More than 500 officers carried out simultaneous raids in Phuket, Phang Nga and Krabi on 20 June 2026, executing 55 warrants and arresting 48 people, 27 Thai nationals and 21 foreign nationals, according to Khaosod English and Bangkok Post reports. Land valued at 1.05 billion baht was seized. The operation is the southern phase of a national campaign against nominee shareholding, where a Thai national holds shares on paper so that a company appears to satisfy the majority-Thai ownership requirement while a foreigner controls it in practice.
What Was Actually Targeted
The target is the structure, not the property. Land in Thailand is reserved for Thai nationals, so a foreign buyer who wants a villa on its own plot has had two routes available: register a lease of the plot, or put the land inside a Thai company. The company route works only when the Thai shareholders are genuine investors with their own money at risk. Where the Thai shareholders are dummies holding shares for a fee, the arrangement breaches the Foreign Business Act, and that is what officers are prosecuting.
The scale of the review is set out in Department of Business Development figures reported by Bangkok Post and syndicated by the South China Morning Post on 21 June 2026. The DBD flagged 11,426 companies on Koh Phangan and Koh Samui with foreign shareholders, close to 68% of every registered firm on those two islands, and identified more than 7,000 businesses nationally as suspected nominee structures, concentrated in real estate, tourism and hospitality.
The Effect on the Villa Market
The same reporting described prospective buyers postponing luxury villa purchases in Phuket and Koh Samui while the legal position settles. Bangkok Post put roughly three in five Phuket villa transactions as involving a foreign buyer or lessee, an estimate attributed to property market sources rather than to a registry, so treat it as an order of magnitude rather than a precise share.
A pause of this kind is uncomfortable for sellers and useful for buyers who were going to do proper legal work anyway. Deals that were structured correctly are unaffected. Deals that relied on a shareholder who never contributed capital were always exposed, and the enforcement wave has moved that exposure from theoretical to immediate.
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The Lease Route Has Its Own Limits
Buyers stepping away from company structures toward leases should know what they are stepping into. Registration of a land lease runs thirty years at a time and no longer. The familiar 30+30+30 shape is therefore one registered right followed by two promises to grant further terms, and the second and third thirty years are only as good as whoever made those promises.
The June reporting cited Supreme Court Decision No. 4655/2566, which held void the pre-paid automatic renewal clauses written specifically to get around the statutory limit. That ruling does not make leasehold unsafe; it makes the marketing description of it inaccurate. The accurate description of a Phuket leasehold villa is thirty registered years, plus renewal expectations whose value depends on the counterparty still existing and still cooperating three decades from now. Price it as that, not as ninety years.
What Is Not Affected
Condominium freehold is untouched, and the reason is structural rather than a matter of enforcement priority. Buying an apartment inside the building’s foreign quota puts the deed in your own name at the Land Department. There is no company between you and the title, so there are no Thai shareholders to be genuine or otherwise, and nothing for this campaign to investigate. The structure it is prosecuting simply does not exist in that transaction.
For a foreign buyer whose priority is a title they can hold, resell and pass on without structural risk, the quota condominium remains the cleanest instrument in the Thai market. Buyers who specifically want land under their feet should go in understanding the trade-off rather than being sold around it.
What to Check Before You Sign
Ask who the Thai shareholders are and whether they can evidence their own capital contribution. Ask to see the lease as it would be registered at the Land Office, not the marketing summary. Confirm the foreign quota position of a condominium in writing from the juristic person before paying anything. Use a Thai lawyer who is instructed by you rather than introduced by the seller, and read our company ownership guide and freehold versus leasehold comparison before the first meeting.
Frequently Asked Questions
No, and not because condominiums are being treated leniently. An apartment bought inside a building's foreign quota puts the deed in the buyer's own name, so no company sits in the transaction and there are no Thai shareholders whose genuineness could be questioned. The campaign is prosecuting companies whose Thai shareholders hold on someone else's behalf; that arrangement is absent from a quota purchase entirely.
A Thai company can own land, and foreign minority participation is lawful. What is unlawful is using Thai shareholders who hold shares on a foreigner's behalf without contributing their own capital. The distinction is whether the Thai shareholders are genuine investors. Since 1 January 2026 the Department of Business Development has required documentary proof of source of funds for newly incorporated companies, which makes that distinction much harder to blur.
More than 500 officers conducted simultaneous raids in Phuket, Phang Nga and Krabi, executing 55 warrants and arresting 48 people, of whom 27 were Thai nationals and 21 were foreign nationals, with land valued at 1.05 billion baht seized. The figures were reported by Khaosod English and Bangkok Post.
It depends on what you are buying. A quota condominium purchase involves none of the structures under investigation and there is no structural reason to wait. A villa on land bought through a company structure deserves proper legal review before you commit, and if the seller resists that review, the review has already told you what you needed to know.
A registered thirty-year lease is lawful, recognised, and what most foreign villa buyers in Phuket actually hold. The caution sits on the renewals rather than the term: Supreme Court Decision No. 4655/2566 struck down pre-paid automatic renewal clauses written to circumvent the statutory limit, so anything past year thirty should be treated as an expectation you are relying on somebody to honour, and priced accordingly.
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Maksim Shchegolev
Phuket Real Estate Experts
The MORE Group team has helped 500+ European and American buyers purchase property in Thailand. We provide legal support, 0% commission, and on-the-ground expertise with 8 years in the Phuket market.
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