FORMER Thai prime minister Yingluck Shinawatra will be tried on corruption and negligence charges, the Supreme Court announced yesterday.

Ms Shinawatra, Thailand’s first female premier, faces accusations that a rice subsidy scheme run by her government squandered billions and was administered corruptly.

She denies the accusation and has defended the programme, which she says helped some of Thailand’s poorest farmers. No specific examples of corruption have been offered by the prosecution.

Critics argue that the charges against the former leader are political and an attempt to crush the Shinawatra family and its Pheu Thai (For Thais) Party, which won Thailand’s last election in 2011 but was overthrown in a military coup last year following mass protests by the right-wing yellow shirts movement.

Ms Shinawatra’s brother Thaksin is also a former prime minister who was overthrown in a military coup in 2006. Their left-leaning movement has won every election in the country in the past decade, but has faced repeated persecution by the royalist state.

The Constitutional Court dissolved its predecessor the Thai Rak Thai party in 2007 and the People’s Power Party that succeeded that in 2008.

Ms Shinawatra’s trial has been set for May 19 — the fifth anniversary of a bloody military crackdown on the pro-Shinawatra red shirts that left 90 dead.

Thailand’s ruling junta was also forced to deny accusations that it used torture to try to extract confessions from suspects in a bombing case.

Lawyers for four men accused of a grenade attack on Bangkok Criminal Court say they were punched and given electric shocks.