The very rich are different from you and me

“The very rich are different from you and me.” “Yes, they have more money.”

Harrison George

30 May 2008

Alien Thoughts

I really had no idea how difficult it was to be rich in Thailand.

M L Nattakorn Devakula, in his last column for the Bangkok Post before a ‘semi-political’ break, relates his experiences in pretending to be an elected politician (or perhaps that should be ‘rehearsing’?) and trying to file a declaration of assets.

It took him all week.

And I have to admit, from my non-rich background, that this is a lot longer than I spend with my hand down the back of the sofa looking for loose change to pay the (up and down again) bus fare. I always assumed that the rich never needed to grope. Or at least paid someone to do their groping for them. It was a shock to discover how time-consuming wealth can be.

First of all, M L Nattakorn had to locate the passbooks for all his bank accounts, ‘even ones with very little money in them’. Now many of us will have some sympathy with that. Bank accounts with very little in them are all too common these days. But it’s clear that M L Nattakorn’s problem isn’t the small amounts, it’s the large number of accounts, and some, obviously, have more than a little in them.

And it was ‘fun’, he says, to get them updated. And discover just how much unearned income he’d just, er, un-earned. But there the ‘fun’ ended. He next had to list all the plots of land that he owns. Including those that have been given to him and he doesn’t know about!

Imagine the distress this causes. You may own property that you don’t know about! How can the nasty NCCC then expect you to declare what you don’t know? What a ridiculous bureaucratic attitude this betrays, expecting people to know what land they own.

But you are supposed to pay tax on this land, no? I mean, couldn’t you just collect the tax receipts? But that’s by the way.

The headaches don’t end there. He’s now got to list his share-holdings. And again, he can’t be sure of what he owns. ‘Just the other week,’ he writes, ‘I found a shares-ownership certificate in an old drawer.’

Now, on the ‘old drawer’ bit of that I’m with him. I mean, T-shirts with ‘UN Fun Run 1993’ on them, yes, I admit I’ve probably got things like that lurking in the bottom of my old drawers. Together with my old drawers. But forgetting that you have shares in a business?

And this is where I begin to sense that we’re not maybe singing from the same hymn sheet. M L Nattakorn talks of ‘the real world, where the ownership of shares is a very normal and mundane practice’.

Now we know it’s normal and mundane for people like ex-PM Thaksin Shinawatra and his family. And even for his maid and driver and gardener, of course. But I still think that this is a rather small ‘real world’. The vast majority of people in this country don’t own shares. And of the tiny minority that do, I would guess that the biggest number do know what they own.

And M L Nattakorn’s worries still aren’t over. He has to get his ‘house and car re-valued’. And that really is a shock. Only one of each? And then his bottles of fine wine, his watches, his jewelry, - is there no end to this?

And then an MP or Senator would have to go through it all over again for the spouse and any dependent children. (Mercifully M L Nattakorn seems to have managed to keep count of how many of these he has.)

Invasion of privacy, he cries. Well, yes. Except that by choosing to be a representative of the people it sort of goes with the turf. You want to keep the number of your shares, houses, Rolexes and wives secret, then just don’t stand for office.

Ineffective, he claims. What corrupt politician is dumb enough to stash his ill-gotten gains in a bank account the NCCC already knows about? Well, there’s a Deputy Prime Minister who was dumb enough to make a duff declaration for which he paid the price, and some of us are still not convinced about that share-out of shares among the Shinawatra domestics.

And a public declaration is exactly the point. How do the fruits of corruption get hidden in a non-transparent system? Very easily. And in the system we have now? Much harder. Everyone who thinks they know about something you own can check what you’ve listed and if it’s not there, you’re shopped.

But the exercise is obviously far too stressful for a semi-politician-to-be like M L Nattakorn. Even if it has been a dry run, it’s clearly been too much for him, it’s even affected his reasoning.

So, in a magnanimous sacrifice on my part, I am prepared to solve his problems.

Dear Khun Pluem (I can call you that, can’t I?), any time you need this burden lifted from your shoulders, just transfer all your assets to me. And I will suffer in your place.

As much of it as you know about, of course.

Source : www.prachatai.com