ၿမန္မာရဟန္း သံဃာေတာ္ေတြကုိေစာ္ကားခဲ႔တဲ႔ ထုိင္း၀န္ႀကီးခ်ဳပ္ဆမတ္ဆြန္ဒရာ၀ပ္ခ်္ တရားစြဲဆုိ ခံေနရၿပီ

Thai prime minister Samak Sundaravej's cookery show has landed him in hot water.


"I was hired to appear on the program and got paid from time to time. I was not an employee of the company so I did not violate the law," Samak said.

He said the television company paid for his transportation. "I presented the cooking show and got paid for my acting," said Samak.

-ၿမတ္စုိး-

၀န္ႀကီးခ်ဳပ္တာ၀န္ထမ္းေဆာင္ေနၿပီး ႐ုပ္ျမင္သံၾကား ကုမၸဏီတခုရဲ႕ ခ်က္ျပဳတ္ေရး အစီအစဥ္ (၂)ခုမွာ သြားၿပီး တင္ဆက္ၿပသေနလုိ႔ ႏုိင္ငံေတာ္ရဲ႕အေရးၾကီးတဲ႔အလုပ္ေတြကုိ ထိခုိက္ေစႏုိင္တဲ႔အၿပင္ ဒါဟာ ထုိင္းႏုိင္ငံေတာ္ ဖြဲ႕စည္းပုံ ဥပေဒကုိလည္းေဖာက္ဖ်က္တယ္ဆိုတဲ့ စြဲခ်က္နဲ႔ ထုိင္း၀န္ႀကီးခ်ဳပ္ဆမတ္ဆြန္ဒရာ၀ပ္ခ်္ ကုိဒီေန႔႐ုံးတင္ စစ္ေဆးေနပါတယ္။

ထုိင္းႏုိင္ငံရဲ႕ ဖြဲ႕စည္းပုံအရ ၀န္ႀကီးခ်ဳပ္တေယာက္အေနနဲ႔ ပုဂၢလိကကုမၸဏီမ်ားမွာအလုပ္လုပ္ခြင့္ မရွိပါဘူး။ ျပစ္မႈထင္ရွားလုိ႔ စီရင္ျခင္းခံရရင္ ဆမတ္ဆြန္ဒရာ၀ပ္ခ်္ဟာ ထုိင္း၀န္ႀကီးခ်ဳပ္အျဖစ္ကႏုတ္ထြက္ရလိမ္႔မယ္။

ဘန္ေကာက္ၿမိဳ႕ရွိ ထုိင္းႏုိင္ငံေတာ္ဖြဲ႕စည္းပုံ ဥပေဒေရးရာ႐ုံးေတာ္မွာ စစ္ေဆးေမးၿမန္ရာမွာ ၀န္ႀကီးခ်ဳပ္ ဆမတ္ ကေတာ႔ ကသူ႕ကို အဲဒီကုမၸဏီက ပါ၀င္ဖို႔ ငွားရမ္းျခင္း သာျဖစ္ၿပီး အဲဒီကုမၸဏီမွာ အမႈထမ္းလုပ္ေနျခင္း မဟုတ္ဘူးလုိ႔ ေလွ်ာက္လဲခဲ႔ပါတယ္။

ဒီ ခ်က္ျပဳတ္ေရး အစီအစဥ္ကုိတာ၀န္ယူထားတဲ႔ ႐ုပ္ျမင္သံၾကားကုမၸဏီ၏ စီမံခန္႔ခြဲေရး တာ၀န္ရွိသူ အၾကီးအကဲစပ္ခ်ိင္း ကေတာ႔ ထုိင္း၀န္ႀကီးခ်ဳပ္ဆမတ္ဆြန္ဒရာ၀ပ္ခ်္ကုိ ႐ုပ္ျမင္သံၾကားခ်က္ျပဳတ္ေရးၿပပြဲ ၄ပဲြအတြက္ ေဒၚလာေငြ ၂၃၀၀ ကုိ ဂုဏ္ၿပဳ ၿပီး ေပးအပ္ခဲ႔တာသာၿဖစ္ေၾကာင္းလုိ႔ တရားရုံးမွာေၿပာၾကား သြားပါတယ္။ ႐ုပ္ျမင္သံၾကား အစီအစဥ္ေတြ မွာ ပါ၀င္သူ၊တင္ၿပသူေတြဟာ ႐ုပ္ျမင္သံၾကား ကုမၸဏီ ရဲ႕ ၀န္ထမ္းေတြ မဟုတ္ေၾကာင္းကုိ လည္း တရားရုံးမွာေလွ်ာက္လြဲတင္ၿပသြားပါတယ္။

၀န္ႀကီးခ်ဳပ္ဆမတ္အတြက္ေတာ႔ ရက္ေပါင္း(၃၀) အတြင္း အယူခံလႊာကုိ တင္သြင္းရမွာမုိ႔ ဒီအမႈဟာ စက္တင္ဘာလမွာ ကုလသမဂၢညီလာခံတက္ေရာက္ဖုိ႔ သူ႔ရဲ႕ အစီအစဥ္ကုိ ခ်ိန္းေခ်ာက္လွ်က္ရွိေနပါတယ္။ ၀န္ႀကီးခ်ဳပ္ဆမတ္ကေတာ႔ စက္တင္ဘာလ (၂၁ ) ရက္ေန႔မွာ ထုိင္းႏုိင္ငံကထြက္ခြာမွာၿဖစ္ၿပီး၊ စက္တင္ဘာလ (၂ရ ) ရက္ေန႔မွာ ၿပန္လည္ေရာက္ရွိလာပါလိမ္႔မယ္။ သူအယင္ထုိင္းႏုိင္ငံ ၀န္ၾကီးခ်ဳပ္ေဟာင္းတပ္ဆင္ကေတာ႔ ကုလသမဂၢညီလာခံသြားေရာက္စဥ္ စစ္တပ္က အာဏာသိမ္းၿခင္းခံ လုိက္ရပါတယ္။

