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Mekong Memo Thailand Weekly: Business, politics, finance, trade & legal news.

Jan 30, 2026

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Here is your Mekong Memo Thailand for this week.

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Headlines:

All That Glitters Gets Capped

Pension Problem Gets a 90 Day Promise

Other Election Tales

Orange Crush as People’s Party Tops the Polls

Bangkok’s Ten-Door Welcome Mat

Border Burns, ASEAN Fiddles

Google Floats Billion Dollar Bangkok Cloud

Baht Be Damned, Factories Press On

Blue Oval Buys Suzuki’s White Elephant

Expired Papers Send Chinese Dream Off the Rails

Bangkok Opens the Credit Spigot

Dial Tone for Scammers

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All That Glitters Gets Capped

The central bank is putting guardrails on election-season money flows that smell. The BOT says it sniffed out two eyebrow-raising cash withdrawals of 250 million and 200 million baht, with one customer asking for all of it as 500-baht notes (the purple-skin, palm-greaser’s special). Banks are being told to firm up their reporting of large cash moves. The regulator isn’t mincing words about grey money and governance, saying it’ll hand suspicious flows to the Anti-Money Laundering Office and Election Commission. Starting March 1, the BOT will cap daily online gold trading at 50 million baht a person in an attempt to “smooth baht volatility,” but a side effect will be to make shuffling cash around more difficult as well. The bank has also warned it could tighten things up even more if baht movements stay divorced from economic fundamentals.

Read more: Bangkok Post (gold trading), The Thaiger (note they’ve misidentified the governor)

Pension Problem Gets a 90 Day Promise

Pheu Thai is saying (oh so optimistically!) that it’ll fix Thailand’s 2.8 trillion baht Social Security Fund within three months if it gets back into office. That’s heady talk for a fund that’s been underperforming for years. The “opposition party” (although technically not, since the gov’t has been dissolved) says the fund’s 2.8% annual returns are leaving workers behind, even as the Government Pension Fund is posting substantially better figures. They’re also proposing to give investment decisions to outsiders and to restructure the board so insured members will get more of a say in how their money is invested. The problem is acute, the fund is delivering returns that would barely outpace a savings account, and whoever forms the next government is going to have to answer about why that is.

Read more: Bangkok Post (Pheu Thai overhaul), Bangkok Post (restructuring),

Other Election Tales

Some of the other ideas that are being floated in advance of the polls include Pheu Thai’s pitching of a 20-baht flat fares on electric trains and a “9-millionaire lottery” to expand the tax base. The People’s Party wants to throw 250 billion baht into the economy plus 1,000-baht handouts for 12 million people. Democrat leader Abhisit Vejjajiva is promising 5% GDP growth within four years by pulling apart “grey capital” networks. He was able to pull off that trick once before during the 2008 financial crisis, but to be fair, circumstances were doing half the work. Thai Sang Thai’s wants to give micro-loans at 12% annual interest, generous by loan shark standards but hardly revolutionary.

Read more: Bangkok Post (Party Visions), Bangkok Post (Abhisit’s vow)

Orange Crush as People’s Party Tops the Polls

The progressive People’s Party (heir to the previously-dissolved-by-the-courts Move Forward party) is heading into the February 8 election with a wind at its back. Almost four in 10 voters want leader Natthaphong Rueangpanyawut as PM, according to a Rajabhat Poll. Pheu Thai’s Yodchanan Wongsawat has also risen in the ranks (to 16%), and incumbent PM Anutin Charnvirakul’s Bhumjaithai is hemorrhaging support, down to just 15%. Voters say they care more about policy than personality, with cost-of-living fixes topping wish lists. Nearly two-thirds of respondent back the drafting of a new constitution. The shift in momentum suggests that the establishment-versus-reformist grudge match isn’t settled.

Read more: Nation Thailand (Rajabhat poll), Asia News (election)

Bangkok’s Ten-Door Welcome Mat

The Commerce Ministry says it wants to remove 10 business categories from the Foreign Business Act’s restricted list! This would allow foreign companies to do biz in those sectors without having to apply for specific permission. Commerce Minister Suphajee Suthumpun floated the idea as a way to bring in (much needed) FDI and breathe some life back into the growth story. The ten sectors to be unleashed remains conveniently unspecified, but the timing suggests Bangkok’s getting antsy about its competitive position in the region (you’re all reading the Mekong Memo, Vietnam, right?). The Foreign Business Act’s long been a maze of restrictions that foreign investors either navigate with Thai partners or avoid entirely, so getting rid of even a handful of categories would be a rare retreat from economic nationalism.

