Things could get ugly if the president of Parliament, Bhokin Bhalakula, was nominated because he is rather unpredictable.

Anyway, Thaksin has proved to be the ideal proxy prime minister for his wife, Khunying Pojaman. Who, really, could fill his exemplary nominee shoes?

Indeed, the Shin Corp deal has given rise to a proliferation of nominees in this country. We are having a hard time identifying nominees from the actual owners of companies, land, stocks and other assets.

Thaksin and his wife Khunying Pojaman have epitomised the practice of naming nominees, transforming it into high art.

They transferred their Shin Corp stocks to nominees - their household servants - before the 2001 general election. As a result, Thaksin had to defend himself in the Constitution Court over this attempt to conceal his assets.

He admitted that it was an honest mistake and the Constitution Court gave Thaksin a small slap on the wrist and allowed him to keep his job as prime minister.

Ever since, nominees have been thriving in this land until you can't really tell whether the politicians, companies or businessmen are for real or whether they are acting as nominees for others.

The household servants of the Shinawatra family must have been mesmerised by the Shin Corp stocks under their names. But when they pinched themselves, they must have realised that they were only nominees - they would still have to wait until the end of the month to pick up their salaries.

They must have gone through some deep psychological turmoil over their identity crisis. They would have thought that they were really the beneficial owners of Bt100-million worth of Shin Corp stocks. If only ...

The most well-known nominee at the moment is Ample Rich Investments Ltd. Thaksin set up the company in 1999 in the British Virgin Islands tax haven so that it could act as his nominee, holding more than 10 per cent of Shin Corp stocks on the foreign board. Following the sell-off of Shin to Temasek Holdings of Singapore on January 23, Panthongtae and Pinthongta Shinawatra, the prime minister's two eldest children, bought the Shin Corp stocks from this nominee company for Bt1 per share before selling them off to Temasek for Bt49.25 a share.

A public uproar broke out over Ample Rich. Was it acting as a nominee for Thaksin or for his two children? For a while, the whole episode looked like a farce, because nobody, including Thaksin himself, could really identify whether Ample Rich was still his or his children's nominee. He must have been torn between thinking that he still owned Ample Rich, had transferred Ample Rich to Panthongtae or had forgotten to do anything with it at all.

"Panthongtae, do you remember that Ample Rich is your nominee?" Thaksin must have reminded his son in his wildest dreams. "But wait a minute, Ample Rich is also Pinthongta's nominee. Do you remember that?"

The Democrats went through their own wild goose chase, finding out that there was a twin Ample Rich. Could it be the nominee of the nominee?

This new Ample Rich was identified as having an "English" nationality. They headed down to Singapore, the new land of nominees, to check out the addresses, which were completely mixed up. Ample Rich 1 was located at one address and Ample 2 at another. But when Karnjanapha Honghern, a secretary/nominee of Khunying Pojaman, reported to the Securities and Exchange Commission about Ample Rich 1's sale of Shin Corp stocks to Panthongtae and Pinthongta, she used the Singapore address of Ample Rich 2 instead.

Karnjanapha also ticked the wrong box when she reported that the transactions were conducted on the exchange when in fact they were sold outside the stock market.

In the end, the identity crisis of Ample Rich had to be laid to rest. Suvarn Valaisathien, the lawyer for the Shinawatra family, came out to assert that there really had been only Ample Rich 1 all along. Any claims about Ample Rich 2 as another nominee company were groundless, products of an overactive imagination. It was only a brief case of mistaken of identity.

But Ample Rich was no ordinary nominee. It had transferred stocks from one custodian/broker account to another like crazy before the stocks were finally parked at UBS AG of Singapore. The Democrats followed the paper trail and found out that Ample Rich traded the Shin Corp stocks for profits. Whereas the Shinawatra family said Ample Rich had never traded a single stock, only held them passively for all those years.

What Ample Rich were they talking about?

We can only arrive at the end of our story about nominees with the launch on Wednesday of the first Thai edition of Don Quixote, written by Miguel de Cervantes of Spain more than 400 years ago. Don Quixote was an elderly, idealistic knight who set out on his old horse Rosinante to seek adventure, along with his materialistic squire Sancho Panza, who accompanied his master from one failure to another.

During his travels, Don Quixote's overexcited imagination blinds him to reality; he thinks windmills are giants, flocks of sheep are armies, and galley-slaves are oppressed gentlemen. Sancho was named governor of the isle of Barataria, a mock title, and Don Quixote beaten in a duel with the Knight of the White Moon, in reality a student of his acquaintance in disguise. Don Quixote is passionately devoted to his own imaginative creation, the beautiful Dulcinea. "Oh Dulcinea de Tobosa, day of my night, glory of my suffering, true north and compass of every path I take, guiding star of my fate ..."

The hero returns to La Mancha, and only on his deathbed does Don Quixote confess the folly of his past adventures.

Thaksin has also been living in this same state of overexcited imagination - for the past five years as Thailand's greatest prime minister since World War II and Thailand's richest man ever. Now he is struggling to come to terms with his real identity.

He wants to be able to remind himself that he knows who he is. But he can't. He has to be told who he really is. 

Thanong Khanthong

The Nation