အခုလည္း အယင္အာဏာသိမ္းမႈမွာ ပါ၀င္ခဲ႔တဲ႔ ဗုိလ္ခ်ဳပ္ေဟာင္းတဦးကေတာ႔ လက္ရွိ ထုိင္းႏုိင္ငံအစုိးရအဖြဲ႔ဟာ ႏုိင္ငံေရးၿပသနာကုိ ႏုိင္ငံေရးနည္းလမ္းႏွင္႔ မေၿဖရွင္းႏုိင္ဘူးဆုိယင္ စစ္တပ္ကအာဏာသိမ္းဖုိ႔သာ ရွိေၾကာင္း ေၿပာဆုိသြား ခဲ႔ေသာ္လည္း၊ လက္ရွိစစ္တပ္ ေခါင္းေဆာင္ အၾကီးအကဲ ကေတာ႔ ထုိင္းစစ္တပ္ဟာ လက္ရွိႏုိင္ငံေရး ၿပသနာကိစၥေတြကုိ ၀င္ေရာက္စြက္ဖက္မွာမဟုတ္ေၾကာင္း၊ ေၿဖရွင္းႏုိင္မည္႔ အၿခားနည္းလမ္း မ်ား ရွိေၾကာင္း ေၿပာဆုိသြားၿပီး၊ စစ္တပ္ကအာဏာသိမ္း မယ္ဆုိတဲ႔ သတင္းကုိ ၿငင္းဆန္သြားပါတယ္။

ေဒ၀ဒတ္မွားကုိးကြယ္ၿပီး၊ ၿမန္မာရဟန္း သံဃာေတာ္ေတြကုိေစာ္ကားခဲ႔တဲ႔ ထုိင္း၀န္ႀကီးခ်ဳပ္ဆမတ္ ဆြန္ဒရာ ၀ပ္ခ်္ပ္ဟာ ထုိင္းႏုိင္ငံတရား႐ုံးေတာ္ေတြမွာ ေနာက္ထပ္ အမႈ ၃ ခုကုိလည္းဆက္လက္ရင္ ဆုိင္ရပါလိမ္႔မယ္။

BANGKOK, Thailand (AP) -- Thailand's prime minister defended himself Monday against accusations he violated the constitution by hosting a televised cooking show while in office, potentially the most damaging of a line of troubles confronting him.

Prime Minister Samak Sundaravej, who denies that he violated the constitution by working for a private company, would be forced to resign if found guilty by the Constitutional Court.

The trial comes on top of a defamation suit and three corruption charges he faces, and as anti-government protesters continue their nearly two-week-old occupation of the grounds of his office complex, demanding his resignation.

The court was expected to give its verdict in the cooking show case Tuesday. If Samak is ordered to resign by the court, it would indirectly end the political deadlock caused by the anti-government protesters, who have virtually paralyzed the government for nearly two weeks.

"By making a quick decision, the court will help a lot in resolving the political crisis," said Suwat Apaipakdi, a lawyer for a group of senators who filed the petition against Samak in the case.

"If the court rules that Prime Minister Samak is disqualified from holding office, then the political crisis will automatically cease," he said.

Before taking office seven months ago, Samak hosted a popular TV cooking show called "Tasting and Complaining," a mix of traditional Thai cooking and rants on the subjects of Samak's choice.

Samak made a few appearances on the show after becoming prime minister, prompting the petition by the senators on grounds that a prime minister is not allowed under the constitution to work with private companies.

Samak, who testified for about an hour Monday, told the court that he only received an honorarium from the television company.

"I was hired to appear on the program and got paid from time to time. I was not an employee of the company so I did not violate the law," Samak said.

He said the television company paid for his transportation. "I presented the cooking show and got paid for my acting," said Samak.

Samak was earlier indicted by the National Counter Corruption Commission, an autonomous body, which then forwarded the case to the Constitutional Court.

Sakchai Khaewwaneesakul, the managing director of the company that produced the cooking show, testified in support of Samak, saying it paid him $2,300 for the four shows.

"The presenters of our shows are not our employees, but we pay them honorariums," he told the court.

The case is the latest embarrassment for Samak, who has not been able to enter his office, the Government House, since protesters stormed the compound August 26. Despite facing emergency rule in Bangkok, the protesters have refused to leave.

A new mediation effort by Senate Speaker Prasopsuk Boondet was due to start Monday. He is scheduled to meet with the opposition leader and the heads of the six political parties in Samak's ruling coalition government.

The anti-government campaign is led by the People's Alliance for Democracy, a loose-knit group of royalists, wealthy and middle-class urban residents, and union activists. They accuse him of corruption and violating the constitution. They say his party won general elections in December 2007 by buying votes.

The independent Election Commission ruled last week that Samak's People's Power Party committed electoral fraud in the polls and should be dissolved. The case is also expected to end up in the Constitution Court.

Apart from the cooking show charge, Samak also has been accused of defamation by Bangkok's deputy governor, Samart Rajpholasit. A lower court sentenced Samak to three years in jail, and an appeals court is expected to rule Sept. 25 on whether to uphold the sentence.

If the court does that, Samak would have to quit immediately.

In addition, Samak faces at least three corruption charges that have not reached the courts yet.

Samak was scheduled to deliver a speech to supporters in the northeastern province of Udon Thani later Monday. Anti-government protesters were expected to gather there, raising fears of violence.