Border Burns, ASEAN Fiddles

Singapore’s foreign minister wants “dialogue and negotiations” at this week’s ASEAN meeting in Cebu while Thailand and Cambodia try to sustain their second ceasefire in six months. ASEAN’s toolkit for bilateral disputes is still what it’s always been: strongly worded hopes. The bloc is already watching its Five-Point Consensus on Myanmar collect dust, so this latest non-action isn’t a huge surprise. A former Thai general says a third round of fighting is “inevitable,” pointing to fresh trenches and bunkers going up along the border. Trade routes stay shuttered, cross-border investment stays frozen, and the diplomats keep meeting.

Read more: Asia News (hope), RFI (more hope!), Daily Dispatch ZA (election), Asia News (more fighting)

Google Floats Billion Dollar Bangkok Cloud

Thailand is Google’s latest regional data sovereignty play with a billion-dollar Bangkok cloud region that lets local banks and ministries check compliance boxes with local infra. The dream is that 1.4 trillion baht in economic value materializes over five years, the forecast comes as regulators tighten data residency rules that have started to make multinationals hesitant to keep Thai citizen information offshore.

Baht Be Damned, Factories Press On

In a welcome reversal following a November slump, local factories pulled off a December surprise, putting up 2.52% year-on-year growth despite expectations of a mild contraction. The hero of the story is auto manufacturing, up 8.6%. The fly in the ointment is the THB, which was up about 9% against the dollar last year and again another 1% so far this year. For the moment, stimulus and exports are keeping the wheels turning, but manufacturers are running uphill. Carmakers pushed hard just before the government’s EV subsidy ran out, pushing December sales up 39% (YoY) to a near three-year high thanks almost entirely to EV demand.

Read more: Market Screener (December surprise), Trading View (Sales), Argus Media (EV boom)

Blue Oval Buys Suzuki’s White Elephant

Ford picked up Suzuki’s 66-hectare Rayong plant for $3.9 billion. The plant turned out nearly 60,000 units annually at its 2012 heyday but managed only 4,400 last year, about 5% capacity. The deal, to be paid over 30 years, gives the American giant an extra 65,000 square meters right next door to its existing Ranger and Everest lines, where it already builds 270,000 units (90% goes overseas).

Expired Papers Send Chinese Dream Off the Rails

Quelle surprise! Italian-Thai Development’s safety certificates for its work on the high speed rail line expired on January 4, three weeks before an accident that left part of their erection on a passing train. The State Railway of Thailand wants to know if it can dump ITD from the project, but if it does, the process could use up more than a year to find a replacement contractor by way of a public tender. Unfortunately, two sections are 99.5% complete, meaning ITD nearly made it to the finish line before faulty rigging and absent oversight came home to roost. For the time being, Beijing’s connectivity ambitions remain stalled out. The delay is only the latest addition to Thailand’s infrastructure headache as the three-airports rail link is also stalled as it waits for Cabinet blessing.

Bangkok Opens the Credit Spigot

Bangkok wants to see if 260 billion baht in cheap money will keep the SME engine running at least until the next electoral cycle. The Thai Credit Guarantee Corporation has rolled out three programs in aid of the dream: a 50 billion baht “Quick Big Win” scheme that will waive guarantee fees for three years, a 100 billion baht lending push by way of commercial banks, and a 100 billion baht soft loan program through Government Savings Bank. The Quick Big Win scheme alone is expected to help more than 50,000 SMEs get financing. Services, F&B, and agriculture businesses were the recipients of half of last year’s roughly 48 billion baht in guarantees, and TCG’s debt resolution program has so far untangled 16.2 billion baht in 24,324 files since 2022.

Read more: Bangkok Post (SME schemes), Bangkok Post (SME support), Asia News (slowdown)

Dial Tone for Scammers

The telecom regulator pulled the plug on 23,057 phone numbers in December after finding 2.4 million suspicious outgoing calls. It was the kind of volume that suggests call centers, not chatty neighbors, that tipped them off, apparently. The NBTC’s pattern-recognition sweep hit numbers making dozens of calls daily from the same locations. Concentrations were especially found in border provinces like Nong Khai, Narathiwat, Sa Kaeo, and Chiang Rai - all known transit points for cross-border criminal operations, but Bangkok took a hit too. The regulator’s been asking mobile operators to keep track of unusual usage on a weekly basis and to cut service immediately if necessary, forcing registrants to re-verify themselves or lose the line(s).

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