The National Legislative Assembly will decide on Friday whether to impeach former commerce minister Boonsong Teriyapirom and two other officials for alleged corruption in government-to-government rice sales.
The two other accused are former deputy commerce minister Poom Sarapol and former director-general of the Department of Foreign Trade, Manas Soiploy.
NLA chairman Pornpetch Wichitcholachai announced the decision date on Thursday after Vicha Mahakhun, a member of the National Anti-Corruption Commission, which filed the impeachment motion, and two of the three defendants delivered their closing statements.
The impeachment hearings began on April 23 and were concluded on Thursday.
Mr Vicha said in his closing statement that the G-to-G deals to sell stockpiled rice claimed by the three defendants did not really exist. They had been fabricated by government officials and the private sector, causing severe damage to the country.
He said that in reality the government under then-prime minister Yingluck Shinawatra had secured deals only with two Chinese traders -- Guangdong Stationery and Sporting Goods Import & Export, and Hainan Grain & Oil Trading Co. Neither were authorised rice traders of the Chinese government.
Mr Boonsong, Mr Poom and Mr Manas had failed to check whether the two companies were really authorised by the Chinese government to close the rice deals.
The money paid for the grain came from rice traders inside the country, not from abroad. The G-to-G deals had been made up to avoid auditing, Mr Vicha said.
Mr Poom, in his closing statement, denied the NACC's allegations. He said G-to-G deals were an effective means of releasing rice from the stockpile and he, as chairman of a subcommittee on selling rice from September 2010-February 2013, approved the deals as proposed by the Department of Foreign Trade.
The subcommittee's members were drawn from both the political and government sectors and had high expertise and experience in rice sales, he said.
Mr Boonsong also denied the accusations, saying that he had honestly performed his duties as commerce minister.
He said the members of the subcommittee for the release of rice were the same people who performed similar duties under the previous government of prime minister Abhisit Vejjajiva.
Mr Boonsong insisted that the rice deals were G-to-G and that both Guangdong Stationery and Sporting Goods Import & Export and Hainan Grain & Oil Trading Co were Chinese state enterprises. He accused the NACC of barring the traders, who it said were not representatives of the Chinese government, from testifying during the investigation into the rice-pledging scandal.
Mr Manas did not deliver a verbal statement, but submitted it in writing to the NLA instead.
Mr Pornpetch scheduled Friday for the NLA to decide whether to impeach any or all of the three men.