A Thai attorney and three former high-ranking judges suspected by U.S. authorities of taking bribes from Japanese automaker Toyota to throw out a massive tax judgment filed a defamation complaint yesterday against an American news site.
Songpol Annanon filed the complaint with Huai Khwang police against Law 360, a legal news website headquartered in New York, for reporting that the U.S. Justice Department was pursuing a corruption case against Toyota. It said authorities there suspected Songpol’s law firm of facilitating bribes amounting to tens of millions of dollars to some of Thailand’s top judges to overturn a THB11 billion tax evasion ruling against Toyota.
Law360 cited law enforcement documents indicating that Toyota itself concluded that the Annanon Law Office had helped “establish a backchannel to Thailand’s highest ranking judge” to pay upward of…
