The attempt by Pol Lt Col Pannapon Nammuang of Thong Lo Police Station to charge the Yoovidhya family driver Suwes Hom-ubon with the hit-and-run killing of Pol Snr Sgt Maj Wichian Klanprasert is a sad reflection on the nexus of influence and illegality that corrupts what passes for a justice system.

The self-confessed real culprit was Yoovidhya family scion Vorayuth, whom the press insists on calling by his totally inappropriate nickname of ‘Boss’. We have learned little about him except that he has a penchant for cruising the neighbourhood before dawn in his Ferrari and is careful to take an early morning nip only after committing a crime and not before. At least that is what we are told by his senator-lawyer.

So why was Pol Lt Col Pannapon so eager to get Boss Vorayuth off the hook by framing driver Suwes for a crime he did not commit? And why was Suwes so willing to become the fall guy and take the rap when he was completely innocent?

Well, because that’s their job.

Driver Suwes could be sure that even if he were convicted (which, since all evidence against him would have to fabricated, is no sure thing), the family employing him would exert their money and influence to ensure his punishment was as short and painless as possible, and that he would be handsomely compensated for his trouble.

And the Police Lieutenant Colonel belongs to those members of the force that are more or less on retainers to the rich and powerful. Those influential families that have not managed to insinuate a family member into a strategic position in the police will arrange to have a coterie of well-placed officers at their beck and call. Whenever a family member falls foul of the law, these privately-engaged public servants will ensure that any investigation is blocked, diverted, and compromised and the evidence mislaid, altered or contaminated to the point where not even a Thai court will convict.

A decade or so ago, a woman went into a Bangkok police station to file a charge of rape against a Ministerial Advisor and former Deputy Minister (whose brother was a Senator and former Provincial Governor who was himself, er, intimately involved in the case). The alleged rapist was eventually acquitted of the charge (acquittal upheld on appeal) and the case became something of a cause célèbre among women’s rights circles.

But regardless of the merits of the accusation, one of the interesting features of the case was that when the woman turned up to file charges, the police station immediately contacted the police ‘bodyguards’ (read ‘fixers’) of the Ministerial Advisor. Then they refused to record the charges and sent her off the CSD. It was far from an open and shut case, but the complainant was struggling uphill from the get go.

But what the mainstream press appears to have overlooked in the hit and run case is the improbability that the family that owns a large slice of Red Bull (and half the Ferrari dealership for Bangkok, so the repairs won’t cost as much as you’d think) would be on terms of acquaintance with an officer as lowly as a Police Lieutenant Colonel at Thong Lo copshop. He’s not even the precinct superintendent.

Knowledgeable circles in the Prachatai newsroom (i.e. me and that long-haired feller that fiddles about with the website server and has an awesome Freecell score) believe that Pol Lt Col Pannapon could well in fact be a scapegoat himself for an as yet unidentified higher-ranking officer in the Metropolitan Police who was really the prime mover in the effort to scotch any chances that a Yoovidhya family member would be at risk of occupying a prison cell.

The unwonted zeal of the outraged co-workers of the dead policeman unfortunately exposed Pol Lt Col Pannapon’s crude and blatant subterfuge. They asked driver Suwes questions about the accident to which he wasn’t able to give coherent answers. Well, I mean, how could he? He’d had no time to be properly rehearsed.

This effectively foiled the first attempt at a cover-up. So Pol Lt Col Pannapon was named as the person supposedly responsible for the scam, so as to hide the identity of the true culprit.

These same knowledgeable circles also point to the possibility that if and when the ‘real’ mastermind of the cover-up is exposed in the next few days, this person is also likely to be the whipping boy for someone even more powerfully connected to the Yoovidhya family.

While we are reasonably sure who this is, the defamation laws prevent us from saying anything more than that their name does not begin with Z.

Or Q.