MONEY has been so kind to Asian stocks, the easy pickings have mostly disappeared.

Out of more than 90,000 publicly traded securities in Asia, excluding Japan, only 26 have the following three features: at least $200 million in market worth; a one-year track record of minimum 10 percent return on equity; and shares going cheap at two-thirds of their book value or less.One of them is Shin Satellite Pcl, a Thai company that has had the misfortune to get caught in the crossfire between the country’s ruling military junta and Temasek Holdings Pte, Singapore’s state-owned investment company.

Shin Satellite, which leases transponders to broadcast and telecommunications operators, is partly owned by Shin Corporation, whose sale last year to Temasek led to a public outcry. That was because the family of former Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra, who controlled the conglomerate, had paid no taxes on the proceeds.

A week ago, military leader Sondhi Boonyarataklin, who ousted Thaksin in a coup last September, issued what many in the media wrongly perceived to be a veiled threat of expropriation.

“I am thinking about whether we can take those assets back,” Sondhi told an army convention in Bangkok. “I want our national assets back, especially the satellites. That’s one of our treasures that I really want.”

Since the satellites are operated by Shin under a concession agreement with the government, the speculation was that the least expensive way for Sondhi to take them back would be to simply scrap the accord.

Indeed, the company had said on January 29 that it was co-operating with the Information and Communications Technology Ministry, which was reviewing the concession. Yet on what grounds can the company lose its right to be in business?

“There’s no excuse to expropriate the satellites or revoke Shin Satellite’s concession,” Nutt-Hathai Thanachaihirunsiri, an analyst at KGI Securities in Bangkok, said in a February 20 note to investors.

Control of the company remains in Thai hands. Unlike in the case of Shin, which Temasek owns almost entirely, Temasek’s stake in Shin Satellite is only about 41 percent.

It would have been doubly problematic to take such a drastic step without just cause: Sondhi has yet to prove his allegation - rejected by the Singapore government - that Singapore is using the satellites to spy on Thailand.

“We are a business; we are not a spy,” Shin Satellite spokeswoman Tanyapas Chuaycho said last month.

Cancelling Shin Satellite’s concession agreement would have been a further blow to the junta’s image, which has taken a beating ever since the botched plan in December to introduce capital controls and penalise foreign investors who wanted to take their money out of Thailand within a year of purchase.

The market correctly understood Sondhi’s remarks - and the attendant talk to allow more competitors to knock down Shin Satellite’s monopoly status - as a gambit to buy back the Singapore investment company’s interest at a discount.

Thai Communications Minister Sitthichai Pookaiyaudom confirmed yesterday that his government had had an “unofficial talk” with Temasek in this regard. Temasek declined to comment.

At 7.7 baht a share, Shin Satellite stock is trading 9 percent higher than immediately after Sondhi’s remarks.

Buying back the stake in the satellite operator, if that is what is needed to cool the anger of the Thai public, might be a sensible move, politically. On the other hand, if it becomes the first step in the unravelling, piece by piece, of the entire 130 billion baht ($3.9 billion) Shin Corp. deal, ties between Thailand and Singapore may be further strained.

Relations between the two Southeast Asian nations have become frayed to a point where Thailand’s loss to Singapore in a recent soccer game became fodder for conspiracy theories involving satellites and eavesdropping.

“The joke going around the Thai team is that their game plan might have been `discovered’ by their opponents prior to the match,” said the Nation, an English-language newspaper published in Bangkok.

Who will buy Shin Satellite if Temasek does agree to sell? Investors wouldn’t mind if it’s a Thai company or a group of buyers. They wouldn’t want the new owner to be the state.

Governments, military or civilian, tend to fill up boards of directors with bureaucrats. That’s the last thing Shin Satellite needs as it tries to make a success out of Ipstar, the $405 million orbiter it launched in August 2005.

Ipstar is designed to offer high-speed wireless Internet services in remote locations. For more people to use this expensive technology, China and India must subsidise rural customers for their equipment costs, Credit Suisse analysts Colin Mccallum and Chate Benchavitvilai said this month.

The analysts raised Shin Satellite to “outperform” from “neutral” after China International Trust & Investment Corp. and GE Capital Equity Investments Ltd. offered to take a similar company, Hong Kong-based Asia Satellite Telecommunications Holdings Ltd., private for HK$2.3 billion ($296 million).

Asia Satellite’s share price is 1.66 times book value, compared with 0.66 for Shin, which also offers phone services in the potentially fast-growing markets of Cambodia and Laos.

Someone’s going to make money out of this low-hanging Thai fruit. Sondhi doesn’t want it to be Temasek.

(Andy Mukherjee is a Bloomberg News columnist. The opinions expressed are his own.)