fed to the tigers in Kaeng Krajan national park in Thailand after he divorced his Thai wife and removed her from his will. She was later charged and convicted with other relatives.

Gary Glitter to roam free - Daily Mail Aug 7 08

Published

on August 7, 2008

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Link to Daily Express

From Andrew Drummond
Bangkok
August 6 2008

Disgraced former rock star Gary Glitter will be free to roam the world at will without registering as a paedophile the day he leaves jail in Vietnam, his lawyer said today.

There will be no restrictions placed on Glitter, real name Paul Francis Gadd, from the moment he steps on an aircraft at Ho Chi Minh International airport, said Le Thanh Kinh.

“His ticket has been bought but I am not free to say where he is going. That is confidential. He will be escorted from the Duc Thu prison by Vietnamese police and a member from the British Consul in Ho Chi Minh straight to the door of the aircraft.

“Once he is on the aircraft he is a free man. He will not be accompanied,” added the lawyer. “He has served his sentence”.

Glitter, who is about to complete a three year jail sentence for sexually abusing under aged girls in the province of Vung Tau, Vietnam, has a choice of regional flights to Hong Kong, Singapore, Kuala Lumpur, Kaohsiung in Southern Taiwan, or the Gulf States, Phnom Penh, or Bangkok.

He has been blacklisted as undesireable from Cambodia but the blacklist has never been tested.

He can connect to London via Singapore, Bangkok, or Hong Kong, though the route through Thailand is shortest.

Sudarat Sereewat Secretary General of ‘Fight Against Child Exploitation’ in Thailand said. The authorities are aware of Gary Glitter. But he has not been convicted of an offence in Thailand so I am not sure what can be done except to keep him under surveillance if he comes here.”

ends

Wife of Premier League club boss jailed - jail boss fired - Daily Mail

Published

on August 1, 2008

Wife of Premier League club boss jailed for three years on tax evasion

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Daily Mail

By Andrew Drummond
Last updated at 2:02 PM on 31st July 2008

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The wife of Manchester City Football Club owner and former Thai Premier Thaksin Shinawatra was sentenced to three years jail for cheating her country out of millions in a massive tax fraud today.

But then she was released immediately on bail and is expecting to be leaving soon with her husband for the Beijing Olympics.

Pojaman Shinawatra is unexpected to do any real time in jail in the near future. Dressed in a pale blue suit and a string of pearls, she still looked shocked as the verdict was read.
The appeal process could take over eight years if the case goes to the Supreme Court. The defendants had ‘lied, cheated, and conspired to evade taxes, which is regarded as a serious crime,’ the judge said at the Criminal Court in Bangkok.

Convicted: Thailand’s deposed prime minister Thaksin Shinawatra (L) and his wife Pojaman (R) arrive at the Court in Bangkok today

‘The defendants are high-profile and wealthy citizens,’ the judge added, remarking that Pojaman’s husband ‘was the leader of the country and she is obligated to pay taxes as a model for society.’

Pojaman, her brother and secretary were convicted of evading the equivalent of over £10million in taxes in 1997 through a complicated transfer of shares in the family’s flagship communications business Shin Corporation that involved placing stocks in the name of one of the family’s maids.

Pojaman, 51, was accused of conspiring together with her brother Bhanapot Damapong and her secretary.

Her brother, also received a two-year jail sentence. The secretary, who played a lesser supporting role, was sentenced to two years.
Thaksin’s spokesman, Pongthep Thepkanjana said: “Thaksin is not disheartened. They respect the court ruling but it is not the end. We will fight until the end.”
In fact it is only the beginning of s series of cases now hitting the courts which have been in the pipeline for two years.

Thailand’s Supreme Court decided this week to put Thaksin on trial for corruptly offering the Burmese military junta a low interest loan from the Thai government’s Export-Import Bank in a deal to benefit his family’s satellite and broadband business.

Both he and Pojaman are also currently on trial for corruptly acquiring land in the centre of Bangkok from a Thai government department at a third of its market price, something akin to Gordon Brown ordering his government to hand over 13 acres of Whitehall.

In another case Thaksin Shinawatra is also accused of initiating a government lottery, the proceeds of which were not properly accounted. As these cases are being heard in the Supreme Court there is no appeal.

With houses in Hong Kong and the U.K. and billons of dollars offshore many people in Thailand have expressed the view that they do not think Thaksin Shinawatra will come back from the Olympics.

But if he does, they say, he is already prepared.

They point to the fact that in an unusual move a recent Cabinet resolution essentially replaced The Director General of Thailand’s Prisons, with the former Director General, whom Thaksin appointed.

The outgoing Director-General Wanchai Roujanavong is an authority on international crime and apparently corrupt politicians.

