Bt1m village fund in trouble
The Village and Community Fund is set to undergo a drastic debt restructuring to pay off Bt8.51 billion in two years.
Social Development and Human Security Minister Paiboon Wattanasiritham told a seminar yesterday on the objectives and policy for the scheme that the move was aimed at solving its cashflow problem.He said that under international accounting standards the project - former prime minister Thaksin Shinawatra's Bt1 million per village scheme - had long gone bankrupt. Bad loans amounted to 12 per cent of the total portfolio even in 2002 - the first year of the programme. The Village Fund was supported by soft loans from the Government Savings Bank and the Bank for Agriculture and Agricultural Cooperatives. A recent random inspection found that half of 450 villages in Krabi, Ayutthaya and Chumphon owed Bt83.3 million to the fund. The villages with the worst repayment records were mostly located in the South.
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