The popular Future Forward party in Thailand has been dissolved after it received an illegal donation from its leader.
The Thai constitutional court judged that a loan to the party provided by leader Thanathorn Juangroongruangkit was a donation, and was subsequently declared illegal.
Following the ruling, Thanathorn and the party's nine other executives have been stripped of their status as MPs and barred from all political activity for ten years.
Businessman Thanathorn had formed the pro-democracy party in 2018, in order to contest the 2019 Thai election.
It performed strongly at the polls, garnering more than six million votes and 80 MPs in the Thai parliament, the third largest share of seats.
The 70 Future Forward MPs who were not in executive party roles have been given a grace period of 60 days to join another party or they too will be forced to give up their status as an MP and their parliamentary seats.
Thanathorn argued that he provided the loan because the party had no other opportunities to fundraise in order to finance their election campaign.
The 2019 election yielded a new coalition government, putting an end to five years of military rule in the southeast Asian state, which had been ongoing since a 2014 coup.
Prime minister Prayuth Chan-ocha who heads the coalition, is the former junta leader who had taken power by force five years before.
