Thaksin Shinawatra, the deposed Thai Prime Minister and former owner of Manchester City Football Club, has had his visa revoked by the British Government, two years after he fled to exile in London following a military coup.

An immigration officer at the British Embassy in Bangkok has also e-mailed airlines warning them not to allow Thaksin, 59, or his wife Potjaman, 51, both thought currently to be in China, to board flights to Britain after a Thai court last month sentenced him to two years in prison for corruption. According to media reports in Thailand, Thaksin was considering sanctuaries such as China, the Philippines and the Bahamas last night.

A Whitehall source confirmed yesterday that the Home Office had revoked the couple’s visas under rules banning entry to those convicted of offences that can carry a jail sentence under British law. The Thai Government confirmed that it had been informed – in fact, the only person who appeared not to have been notified was Thaksin himself. “I spoke with Thaksin’s secretary and he said that Thaksin still has not been notified by the British Government,” said Phongthep Thepkanjana, a spokesman for Thaksin.

Unconfirmed reports said that the Thaksins had been granted honorary citizenship by the Bahamas. The couple are said to be in China, where they are building a £5.5 million home.

Pracha Prosobdee, a member of the ruling pro-Thaksin People Power Party (PPP), told a Thai newspaper: “We don’t have to be concerned about Thaksin and his family. There are the Bahamas and several countries in Africa and around the world that will gladly welcome high-quality people like him.” The tycoon first fled to London after the military coup in 2006 and bought a £3 million penthouse flat in Kensington, West London, and a £4.5 million mansion in Weybridge, Surrey. He bought Manchester City in July last year and sold it in September to Sheikh Mansour bin Zayed al-Nahyan of the Abu Dhabi United Group for Development and Investment for £210 million. He retained the post of honorary president but the club’s board is believed to be considering stripping him of the title. There is also concern over his link to a 10 per cent holding of the club’s shares through associates.

Last month Thailand’s constitutional court convicted him in absentia of abusing his power as Prime Minister over his wife’s purchase in 2003 of a 772 million baht (£14 million) plot of land in central Bangkok. The court found that a government agency sold the property at Thaksin’s behest for a third of its market value.

The visa revocation puts an end to attempts by Thailand to extradite Thaksin from London. Indeed, it may have been a desire to avoid a complicated and politically charged extradition process that motivated the Home Office to take the procedurally much simpler step of revoking the visas – making Thaksin, at a stroke, someone else’s problem.

Thai prosecutors complained that the British decision would complicate the job of extraditing Thaksin. It will now be harder to keep track of him, and he could end up in a country with which Thailand does not have an extradition treaty.

Thaksin was the most popular, but also the most divisive, Prime Minister that Thailand has known. His village health-care schemes and programme of cheap loans won him the love of rural voters who had been ignored by the metropolitan political class, and carried him to three successive election victories. But many middle class urban Thais abhorred him, accusing him of using the vast wealth he acquired as a businessman to corrupt the country’s institutions and make it impossible to unseat him and his supporters.

Supporters of Thaksin still control Thailand’s Government, and this month more than 50,000 people attended a rally in Bangkok to hear him speak by telephone. Yesterday the Prime Minister Somchai Wongsawat – Thaksin’s brother-in-law – said: “The revoking of the visas is the decision by the Government of Great Britain. We cannot criticise.”

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