Apparently, the Prime Minister of Thailand was forced to resign because he hosted a cooking show:
BANGKOK — A Thai court ruled Tuesday that Prime Minister Samak Sundaravej had violated the Constitution by appearing as the host on a television cooking show, forcing him to resign after just seven months in office.
The ruling brought a sudden and unexpected end, at least for the moment, to Mr. Samak’s confrontation with thousands of protesters who have occupied the grounds of his office for two weeks, demanding his resignation.
(….)
A hardened and sharp-tongued politician, Mr. Samak, 73, has shown a folksy side on his televised cooking show — “Tasting and Complaining” — stirring up personal recipes and sounding off on topics that catch his interest.
“I have done nothing wrong,” the prime minister told the Constitutional Court on Monday. “I was hired to appear on the program and got paid from time to time. I was not an employee of the company.”
He said, “I did it because I liked doing it.”
Mr. Samak made just a few appearances on the show after becoming prime minister seven months ago, but that was enough for a group of opposition senators, who brought his case to the Counter-Corruption Commission, which forwarded it to the Constitutional Court. The accusation against Mr. Samak was that he had violated a constitutional prohibition against private employment while in office.
The charge of cooking against the rules is a curious one, given the allegations of gigantic corruption that surround other government figures.
Something tells me there’s more to this than just a cooking show.
