The eccentric billionaire king of Thailand has a number of problems on his gold plate right now.
The German government has expressed concern that it is illegally governing its country from a hotel in the Bavarian Alps, where it has spent much of the year living with a group of 20 women. Demonstrations at home calling for democratic reforms of the country and its power are growing more and more.
And now his mistress has been targeted by an apparent leak of nude photos.
About 1,400 selfies, many of them sexually explicit, were allegedly stolen from Sineenat “Koi” Wongvajirapakdi, 35, and sent to anti-monarchy activists in what appears to be a very modern twisting of the old rituals of court and court rivalry. intrigue.
Koi was released from custody earlier this year after spending ten months in a correctional facility. She had been accused of fighting the queen, but has now been declared “unpolluted” and returned to her role as the 68-year-old official consort of King Maha Vajiralongkorn.
The alleged nude photos were sent earlier this year to prominent British commentator on Thai affairs Andrew MacGregor Marshall and Pavin Chachavalpongpun, a Thai academician living in Japan who is facing prosecution in Thailand for his criticism of the monarchy. .
Marshall told The Daily Beast that he only decided to publicly reveal that the photos were sent to him because Chachavalpongpun had done so. Chachavalpongpun released several of the unexplained images.
Marshall told The Daily Beast that in August – when Koi was greeted again at the royal house – he received a letter sent to an address where he no longer lived, containing an SD card. The letter was supposed to be a “false return address” that corresponded to the headquarters of the German intelligence services in Berlin.
“There were 1,400 photos on four different iPhones. Some of them were very intimate photos.
“I decided not to publish them. Obviously, they were sent to me without her consent, but I also just saw that it’s a faction palace game.
“In early August, my house in Scotland was monitored and a threat was left on the doorstep, so it was a pretty worrying time and the last thing I wanted was to get involved in palace politics.”
When Chachavalpongpun released some of the images and described the content of others, claiming that he was doing so to expose the falsity of the image the Thai royal family was pursuing, Marshall thought it appropriate to support and say he received them. they.
“From the moment it was clearly an attempt to sabotage her return to court,” Marshall said.
“In any royal court you have factional struggles. It is a notorious element of palace life. When you are a monarch with a wife and a queen and you are called a consort, this is a recipe for vicious battles. “
Marshall notes that this is not the first time compromising photos of Thai kings have appeared online, “There is an impressive amount of naked Thai royal meat out there online,” he said.
The king divorced his third wife in 2014, after a video showed him feeding her birthday cake with his poodle, Fufu, while she was wearing only a rope and the courtiers crawled on the floor in front of them. .
The existence of the photos will not be reported by the local media in Thailand due to the strict bans, but the news about them is returning to the country through social networks, especially Facebook.
Thailand sought Facebook earlier this year to remove a critical group of the monarchy that had more than a million members, but failed.
Marshall posted an account of the Thai images on his Facebook page.
Thailand is struggling with a deep recession caused by COVID-19 and the collapse of essential tourism trade.
Opponents of the royal family have been encouraged in recent months, as student rallies against the institution have seen their numbers rise.
Protesters recently went to protest wearing harvested blouses, exposing their pants to mock the king, who was photographed wearing similar clothes at German airports and malls.
The protests were inflamed by reports of the king’s vast wealth, estimated by that of London Financial times between $ 30 billion and $ 40 billion after sovereign funds were effectively brought under his direct control by the leaders of a successful 2014 coup.
He is believed to be the richest king in the world.
As recently reported by The Daily Beast, Vajiralongkorn is said to have built an extraordinary fleet of 38 planes and helicopters for the exclusive use of the Thai royal family.
The accounts of his golden life at the Grand Hotel Sonnenbichl in Garmish-Partenkirchen, where his successor of 20 concubines who were given the same name of honor, also affected his domestic and international reputation.
The cables written by Eric John when he was US ambassador to Bangkok, which were published by Wikileaks, detail the strange behavior of the king. The cables said he adored his pet dog, Fufu, and gave him the title of air marshal. He is said to have brought the dog to an official dinner “dressed in formal evening attire complete with paw gloves” where he drank from the guests’ glasses of water.