Thailand’s central bank and anti-money laundering agency say they have found no evidence to support claims in a recent UN report that Thai banks facilitated the acquisition of weapons by Myanmar’s military junta.
The report of the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR), released in Junealleged that companies registered in Thailand had used Thai banks to transfer funds for the purchase of weapons and related military equipment. Such purchases totaled nearly $130 million in fiscal 2023, the report said, compared to $60 million in 2022.
Following the publication of the report, the Thai government did this announced the establishment of a task force to investigate OHCHR’s claims and to “further equip and enhance” the capacity of Thai banks to conduct due diligence on transactions that could be related to human rights abuses in Myanmar. This came after bank representatives told a parliamentary committee that they did not have the capacity to properly investigate transactions.
“The investigation found that some financial institutions conducted transactions with individuals listed in the OHCHR report, but no evidence was found linking these transactions to the purchase of weapons,” the Bank of Thailand and the Anti-Money Laundering Office said in a statement yesterday. to a Bloomberg report.
The investigation found that Thai financial institutions employed “varying levels of rigor in their operations,” the agencies said, stressing the need to improve anti-money laundering and anti-terrorism practices.
“This would allow financial institutions to better manage the risks of being used as conduits for financing illegal activities and human rights violations, which could manifest themselves in new forms,” the agencies said.
The OHCHR report, written by Tom Andrews, the UN Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in Myanmar, tracks how the military junta has been able to continue acquiring weapons by shifting suppliers of financial services and military hardware in response to the imposition of arms. of economic sanctions by Western governments, including the United States. It found that the military junta “continues to work with a broad international banking network to sustain itself and its weapons stockpiles,” allowing it to continue both its battlefield campaigns and its retaliatory attacks on the civilian population.
The most notable shift noted in the report was the emergence in 2023 of Thailand as the “main source of military supplies purchased through the international banking system” for the military junta. It said Thai banks had taken charge after the crackdown in Singapore, a country that had served for years as an offshore trading hub and a financial haven for Myanmar’s military and its galaxy of allied businessmen.
In a report published in 2023, Andrews documented how Singapore-based entities had become the military junta’s third largest source of weapons material, after Russia and China, despite the government’s opposition to arms transfers to Myanmar. Following a subsequent research According to Singaporean authorities, the flow of weapons and related materials into Myanmar from Singapore-registered companies fell by almost 90%, with Thailand catching up, Andrews wrote in this year’s report. These include the purchase of spare parts for Mi-17 and Mi-35 helicopters and K-8W light attack aircraft, which the report said were used by the junta to carry out air strikes on civilian targets.
Andrews wrote that Singapore’s crackdown showed that decisive actions by national authorities could have a decisive effect on the junta’s ability to purchase weapons.
“If the government of Thailand were to act on this information as the government of Singapore did a year ago, the SAC’s ability to attack the people of Myanmar would be significantly compromised,” he wrote in the report.