This telecom affair symbolises everything that was morally and ethically wrong with the ousted administration. Many believe it could have been one of the main reasons why Thaksin entered politics in the first place. Thailand's plan to liberalise the telecom sector, under its commitments to the World Trade Organisation, warranted the conversion of existing telecom concessions at that time. It required the concessionaires, including Thaksin's telecom empire, which had obligations to pay the government an estimated Bt300 billion, to face a new formula of payment - one that had to be fair to them, the state and consumers. Superficially, excise tax on the concessions seemed a good alternative, but the measure, and the way it was introduced, sparked controversy and questions about whether the state and consumers were robbed blind in a politically shrewd scheme.

First of all, the excise tax was implemented through an executive decree. Side-stepping Parliament was a trademark of the Thaksin government. Uproar over the decision to enforce the conversion through executive decree prompted calls for the Constitution Court to determine if it was a constitutionally justified move. This only led to another major controversy. Eight Constitution Court judges, forming a majority bloc, let the government off the hook. The court's 8-6 vote to endorse the excise decree recalled its 8-7 decision to acquit Thaksin of asset-concealment charges in 2001 - thus allowing him to narrowly escape a five-year ban from politics. Shrugging off doubts over its integrity and independence, the court decided that the executive decree was relevant to the national economy, thus fitting the constitutional requirement that executive decrees must be issued under emergency situations in order to safeguard national security, public safety or economic stability.

Why the public questioned the decree was simple. The most basic of ethical questions were being asked: should a government led by a telecom patriarch take a short cut to decide what was tantamount to a Bt100-billion telecom issue? Should the same government ignore Parliament when the administration was about to take crucial legal steps that could determine who would dominate the market after the lucrative sector was liberalised? And if the issue was so important, as claimed by Thaksin, why didn't it wait for the establishment of the National Telecom Commission, which would be constitutionally empowered to make rulings regarding liberalisation of the industry?

Constitutional aspects were not as troubling as consumer-related questions. The excise tax, critics said, was tantamount to throwing the burden straight to consumers. It was a big shift in philosophy, because the original idea was to make the concessionaires pay a fixed, albeit progressive, sum regardless of how well their businesses were doing. There was also the question of whether the whole tax scheme was fair to potential newcomers to the market and whether it would truly create a competitive environment that would benefit consumers. How much the state lost and Thaksin's telecom empire won from the decree is anybody's guess. Shin Corp could have claimed that their huge leaps in profit thereafter were the result of shrewd business strategies; investigating its balance sheets wouldn't yield any clue to wrongdoing. Scrutinising government coffers wouldn't tell the whole story. And to determine how much consumers could have been taken advantage of would have been impossible.

The Assets Examination Committee may decide next month whether to accept the state-enterprise labour activists' petition and launch a probe. It is not an easy decision to make, but more difficulties lie ahead if the investigators choose to give it a shot. But this is the challenge they face. Thailand has arrived at this precarious point because it has ignored or tried to avoid blurry ethical issues like this. The country won't be able to really move forward unless the ghost of conflicts of interest is exorcised.