Yingluck indicted

Former Thai premier Yingluck Shinawatra was indicted over a bungled rice subsidy scheme yesterday in the latest legal move against her family that could see her jailed for up to a decade.

Thailand's junta-stacked government is also considering launching a civil suit against Yingluck, the nation's first female prime minister, to seek $18 billion in compensation for damages caused by the scheme introduced by her government.

The indictment comes after Yingluck was retroactively impeached last month by an assembly appointed by the junta which seized power from her elected government last May.

"We have indicted former prime minister Yingluck Shinawatra... for dereliction of duty" in relation to the costly rice scheme, said Chutichai Sakhakorn, a director-general at Thailand's attorney general, which filed the criminal charges.

The Supreme Court will decide whether or not to accept the case on March 19.

The ousted premier has been banned from leaving the country since authorities announced she would face charges over the populist subsidy scheme on the same day she was impeached, a move that carries an automatic five-year ban from politics.

Yingluck's brother, former premier Thaksin Shinawatra, has been in self-exile since 2008 to avoid being jailed for corruption after he was ousted in a 2006 coup.

The ex-premier has defended the rice scheme as a necessary subsidy to help poor farmers who historically receive a disproportionately small slice of government cash.

The subsidy, which paid farmers in the rural Shinawatra heartland twice the market rate for their crop, cost billions of dollars and inspired protests that felled Yingluck's government and led to a military takeover on May 22.

Experts say the impeachment and criminal charges are the latest attempt by the country's royalist elite, and its army backers, to extinguish the political influence of the Shinawatras, whose parties have won every election since 2001.