His book ‘Organised Crime in Thailand’ details how politicians play a major part in organised crime in Thailand, how they avoid tax, buy votes, and to a certain extent control the courts, while at the same time playing the role of benefactor to the people.

He said: ‘I expected to be here for another year. But I am a civil servant I must go where I am sent.”‘

The Lord works in mysterious ways - says Christian short time hotel boss

Published

on July 30, 2008

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‘Way of the light’ hard, says born again Christian who ran short-time hotels.

From Andrew Drummond, Manila, Monday July 29 08 -

The owner of a chain of love motels in the Philippines has shut them down for the ‘glory of god’ and to stop earning cash from the devil.

The owner is a born again Christian. But as his conversion took place in 1992 it appears it took a little while for the ‘Word of God’ to sink in.

Wyden King, 54, was earning the equivalent of £30,000 a day for renting out short time rooms in 14 hotels in the Anito hotel chain in Manila.

He once boasted that each night some 11,000 Filipinos – and foreign tourists – engaged in trysts in his rooms.

The last branch in Caloocan, Manila was closed last week. A sign outside read ‘Anito Hotel – closed for the glory of God’.

However his new hotels branded ‘Status Married Couples Place’ do not appear to have been blessed with success. One of his managers says it would take a miracle to turn a profit. Business is dire, perhaps because couples are now photographed on arrival.

The curtains were drawn on illicit sex in a religious ceremony at the Anito Hotel, Coolacan last week, attended by family, friends, and apparently a few former patrons. Holy water was sprinkled on beds to ‘exorcise the devil’s presence.”

Said Mr. King: “The beds are altars to the demons. We have to destroy these altars of wickedness. We are redeeming this place from the gates of hell. I also destroy my covenant with the devil.”

Mr. King, 54, actually kept cashing in for a further 16 years after first seeing the light. The way of the light was a difficult path follow, he said.

King, who admitted paying bribes to Philippines officials explained: “It took a long time to obey God. This was a fulfilment which was not easy. But God’s grace sustained me. I knew I had to obey him.

“I was blinded by the money but it took the Lord to open my eyes. He found me but it was a struggle to let go.”

He denied he had closed the business because of the worldwide recession and falling revenues.

“The ways of the Lord are very strange and we can’t fully comprehend them,” he said.

Meanwhile at the ‘Status Married Couples Place’, formerly Anito Motel, in Pasay City, the manager Bing de Ocampo admitted that his hotel was now barely occupied.
“Since the new owner decided to transform his motel business into hotels for family and married couples we have dropped from an average of 230 couples daily, the number of customers dropped to about 12 couples.
“Before entry into this motel, couples are obliged to register at the front office, and the staff ask them to present proof of their marriage, like wedding rings, marriage contract, wedding picture or ID cards showing the same surname.
He said photographs were only taken “so the next time they check in, we do not require them anymore to present proof of marriage.”

Canadians protest ‘murder’ by Thai police - July 19 08

Published

on July 19, 2008

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From Andrew Drummond, Bangkok, Saturday July 19 2008

The family and friends of a young backpacker who was gunned down by a policeman in Thailand have begun a nationwide poster campaign in Canada to demand the killer be brought to court.

Leading the ‘search for justice’ is Ernest Del Pinto, from Calgary, Alberta, whose 25-yr-old son was shot dead by a Thai policeman in the northern Thai village of Pai.

City buses in Calgary are now carrying the posters ‘Canadian Murdered in Thailand. When will be justice be served?’. The campaigners, who are also getting together a petition, plan to take the campaign to buses in Toronto, Ottawa and Vancouver.

The move follows lack of action in Thailand and the exposure by the Thai National Human Rights Commission of a cover up into the ‘murder’ in January this year.

Mr. Del Pinto (below third from left) is also asking Canadians to stay away from Thailand until the matter is resolved.

Leo Del Pinto was shot in the chest and in the head by a Thai policeman in January. A Canadian friend Carly Reisig, 24, from Chilliwack, B.C. was also shot in the chest but she survived.

After the shootings local police chief Colonel Sombat Panya claimed that Canadians had made an unprovoked attack on Police Sergeant Uthai Dechawiwat in the northern village of Pai after he broke up a fight between them.

Uthai, he claimed, shot in self defence as he fell to the ground. His automatic had a hair trigger.
However witnesses and forensic evidence revealed by Thailand’s leading pathologist Dr. Pornthip Rojanasund contradicted the police story.

It was Leo who as he fell to the ground. He was shot in the chest and then a second shot was aimed straight at his head as he fell.

Witnesses under protection also said that Sergeant Uthai pistol whipped Ms. Reisig before shooting her under her left breast.

