In fact, he said he himself had been asked to chair a company with a similar structure. In other words, if the press quoted him correctly, a Cabinet member has admitted that he somehow had dealings with a company that broke the law.

His rationalisation goes something along this line: foreign investors may not be allowed to hold more than 49 per cent of a "Thai" company, but they want management rights. One option to attain that status is for them to effectively hold the majority equity, with what's over the legal ceiling of 49 per cent being held by their Thai "nominees".

But isn't that a very cynical way to circumvent Thai law? The finance minister says that perhaps it is. But he indicated that since everybody has been doing it in one way or another, it's an open secret that it's sort of an accepted fact of life here. Or so Thanong suggested.

Did he mean that breaking the law is an accepted fact of life? This Cabinet member who is known to be very close to the caretaker prime minister didn't actually say that in so many words. But then he came very close to issuing a threat that if we were too strict with the implementation of this particular clause of the 1999 Foreign Business Act, then foreign investors would flee Thailand for greener pastures.

With that kind of official attitude, is it any wonder that the probe launched by the Commerce Ministry into the "fake Thai equity holding" in Kularb Kaew Co, which together with Singapore's Temasek took over Shin Corp shares from caretaker Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra's family, has taken a twisted, curious detour?

An initial fact-finding committee has made public the fact that there are grounds to believe that the law was broken - that some of the Thai shareholders were in fact "nominees" used to help the official Singaporean concern take over the company while retaining the "legal" Thai entity.

But instead of filing the case through the police as part of the due process, caretaker Deputy Commerce Minister Preecha Laohapongchana decided to set up a new committee to, in his own words, determine the definition of a "nominee". His first argument was that care and prudence had to be exercised because any counter-suit by the defendants would incur great losses to the government. That alone is a bizarre excuse. If it were to run on the basis of "governing by fear" (of being counter-sued by those it offends), the government wouldn't be able to take any wrongdoers to court at all.

That, however, wasn't going to be the only comical subplot to emerge. A few days later, this Cabinet member came up with a new, more grotesque twist: if a "nominee" in this case is actually taken to task and punished for breaking the law, a serious "domino effect" would erupt and the country's stock market could be completely shattered.

Thanong added insult to injury to the principle of the rule of law when he said in a separate interview: "The Finance Ministry has appointed a representative to join the working group to investigate relevant facts to determine the traditional practice of foreigners' shareholding in Thai companies so far - and to decide whether Kularb Kaew has followed that tradition or not."

In other words, the focus of the investigation has shifted from whether the law has been broken to whether traditional business practices have been followed - obviously not a very subtle way to whitewash the looming crisis over the controversial Shin-Temasek deal.

But this is no "normal business deal" or a "traditional" investment project. The Shin transaction includes AIS, Shin Satellite and iTV - all major telecommunications and media concessions from the government, related one way or another to the sensitive issues of national security and media operations - and which are specifically reserved by law for Thai control.

Several legal experts, including Meechai Ruchuphan, have pointed out that a violation of the law governing foreign ownership limits would inevitably mean the revocation of Shin Corp's concessions. Any subsequent attempt to "legalise" the ownership structure wouldn't change the fact that the law was deliberately broken and action had to be taken against the violators.  The sudden introduction of Surin Upatkoon, a Thai businessman with business interests in Malaysia, into the picture to "legitimise" the Thai "majority" equity holding on March 10 of this year, didn't help matters either because the crux of the investigation focused on the legal status of the new majority shareholders of Shin Corp from January 23 of this year (the day that Temasek's takeover of Shin from Thaksin's family took effect) to March 9 (when Surin was brought in as part of an apparent last-ditch rescue mission).

The Commerce Ministry's apparent foot-dragging and subterfuge in this case will plunge the government further into the abyss of duplicity. Every member of the government under this particular caretaker premier could be charged with conspiracy to break the law to protect the commercial interests of Thaksin's family and a foreign concern under the thinly veiled disguise of protecting foreign investment.

Thaksin and his Cabinet simply cannot hide behind the pretext of protecting foreign investment in order to whitewash this scandal.

The fact that it's a deliberate attempt to protect only the powerful, an application of a double standard that favours a select few politically connected business groups, and that it is in clear violation of good governance, undermines the confidence of foreign investors in this country.

Suthichai Yoon