A former lawmaker once jailed for bulldozing tenants off land he owned may not get to build a lucrative development if the law holds him to his promise to give it to the people of Bangkok.
It turns out that Chuwit Kamolvisit, the self-described “super pimp” with ties to the underworld who now promotes himself as a graft-busting whistleblower, may not legally own the land between BTS Nana and Soi Sukhumvit 10 where initial work has begun on Tenth Avenue, a THB10 billion (US$292 million), 51-story mixed-use development.
An activist lawyer has said Chuwit is legally bound to his 2005 promise to give the land to City Hall, a vow he made to win a more lenient sentence from the courts for illegally demolishing all of his tenants’ businesses in 2003 in the dead of night.
Chuwit fought the related charges for over a decade until finally confessing guilt in 2016, at which time the Supreme Court cut his sentence from five years to two years because of his magnanimous gesture. His deal secured, Chuwit soon ordered the gates of Chuwit Park locked, about a decade after it had opened. His gift to Bangkok’s park-starved people? He said they’d had it long enough.
Debate over the land was kicked off Thursday when Bangkok Gov. Chadchart Sittipunt said that although the city had not taken control of the land, he asked a deputy to formally request the verdict and testimony from the Supreme Court’s 2016 case against Chuwit.
Sittra Biabungkerd, the activist lawyer who heads a group floridly called the People’s Lawyer Team for Youth and Society Foundation, said Sunday that Chuwit’s announcement 18 years ago that he was gifting the land to the public was legally binding and effective immediately at the time.
“Just by giving the land to the public, it was transferred immediately without registration and cannot be revoked,” wrote Sittra, who also posits himself as a corruption-buster and has become the chief Chuwit-botherer of late. Just late last month, he embarrassed two Bangkok hospitals into returning THB6 million in what he said were dirty-money donations from Chuwit.
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All this has sent Chuwit into a frothy frenzy. Yesterday he went into attack mode, calling out “people’s lawyers” such as Sittra – without naming anyone – are really “bandit lawyers” who enjoy unusual wealth to their own unseemly connections to the criminal world. Coconuts has reached out to Chuwit for comment.
He has said that he has continuously paid property taxes and will take the Bangkok Metropolitan Administration to court if it tries to claim the land.
Under legal codes regulating public property, it only takes verbal consent to transfer private land to public use. And according to court precedent, judgments in land cases based on verbal or written agreements consider such transfers to be effective immediately without need to wait for registration, according to Manager.
Chuwit, now 61, was born in Hong Kong and earned an MBA at the University of San Diego in California, where he went by the name Davis Kamol. His firm, Davis, owns six large soapy massage brothels near Ratchadaphisek Road along with several other projects including The Davis Hotel in Soi Sukhumvit 24.
After rising to fame in 2003 by detailing the bribes he’d paid to which cops, Chuwit launched a brazen but failed gubernatorial campaign in which he promoted himself as both anti-corruption outsider and bad boy owner of multiple brothels.
He was elected to parliament in 2005 where he served a year before the Constitutional Court removed him from office. He was elected again in 2011 and served until parliament was dissolved by the army, which staged a coup d’etat in 2014.
In recent years, he has remained a media fixture and hosted several shows.
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