Re: CP unit to build USD68.5 million plant in Vietnam, Business, December 10.
This press release in The Nation caught my attention along with another one from last October when The Charoen Pokphand Group (CP Group), Thailand’s leading agribusiness conglomerate, announced plans to invest 123.6 billion Baht (US$3.6 billion) in Vietnam over the next five years. Even more interesting is the fact that a former Thai prime minister, Anand Panyarachun, is leading the charge into Vietnam. Add to this, the CP Group is grabbing up or creating businesses using the business model almost identical to our latest former prime minister, Thaksin Shinawatra, makes me very curious. Sooksunt Jiumjaisawanglerg, executive vice-president of CP Vietnam Livestock, a unit of the CP Group, said the company will invest in food processing, real estate, retailing, telecoms and banking.
The money involved in these offshore investments is astronomical by any world standard and the CP Group will make nothing but money on these ventures. I find it fascinating that the CP Group and its subsidiary True Visions invested a reported Bt100 million recently in political contributions to major political parties. While all of this investment capital is flowing out of CP Group’s bank accounts they will not invest any cash in their flagship satellite television monopoly, True Visions. Subscribers are subjected to second rate programming and multiple repeats on just a few channels. While CP Group and True Visions gets rich and hundreds of billions of Baht is being taken out of the country we are forced to subscribe to late 1980’s technology, made for television movies from the 1980’s and 1990’s that True Visions passes off as theatrical releases and constant repeats of substandard programming. Perhaps a small amount of the cash earmarked for foreign investment could be redirected for the purchase of quality programming and to improve a woefully inadequate satellite television system here in the Kingdom.
David Barkdull
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