People’s Party MPs urge elected Phuket governor, dismiss official transfers as ‘theater’

People’s Party lawmakers on Tuesday called for Phuket to have an elected governor, saying repeated transfers of senior officials would not solve entrenched problems of influence-peddling and illicit benefit-taking in the island province.

At parliament on June 17, Pokmon Nunanun, a party-list MP and chair of the House committee on political development, mass communications and public participation, and Phuket MP Chalermpong Saengdee received a complaint from the founder of the Phuket local media Facebook page “Hot Jung Changwat Phuket.” The media figure has faced what the lawmakers described as a SLAPP-style lawsuit after reporting on alleged encroachment on public land at Bang Tao Beach and the transfer of officials who had tried to suppress local influential figures.

Pokmon said the alleged influential figures were not new actors and were linked to the recent transfer of a deputy Phuket governor. She said the prime minister had told an Interior Ministry meeting that the deputy governor had a close associate allegedly involved in seeking benefits and encroaching on public land, and that the person suing the Phuket local media outlet was close to that associate.

She argued that transferring the deputy governor was only one scene in a larger drama because, she said, people with power and operational roles in the area remained in place. According to Pokmon, the public wanted to know how benefit networks, influence and “tribute” payments in Phuket would actually be addressed, rather than seeing only personnel reshuffles.

Pokmon also questioned why no disciplinary or criminal proceedings had been publicly disclosed despite what she called serious allegations surrounding the transfer. She said merely moving top officials without uprooting the wider network would leave the same practices intact.

She further criticized the transfer itself, saying officials in the Department of Provincial Administration generally are moved to smaller provinces, but in this case the deputy governor was moved from Phuket to Nakhon Si Thammarat, which she described as a larger province and the official’s hometown.

Pokmon said the public should keep watching what she called a new power arrangement in Phuket. She alleged the transfers were tied to broader political competition for influence in southern Thailand.

Chalermpong said Phuket’s problems with influential figures had existed for years and would not disappear simply by changing governors. He said Phuket residents had endured the situation for decades and should be allowed to elect their own governor to determine the province’s future.

He said local people understood Phuket’s context best, including how administration should work, how influential figures should be suppressed and how investors entering the province should be screened. He called on the prime minister to support direct election of a Phuket governor as the best long-term solution.

Chalermpong also said prime ministers and senior leaders had visited Phuket many times, including Bang Tao Beach and Freedom Beach, and therefore should already know where the problems lay. He said what Phuket residents wanted was not polished rhetoric but concrete action.