Transcript of the above video: 

As the title of this video suggests, yes indeed it does appear that Ms. Paetongtarn Shinawatra has been suspended from her role as Prime Minister of the Kingdom of Thailand. I thought of making this video after reading a recent article from the Bangkok Post, bangkokpost.com, and by the way, hats off to the Bangkok Post. Thank you very much just generally, as a member of the public and as a reader, I read the print edition, I may be resubscribing to the print edition frankly Bangkok Post. You guys are a great news service over there, I just want to say that. But I am going to do some extra commentary on here and get into some other stuff that it doesn't get into in that article.

I am going to quote directly from that but I urge those who are watching this video, go check out that article on bangkokpost.com, the article is titled: Court suspends PM Paetongtarn from office in Hun Sen phone call case. Quoting directly: "The Constitutional Court on Tuesday suspended Prime Minister Paetongtarn Shinawatra from Duty pending its consideration of the case against her involving a controversial phone conversation with Cambodian Senate President Hun Sen.  The nine Constitutional Court Judges resolved unanimously to accept the Senators' petition against Ms. Paetongtarn continuing as Prime Minister for consideration and temporarily suspended her from office by seven votes to two." So all nine agreed to take it on, seven said she's got to be suspended while we go over this. Quoting further: "Ms Paetongtarn remains in the Cabinet because in Monday's Royal approval of her new cabinet she was given the dual roll of Minister for Culture. The royal command was published on Tuesday morning." So that's where we are at with this thing. 

Now what is the aftermath of this? Well we have seen a similar situation before when Prime Minister Srettha was removed from office or suspended. He was actually not suspended, they adjudicated it, determined he needed to be removed and then under that set of circumstances - which may not essentially be the exact same thing that plays out here - we went in very briefly to what is called a caretaker government here in Thailand. Things reformed, there was an another vote basically and they decided on Paetongtarn who has just been suspended, and we may have her back depending on the final ruling of the Constitutional Court, we may not. The way it looks like to me, and again this is pure speculation as of the time of this video, because unlike before where they did not suspend Srettha, they basically adjudicated while he was in office and then determined hey, we need to remove you, they required a caretakership, I think that lasted longer, well it lasted a minute longer, and then went over to a brand-new government. Here it looks like we may have a prolonged caretaker government because they have suspended her pending their adjudication.

Now I don't know exactly how this is going to play out. It could play out where we have a caretaker government that lasts until the Constitutional Court makes a final decision and if the Constitutional Court decides - and I don't know how they could, but again I am not one of them and I can't see how they think - if they decide, "hey there's no wrongdoing or anything here", and they reinstate her, then the government comes back online. I think another very real possibility is Parliament comes back together in light of these circumstances and says hey, we need to come up with somebody else and basically says we are going to have a new vote and vote somebody else in. Who is it likely to be? As I have discussed in other videos, there remains one more person from the Phue Thai slate that it is eligible to be Prime Minister per the current rules in the Parliament as it stands. Also former Coalition Party Bhumjaithai has a slate of their own. Maybe they come back together and decide on somebody else, that's not outside the realm of possibility. Maybe, I mean in theory Prayut is on the list. He could in theory maybe come back. Again, I don't think that's overly likely but as of now there are many options that could play out moving forward, but for now the best thing to assume I think or the safest assumption to make is that it will go into a caretaker sort of government at least momentarily, while we figure out exactly who the next I guess “non-caretaker” Prime Minister will be and then from there move forward. 

So hard to say exactly how this is going to play out. This is definitely big news. Again I wanted to make this video very quickly so that it didn't, especially in the English language Community, it didn't get, "oh my gosh, it's chaos or something." No, there is a formal set of procedures there that we are going to move through. We saw this happen once before with Srettha and the transition from him to Paetongtarn. It's not completely similar; it's not an apples-to-apples comparison but it is similar enough that we at least have a reasonable idea what this is going to look like. So presume moving forward at least a brief period of a caretaker, some form of caretaker role for at least the Prime Ministership itself, and then thereafter either an ongoing caretakership or they will come to some kind of decision regarding somebody new to fill the role in a non-caretaker capacity. Who that could be, will likely be from one of the five people that's on that the slate that we have talked about in prior videos. Most likely I would presume it would be that other person from Phue Thai whose name currently escapes me, and that looks to me like the possible option moving forward. 

I will be doing a new video in our paid news service. For those who are interested in that, you can email us: [email protected], I will be doing that tomorrow. I'll be doing a long form paid video tomorrow regarding all of these developments. I want to see further what's going on past right at this moment before I make a long form video and then make something so that I can provide the viewers on there with a little bit deeper analysis of what is going on. And also while I'm at it, for those who want to have some American diner food, come on down to Pancake Palace here in downtown Bangkok. We have all kinds of good stuff: cheeseburgers, buffalo wings, chilli bowls and of course as the name implies, pancakes and breakfast anytime. 

But to conclude this and round this out, Prime Minister Paetongtarn Shinawatra has been suspended from her role as Prime Minister of Thailand. We anticipate we are going to see at least a brief caretaker Administration before we see what transpires thereafter.