BANGKOK (The Nation/Asia News Network): Thai Sang Thai Party leader Khunying Sudarat Keyuraphan on Friday (March 17) floated the idea for a “pension lottery” scheme, as part of her party’s election promises, under which lottery buyers would get their invested sums back at the retirement age.
In a Facebook post on Friday, Sudarat said: “You have lost your money in buying lottery tickets, haven’t you?”
She said her party plans a new lottery scheme in which buyers will get their invested money back at the age of 60, 70 and 80 while having a chance to win big prizes in every draw.
The post said the new lottery scheme would be called “national savings lottery”.
Explaining the scheme in a video clip, Sudarat said it would encourage people to save money for use after retirement.
She said Thai people often neglected saving money in banks, saying they did not have enough to put aside, but they always bought lottery tickets.
“So, Thai Sang Thai has come up with the idea of a national savings lottery. Investors will get the deposit back but without interest. The interest on the deposits would be used for the prizes,” Sudarat explained.
She said the payout would include the first prize, two and three-digit prizes and a jackpot prize. She did not elaborate on the prize amounts.
Sudarat also posted a video clip of her party’s core members and herself acting in an opera-like show.
The clip starts with a young and pretty woman bullying and looking down on an old woman watering a tree inside the compound of the Thai Sang Thai head office.
When it is unveiled later that the old woman is actually Sudarat, the young woman faints and is taken to a hospital where Sudarat sells her party’s 30-baht-plus universal healthcare programme and other policies, and promises that her party will not look down on the poor, and will treat every person with dignity.
