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Published on December 1, 2007

Police in Mueang Chiang Mai's Chang Pheuk district yesterday issued arrest warrants for four more suspects allegedly involved in Easy Network Marketing's alleged pyramid fund, which stripped some 800 plaintiffs nationwide of about Bt30 million.

The Department of Special Investigation (DSI) is planning to allot more manpower to the investigation into Easy Network because of the growing number of complaints being filed against it.

Chang Pheuk police superintendent Colonel Piyabutr Atchariyamongkol, assigned by Provincial Police Region 5 and the DSI to update the media, told a press conference yesterday that since the DSI took up the case on November 19, there had been 800 complainants, with 117 of them interviewed so far.

The problem was that some of these plaintiffs were afraid to give official testimony for fear of being prosecuted, too, especially those in Lamphun, Lampang, Chachoengsao, Satun, Phuket, Krabi and Nakhon Ratchasima, where the company's branches are located, Piyabutr said.

Some plaintiffs also reportedly received threats that the company would not pay them if they talked to the police, he said, affirming that after the witness interviews were completed, police would seize assets of the firm and repay the plaintiffs.

The DSI investigation will conclude on December 30, after which Chang Pheuk police will take over the case.

In Bangkok, the head of the DSI's Special Crime Office, Colonel Piyawat King-ket, said he planned to ask the DSI chief to add more investigators to the case because many more people had filed complaints. He will also ask the Justice Ministry's Central Institute of Forensic Science for experts to help check the firm's documents.

Now that the DSI has detained the firm's managing director Pathom Ansakul, 28, it must speed up the probe as it has 84 days to complete the case, given a maximum of seven 12-day periods of court-granted suspect detention, Piyawat said.

The investigation so far has found that the firm had nearly Bt1 billion in capital, but the DSI has seized only Bt100 million, or 10 per cent, of this, he said. The DSI will ask the Anti-Money Laundering Office to check the financial transactions of people related to Pathom and Easy Network Marketing.

A source at the DSI said the firm's lucky draw events were suspected to be a marketing hoax as some winners reportedly used fake papers to receive the prizes. The firm's executives musty clarify to police who these winners were.

Many more people - mostly middle-aged women living in provinces around Bangkok and in the South - filed complaints with the DSI yesterday, a source said.

Most said they filed the complaints after learning that the police were investigating the firm, which had not yet paid them any dividends.

However, some still believed Pathom was a good man, saying that he paid for members' meals, allocated dividends systematically, and had set up the Thai Rum Ruay Party to run in the upcoming election.

A 34-year-old plaintiff from Yala said Easy Network Marketing was well known in the South, and she was invited by a friend to invest with the company. At first she paid Bt2,100 for stock in a canned coffee beverage and received a dividend of double the amount she invested.

Becoming more confident, she joined a lucky draw and invested Bt35,000. She received a first dividend of Bt10,000, but then the company kept postponing the second dividend payment until Pathom was arrested, so she filed a compliant with police in the hope of getting her money back.

"I believe all investors knew that the company got money from newcomers to pay old investors, thus the dividend payment was not on a fixed schedule. But in the past we got high returns despite the delay and we were happy with that," she said.

Easy Network Marketing investors and employees went to Bangkok Special Prison yesterday to give moral support to Pathom, who is detained there. However, prison officials allowed only Pathom's relatives to see him.

The Nation

CHIANG MAI