" Check Bill " - say it with a Thai accent (เช็กบิล)

Thailand's coup was a blue sky lightning jolt - not an event many saw coming. Today, I met a Thai PhD student (let's just call him Pong, not his real name). He was elated with the military takeover back home. "Check Bill" he said, which in Thai colloquial meant payback time.

For months now, Pong had been lamenting about the Thaksin government. Allegations against Thaksin are fairly well-documented, so there is no need to discuss them here. Pong could scarcely contain his joy that the military or the military-imposed government might re-nationalise the assets sold to Temasek. Though I was never too comfortable with the deal based on what I had read, I nevertheless registered my protest that the deal was legal. If you read the news articles, Temasek is still maintaining that it has done nothing wrong.

Pong's rejoinder was that even if the deal were perfectly legal, Temasek (and by implication the Singapore government) acted in bad faith since it was well aware that the deal benefited Thaksin personally a lot more than the Thai people. I could not find a counter argument against this line of reasoning, not one that I could convince myself enough to say anyway.

Pong was very much in touch with his people back home. He told me that the coup went so successfully only because Thaksin was over-confident. For months now, the coup plotters had lured Thaksin into a sense of security by allowing the prime minister to get away with just about any thing. It was this sense of security that blinded him. If he was struck by a blue sky lightning, it was only because he saw only the sunny side of things.

Temasek now faces the possibility of being also a victim of this blue sky lightning. How could a venerable Singapore institution like Temasek commit such a strategic blunder? Not only is the investment under the cloud of uncertainty, the goodwill between Singapore and Thailand will now be put on the line.

Again, it was down to blindness. Temasek was so blindly convinced of its commercial logic that it probably chose to ignore the geo-political risk of the Shin Corp deal. Thaksin was so assured of his power that he was blind to the opposition to the deal. Both parties happily chose to look at the bright big picture.

If the assets were indeed re-nationalised, it would also be " Check Bill " for Temasek to the tune of USD1.9 billion.