Thammanat Prompao, a 60-year-old political heavyweight in Thailand, has certainly come a long way from his days as a shadowy figure entangled in multiple scandals.
He has now been appointed deputy prime minister and agriculture minister in Prime Minister Anutin Charnvirakul’s Cabinet.
While serving as deputy agriculture minister in the Prayut administration in 2020, his involvement in a drug smuggling case in Australia, more than 20 years earlier, came back to haunt him.
He was brutally grilled in a no-confidence debate over the prison term he served on a drug conviction in New South Wales in 1994, but Thammanat survived the vote.
In 2021, opposition MPs tried, unsuccessfully, to have the Constitutional Court declare him unfit for office. At the time, he was still deputy agriculture minister. The court ruled that it did not recognise Thammanat's conviction in the Australian drug case, as the verdict had been delivered in another country.
Thammanat has consistently denied any involvement in the smuggling case. Australian media reported that his conviction was the result of a plea bargain.
Nonetheless, the scandal failed to stop Thammanat’s political rise.
He was appointed agriculture minister in the short-lived Srettha government, before being dropped from the subsequent Paetongtarn coalition last year, in exchange for his political protégés taking over the Agriculture Ministry.
Thammanat is also remembered for his relationship with coup leader and former prime minister Prayut Chan-o-cha, which later turned sour, despite his being close to Prayut’s long-time ally, Gen Prawit Wongsuwan.
After the 2019 general election, Thammanat, a key power-broker within the Palang Pracharath party (PPRP), was instrumental in securing support for Prayut to return as prime minister, earning the nickname “kingmaker” for mobilising small and medium-sized parties, as well as MPs from various factions, behind Prayut’s premiership bid.
During this period, Thammanat was seen as a crucial ally and served as deputy agriculture minister in Prayut’s cabinet.
Their relationship collapsed in 2021, though, after Thammanat was accused of plotting a “coup in parliament”, by lobbying MPs to vote against Prayut in a no-confidence debate.
Although Prayut survived the censure motion, he lost trust in Thammanat, which led to Thammanat’s abrupt dismissal from his ministerial post in September that year.
