The Department of Special Investigation (DSI) looks set to take on the alleged cassava-pledging scheme scam which caused 4.1-billion baht in damage as a special case.
The move will allow authorities to investigate everyone involved in the suspected wrongdoing.
A DSI Special Case Committee decision is now pending on whether to grant it special case status, the DSI's Bureau of Special Operations chief Korawat Panprapakorn said yesterday.
Special case status, which will draw serious attention to the accusation, is needed because of the huge amounts of money in damages that occurred when the past government spent more than 10 billion baht on the scheme, he said.
Police have already sent Pol Lt Col Korawat's department their initial investigation reports after finding vast stocks of cassava under the scheme went missing and accused several suspects of embezzlement.
"We have also found some state officials took part in the scam," Pol Lt Col Korawat said after meeting representatives from the Public Warehouse Organisation (PWO), which filed complaints with police alleging around 95 instances of irregularities. Deputy PWO chief Pol Lt Col Piyawit Wongsawat said the irregularities involved Kasetphuetpol Intertrade Co which was recently implicated in the disappearance of cassava from warehouses in Kanchanaburi and Ayutthaya provinces.
In those cases, about 13,000 tonnes of tapioca pellets went missing from a warehouse in Ayutthaya's Wang Noi district, along with another 11,000 tonnes from two warehouses in Kanchanaburi's Tha Maka district.
The two warehouses were reportedly torched in May last year, according to PWO officials.
Fires, whether accidental or deliberate, are suspected of being used in the scam to dishonestly reap benefits from the scheme, in which farmers pledged cassava at agreed prices with the government, which then contracted private companies to store the crops.
The scam was believed to have been carried out by a well-organised network, Pol Lt Col Korawat said.
They allegedly replaced some of the pledged tapioca with chaff and stored it in a way that would make inspectors think it was all tapioca. Fires would later destroy all the crops, Pol Lt Col Korawat said.