The Supreme Court yesterday handed down a jail term of two years and eight months to former Democrat MP for Kanchanaburi Pracha Phothipipit, alias Kamnan Sia, for possessing state land plots without permission.
The court's ruling was delivered in absentia as Pracha is on the run.
The court read out its sentence against Pracha, 74, who was charged with encroaching on 1,199 rai of Treasury Department land -- of which 299 rai is in Kanchanaburi's Dan Makhamtia district and 900 rai in Ratchaburi's Suan Phung district -- between 1990-2004.
The court reasoned that Pracha should have known that the plot of land he had contracted to buy from Pairoj Chaodee belonged to the state.
The defendant was supposed to study who is the landlord of the land he wanted to buy but he had failed to do so, the court said.
Pracha had negotiated the land deal verbally with no written documents, according to the court.
Pracha managed to gain ownership of the state land plot without permission from state authorities, the court said.
But the court decided to cut the sentence to two years and eight months as his account of what happened was deemed useful, according to the court.
On Jan 25 last year, an arrest warrant was issued for him after he failed to show up to hear the Appeal Court's verdict in the case.
The Supreme Court initially set March 10 for the delivery of its ruling, but Pracha did not show up.
The court re-scheduled the reading of its final judgement for April 18 and issued a warrant for his arrest.
The case in which Pracha had committed land encroachment was brought to court by prosecutors on Jan 12, 2012.
On Aug 29, 2014, the Court of First Instance sentenced Pracha to one year in jail for possessing state land plots without permission, in violation of the Land Act.
The case was brought to the Appeal Court which later increased his jail sentence to four years, reasoning that the defendant encroached on the land plots in full knowledge that the land belonged to the state.
However, the sentence was commuted to three years because Pracha gave "useful" testimony.
Pracha then appealed to the Supreme Court.
Besides the land encroachment case, another arrest warrant was also issued the same day due to his failure to appear in the Supreme Court to hear its judgement in a bid-rigging case involving construction projects in Kanchanaburi between 1999-2001.