Bangkok : Ousted Thai premier Yingluck Shinawatra attacked impeachment proceedings against her ahead of a crunch vote that could see her banned from politics for five years and deepen the country’s bitter divide, reports AFP. Yingluck, the kingdom’s first female premier and the sister of former leader Thaksin Shinawatra, was toppled from office by a controversial court ruling shortly before the army staged a coup in May.
She faces impeachment on Friday by the junta-picked National Legislative Assembly over her administration’s populist rice subsidy programme, which funnelled cash to her rural base but cost billions of dollars and inspired protests that felled her government. Yingluck arrived at heavily-policed Parliament House in central Bangkok accompanied by a handful of her party members. Yingluck defended the rice scheme as an attempt to support Thailand’s rural poor