Thai Prime Minister Samak Sundaravej ordered the Thai Department of Special Investigation to take up the case four months ago. Thai police are notoriously inefficient in investigating their own officers.

No policeman has yet to be prosecuted in connection with a government drugs war in Thailand which began in 2003 during which over 2,000 were killed, killed mainly, say human rights organisations, by policemen.

Family spokesman Ross Fortune said: “The officer concerned is still free and walking the streets and drinking in the bars. Is it not right for the family to feel upset?”

In Bangkok Kamol Kamultrakul of the Thai Human Rights Commission said: “We will be in touch with the DSI to discuss progress.”

Four years ago British backpackers Vanessa Arscott, 23, and Adam Lloyd, 24, from Devon, were gunned down by a Thai policeman in Kanchanaburi on the River Kwai.

Local witnesses to the shooting were scared to give evidence against the policeman, Sergeant Somchai Wisetsingh. But he was convicted and jailed primarily on forensic evidence.

Up against the Komodo Dragons and Jeremy Clarkson - Blog

Published

on June 16, 2008

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So here I am face to face with a Komodo Dragon on Rinca Island in Indonesia where three unfortunate Brits along with a Swede and a Frenchman were washed up after their dive boat went off without them.

But no need to worry. The park rangers gave me this white stick when I arrived on the island and said just catch them by the neck if they approach.

Well I guess the neck on this one seems a bit small for my stick, but fear not, these guys only eat carrion according to our very own Jeremy Clarkson writing in the Sunday Times.

There’s a blessing.

What he forgot to say is that the carrion they eat is normally only carrion because they’ve bloody well killed it in the first place. Water buffalo, deer and even humans can die a slow lingering death from the bacteria in the saliva of these foul mouth monsters. And I’m sure deer run run faster than I can.

Komodos, when enthusiastic, can run at 20 m.p.h. I think I can do that but not for the full hour.

Here’s what to do if you get bitten by a Komodo on Rinca Island. Get on a boat quick. Its a two and a half hour journey to Labuan Bajo on Flores home of Indonesia’s Hobbit people. Wait for a plane and hope its not one of those days they dont fly, or at least if they do fly, hope you can bump someone from the flight. This will be difficult because by now you’ll be sweating, your face will be contorted, and you’ll be looking like a potential terrorist and your attempts to say ‘I’ve been bitten by a Komodo’ may be misinterpreted. If you succeed, get yourself to a hospital in Bali a one and a half hour trip over the Indonesian archipelago..

The only cure for a Komodo bite is a Fokker.

But wait a minute. I’m not the only fearless hack here. The Daily Mail have apparently given my Sydney based colleague Richard Shears a knighthood for tackling the same Dragon. Notice that stick he’s carrying. ITS MINE!. (more here) . Apparently the Komodo is called ‘Beth’. Its amazing what the Daily Mail can pull out of the bag.

(Pictures of fearless white stick courtesy of Andrew Chant, c/o i.c.u. Bali international hospital)

Anyway back to Jeremy.

Jeremy’s column in the Sunday Times headed ‘Swim with sharks - Its easy money’ was a frivilous knocking piece on the story of two sets of divers who were left recently in ‘Open Water’ by their dive boats. (see this website)

The first couple Richard Neely, 38, and his American girlfriend Alysson Dalton, 40, spent 19 hours floating above Australia’s Great Barrier Reef before being rescued.

The others, including Britons Charlotte Allin, Jim Manning and Kathleen Mitchinson eventually floated up on Rinca island off Flores with the Komodos.

Jeremy, regarded in Britain as somewhat of a ‘man’s man’, noted that in warm water areas the size of the sharks would hardly classify as a ‘hungry man’s starter’. This even though British newspapers - as they always do when talking about any seas further away than the English channel - described both incidents as taking place in ’shark infested waters’.

It’s been done to me several times by sub-editors in London.

SUB: ‘Well are there sharks there or not ?????

Me:’Yes. There are Reef sharks, black tipped ones, leopard sharks, lovely little ones with spots etc.’

SUB:’Well they’re in f…king shark infested waters aren’t they? (pause) Are’nt they!!???.

How can you argue with that. It doesn’t matter that the sharks, sit, roll over and beg, and eat morsels from your hand, and off Thailand ‘wai’, nick your small change and sell you fake gems, and ‘go short time’. Still ’shark infested waters’ paid for my holidays when Leonardo di Caprio sank while filming off the island of Phuket.

