November 11, 2021 – Thai authorities have recently been cracking down on a wave of fraud among rubber glove companies in the country, including the sale of substandard and used gloves.
Police in Thailand announced yesterday the arrest of the head of a company suspected of cheating overseas buyers of millions of dollars they paid for undelivered medical rubber gloves during the coronavirus pandemic.
Rock Fintek (Miami Beach, FL), a trading company, filed a complaint that Sufficiency Economy City Co. (Thailand) failed to deliver 2 million boxes of nitrile gloves worth $15.5 million for which it had paid a 40% deposit. Two other companies, from France and Hong Kong, also filed complaints about Sufficiency Economy City Co., which marketed gloves branded SkyMed.
Sufficiency Economy City Co. CEO Kampee Kampeerayannon was arrested Tuesday on charges of fraud and posting false information online, the Associated Press reports.
In a separate case Tuesday, the Thai attorney-general’s office announced that a Thai employee of Paddy the Room Trading Co., Pipatpon Homjanya, was sentenced to four years in prison.
The company had exported millions of substandard and in some cases secondhand gloves to the U.S. which were packed without permission in boxes of a legitimate glove producer, Thai officials said.
These crackdowns follow the United States’ ban in October on gloves from Thai manufacturer Supermax and the July ban of Top Glove – the world’s largest latex glove maker – over alleged forced labor practices at the companies. The ban on Top Glove was lifted in September.