Phuket camp inferno sparks fear as migrant scandal probe heats up
Blaze guts rooms in Phuket as separate corruption case rocks labour system
A fire tore through a migrant workers’ camp in Phuket yesterday morning, just hours before a bombshell corruption complaint involving foreign labourers rocked officials in Bangkok.
Flames ripped through the Wasi M&E Co compound in Moo 4, Srisoonthorn, at 8.19am yesterday, July 22, damaging around 10 rooms and destroying the personal belongings of the camp’s Myanmar residents.
Thankfully, no one was hurt as the workers had already left for their jobs when the blaze broke out.
Local fire crews brought the inferno under control before police arrived. Phuket News reported that investigators suspect a dodgy electrical short circuit sparked the flames.
Officers from the Phuket Forensic Science Centre are now combing through the wreckage to confirm the cause.
Police said: “Further action will be taken following the forensic investigation.”
Meanwhile, in Bangkok, the Department of Special Investigation (DSI) was hit with fresh allegations of corruption involving migrant workers from Myanmar, Cambodia, and Laos.
Mongkolkit Suksintharanon, chairman of the Anti-Corruption Network Foundation, accompanied by activist-turned-politician Yoswarit “Jeng Dokjik” Chooklom, filed a formal complaint and handed over evidence to DSI boss Major Yutthana Praedam.
“This goes beyond Cambodia,” Mongkolkit said, accusing officials of turning a blind eye to registration irregularities affecting hundreds of thousands of migrant workers.
The complaint follows an earlier case involving Cambodian name lists. But Mongkolkit claims the rot runs deeper, with Myanmar workers, Thailand’s largest migrant group, being dragged into a murky web of dodgy paperwork and backdated registrations.
As of the latest Cabinet resolution on September 24 last year, over 2.4 million foreign workers were officially registered in Thailand, including 94,000 from Laos and 3,000 from Vietnam.
Around 1.2 million of these were so-called “self-arrived” or previously undocumented workers who were retroactively registered, among them, up to 50,000 Myanmar nationals.
Officials are now facing pressure to probe how many of those registrations were legitimate, and whether powerful figures profited from the confusion.
As the embers cool in Phuket and the scandal heats up in Bangkok, Thailand’s treatment of its foreign workforce is under scrutiny like never before.
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