Anyway Jeremy wrote:

‘How’s this for a money-making idea? Simply go on a scuba-diving holiday and get lost. Obviously, you don’t want to be getting, ahem, “separated from the dive boat” in Norway. Or in a gravel pit in Wakefield. It’s best to go to a place where the sea is warm. This will make your “ordeal” quite comfortable. And as an added bonus there will be sharks, which will sound great after you’ve been miraculously rescued and your story is appearing in Hello! magazine’.

He then muses on wittily suggesting that the survivors’ stories were not the ordeals they were cracked up to be.

On the Komodo: “They made it go away by throwing pebbles at it!’

On what prospective drifters should take with them:

‘Things to pack? Well, obviously you’ll need some sandwiches so you have something to eat while you wait for the dive boat to go away. You’ll also need some sun cream, a torch, a portable sat nav system, a harpoon gun and some condoms, in case one of the pretty girls falls for the “Well, since we’re going to die, we might as well” line’.

Well on my deathbed might be one occasion on which even I might definitely forget the condoms.

He goes on…Who you should have in your party

’No mingers. The girls must be prettier than a Caribbean sunset, partly because Hello! is not going to put someone who looks like Ann Widdecombe on the cover’.

Hmm. Chav Jade Goody of ‘Big Brother’ fame and Britain’s most famous minger didn’t do too badly as a cover girl.

The men, on the other hand, should be big and strong so that they can deal with any unfortunate attacks by cannibalistic fishermen or Portuguese men-of-war. But, critically, one must be a concave-chested prat whom you don’t like very much. Because someone has to come home with a half-eaten head, after all..

Where not to do it.

‘Don’t, whatever you do, get yourself lost miles from land in some two-bit Third World backwater where all the rescue-boat captains are on heroin.

I’m not sure I would care if my rescuer was addicted on heroin. I think I would support his addiction for the next six months.

And finally he says:

I do hope my simple guide to making a fortune while on a lovely holiday in the Indian Ocean will come in handy this summer. Because the only way you’ll make more money is by sleeping with Wayne Rooney. And I really wouldn’t fancy that.

I’m taking him at his word for for his last comment. But as for making money by sleeping with Wayne Rooney, some mistake surely. Rooney’s a ‘walk-over’ according to Jeremy’s editors and not the most grateful sleeping partner either. I’m assuming sleeping is a euphamism for something else. The most publicised incident of this nature involved Rooney handing over a miserable £35.50 in a Liverpool brothel I seem to recall. And he was not the first in the queue.

But, dare I say it, a much easier way to make money is to front a syndicated BBC television programme called ‘Top Gear’, and then for a couple of thousand a week pocket money write columns for the Sunday Times and SUN, offering words of wisdom on subjects on which the only knowledge required is from reading the papers provided.

It certainly beats dunking yourself in the ocean off Australia for nineteen hours or off Indonesia for nine for that matter.

Maybe if one dunked the on-screen crew of ‘Top Gear’ in the Med off Ibiza they’d be shrieking like a line of BBC chorus girls after 15 minutes. This is only speculation as we know they’re all macho men do we not?

The BBC should therefore immerse them in the newly developed and open topped, would you believe, sQuba under-water sports car (below) in the sea off Cape Horn for a future programme.

But you just know it don’t you. They’ll steal the idea and dump them off St.Tropez or Puerto Banus and have 007 Jeremy wind down the window and drop out a fish, held between his thumb and index finger, in the unlikely event the car rises up onto the beach.

Jeremy and perhaps could also demonstrate in true Top Gear fashion just how to put on a condom under water in a new episode of Top Gear on underwater shift stick sex.

Still I like Clarkson, not because he thumped former Sun Editor Piers Morgan at the British Press Awards a couple of years back.

(The Sun apparently photographed him snogging his woman producer, which again is not a first. Done it myself I’m afraid. The penalties are greater than being photographed by the SUN) but more because the BBC itself describes him as a man ‘not given to considered opinion’.

There’s a whole library of non pc quotes attributed to him.

I loved this I found in Wikipedia

During the 13 November 2005Top Gear episode, a news segment featuring BMW’s Mini Concept from the Tokyo Motor Show showcased what fellow-presenter Richard Hammond quoted as a “quintessentially British” integrated tea set. Clarkson responded by mocking that they should build a car that is “quintessentially German.” He suggested indicators that displayed Hitler salutes, “a sat-nav that only goes to Poland” and “ein fanbelt that will last a thousand years.”

And there’s more:

In October 1998, Hyundai cars of Korea complained to the BBC about what they described as “bigoted and racist” comments he made at the Motor Show in Birmingham, when he was reported as saying that the people working on the Hyundai stand had eaten a dog, and that the designer of the Hyundai XG had probably had a spaniel for his lunch.

He sort of grows on you doesn’t he?

‘I decided to pluck all my resources to live- The Sun June 09 08

Published

on June 12, 2008