Source @thailand_news
countability of exactly the kind a maturing legal system is supposed to impose on its own practitioners. A country that prosecutes the buyer but never the adviser is announcing that it is more interes
countability of exactly the kind a maturing legal system is supposed to impose on its own practitioners. A country that prosecutes the buyer but never the adviser is announcing that it is more interested in the asset than in the fraud.
Give the good-faith buyer a path, not a trapdoor. The retiree who bought a single home on professional advice and has paid his taxes for a decade is not the priority target a serious anti-fraud campaign should be spending its energy on. A defined grace period, a window to come forward and restructure into something lawful rather than face sudden confiscation, is how a fair state separates the deceived from the deceiver. Several countries that have tightened foreign-ownership rules have offered exactly this kind of transition, precisely because the alternative, retroactive seizure from people who acted in good faith, does lasting damage to a country’s name as a place to invest.
And license the profession, finally. One of the quietest scandals beneath all of this is that Thailand has never had a proper licensing and accountability regime for the legal advisers and “consultants” who guide foreign buyers, which is exactly how unlicensed advice masquerading as legal counsel was able to flourish for twenty years. Fix that, and you stop the next generation of this problem at its source, rather than punishing the last generation at its end. Enforcement without that reform simply clears the field for the same thing to happen again to the next wave of buyers. The real test
So this is not, in the end, really an article about foreigners at all. It is an article about consistency, and about a single question that the crackdown will answer whether it means to or not: will enforcement be aimed at the powerful, or only at the convenient?
Thailand built this system. Professionals operating in Thailand designed and sold it. Thai officials registered it, transfer by transfer. Thai governments tolerated it for twenty years because it paid the country’s bills. That is not an attack on Thailand; it is simply the history, and it is the precondition for getting the response right rather than wrong. A Thailand serious about the rule of law would enforce that law along the entire chain of responsibility, beginning with the people who knew best and profited most. A Thailand interested only in the appearance of action will enforce it on the foreigner standing at the end of the chain, collect the seized assets, announce that the market has been cleaned up, and leave every domestic enabler exactly where they have always been, ready to do it all again.
The first path is hard, and fair, and would genuinely deter the next round of bad structures. The second is easy, and popular, and would change nothing at all except the nationality of the person who pays.
It is easy to raid a villa. The owner is foreign, frequently absent, and nobody in the room speaks for him. It is much harder to walk into the glass tower downtown where the structure was drafted, or the government office where it was stamped, and ask those people to account for twenty years of the very same signature. But that is where the responsibility actually lives. A villa on a beach did not incorporate itself a fake company. Someone with a licence, a letterhead and a stamp did that, knowingly, again and again, for a fee, and then went to lunch.
Which path Thailand takes will say more about the country than any number of raids or seized rai ever could. Because enforcing the law on the least powerful person in the room is not the rule of law. It is the appearance of it, wearing the costume. The rule of law follows responsibility wherever it actually leads, even when it leads away from the foreigner and back into Thai offices, Thai firms, and Thai ministries.
So we will ask the question the whole chain raises, and we will ask it plainly, and we will leave it with the people who know this market far better than any single article can. If this was designed by professional hands, sold by profe[...]
← Back to newsGive the good-faith buyer a path, not a trapdoor. The retiree who bought a single home on professional advice and has paid his taxes for a decade is not the priority target a serious anti-fraud campaign should be spending its energy on. A defined grace period, a window to come forward and restructure into something lawful rather than face sudden confiscation, is how a fair state separates the deceived from the deceiver. Several countries that have tightened foreign-ownership rules have offered exactly this kind of transition, precisely because the alternative, retroactive seizure from people who acted in good faith, does lasting damage to a country’s name as a place to invest.
And license the profession, finally. One of the quietest scandals beneath all of this is that Thailand has never had a proper licensing and accountability regime for the legal advisers and “consultants” who guide foreign buyers, which is exactly how unlicensed advice masquerading as legal counsel was able to flourish for twenty years. Fix that, and you stop the next generation of this problem at its source, rather than punishing the last generation at its end. Enforcement without that reform simply clears the field for the same thing to happen again to the next wave of buyers. The real test
So this is not, in the end, really an article about foreigners at all. It is an article about consistency, and about a single question that the crackdown will answer whether it means to or not: will enforcement be aimed at the powerful, or only at the convenient?
Thailand built this system. Professionals operating in Thailand designed and sold it. Thai officials registered it, transfer by transfer. Thai governments tolerated it for twenty years because it paid the country’s bills. That is not an attack on Thailand; it is simply the history, and it is the precondition for getting the response right rather than wrong. A Thailand serious about the rule of law would enforce that law along the entire chain of responsibility, beginning with the people who knew best and profited most. A Thailand interested only in the appearance of action will enforce it on the foreigner standing at the end of the chain, collect the seized assets, announce that the market has been cleaned up, and leave every domestic enabler exactly where they have always been, ready to do it all again.
The first path is hard, and fair, and would genuinely deter the next round of bad structures. The second is easy, and popular, and would change nothing at all except the nationality of the person who pays.
It is easy to raid a villa. The owner is foreign, frequently absent, and nobody in the room speaks for him. It is much harder to walk into the glass tower downtown where the structure was drafted, or the government office where it was stamped, and ask those people to account for twenty years of the very same signature. But that is where the responsibility actually lives. A villa on a beach did not incorporate itself a fake company. Someone with a licence, a letterhead and a stamp did that, knowingly, again and again, for a fee, and then went to lunch.
Which path Thailand takes will say more about the country than any number of raids or seized rai ever could. Because enforcing the law on the least powerful person in the room is not the rule of law. It is the appearance of it, wearing the costume. The rule of law follows responsibility wherever it actually leads, even when it leads away from the foreigner and back into Thai offices, Thai firms, and Thai ministries.
So we will ask the question the whole chain raises, and we will ask it plainly, and we will leave it with the people who know this market far better than any single article can. If this was designed by professional hands, sold by profe[...]