Thailand's military government on Tuesday cancelled a visit by Singapore's foreign minister in protest at a meeting between ousted Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra and one of the city-state's cabinet ministers.
Having dressed down Singapore's ambassador on Thaksin's visit, Bangkok tore up its invitation to Foreign Minister George Yeo to a meeting of civil servants this month and suspended a nine-year-old exchange programme with Singapore - a measure of the growing bad blood between the south-east Asian allies.
Singapore's Ministry of Foreign Affairs said that Thaksin's weekend talks with his "old friend" Deputy Prime Minister S. Jayakumar were a "social and private meeting".
It said that since Thailand had not informed Singapore that Thaksin had been charged with any offence, there was no reason to refuse him entry. "We are therefore saddened that the Thai Government has chosen to take this course of action," a ministry statement said.
The row is set to further cloud negotiations about the fate of Singapore state holding company Temasek's controversial $3.8 billion acquisition of telecoms group Shin Corp from Thaksin's family a year ago.
The deal led to Thaksin's downfall and has been a financial and publicity nightmare for Temasek. The Temasek-led consortium has seen its investment more than halve in value and is now sitting on a $2 billion paper loss, while one of Shin's units faces damages of about $2.7 billion due to a licence fee dispute with the Thai government.
Singapore Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong on Sunday repeated the purchase of Shin was a commercial deal, not a government-led matter, but said that Temasek, headed by his wife Ho Ching, should be held accountable if the deal does not work out.
The Singapore Foreign Ministry said prior to Thaksin's visit to Singapore, the ousted leader had visited several other countries without any protest by the Thai Government. But Thailand's ruling generals were not persuaded of the innocence of the meeting. The government was "dissatisfied with the incident and the explanation", the foreign ministry said.
Besides meeting with a Singapore deputy prime minister, Thaksin also used his Singapore visit to give his first televised interview since his removal in a military coup on September 19. He has spent most of his time since then in exile in London or Beijing, where he had declined interview requests.
The billionaire businessman, who won election landslides in 2001 and 2005 before opponents started a street campaign against him, promised to quit politics and return to private life. However, no Thais got to see him telling CNN "enough is enough" as cable television operators complied with a directive from the Council for National Security (CNS), as the generals who ousted him now call themselves, not to air Thaksin footage. CNS leader and army chief Sonthi Boonyaratglin told Channel 3 television that he had "given guidelines to television operators on how to keep stability and unity in the country".
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