ACLEDA Bank, Cambodia’ leading commercial bank, held a ground-breaking ceremony yesterday for its new 20-storey headquarters, which will be located directly behind its present building. The new headquarters will cover 43,000 square metres, with parking for 700 cars. Construction is scheduled for completion in two years. ...

Grounded Tonlesap Airlines has changed its name to Wat Phnom Airlines, an official with Cambodia’s State Secretariat of Civil Aviation said yesterday, about two months after the local chartered carrier suspended all of its flights. Wat Phnom Airlines is now in the process of applying for ...

Laos plans to establish consulate general in Siem Reap province to boost bilateral cooperation with Cambodia through tourism and trade, a senior official from Ministry of Foreign Affairs said on Wednesday. “Tourism from Laos is increasing annually, so Lao PDR will establish a general consulate based ...

About half the Koh Kong province villagers relocated to make way for a Union Development Group resort project have abandoned the new homes provided for them, citing poor conditions and an inconvenient location, a village representative said yesterday. More than 1,000 families living in the province’s ...

In its continuing campaign to clean up the grade 12 national exam, the Anti-Corruption Unit (ACU) has warned that anyone caught leaking copies of the test or selling answers could find themselves imprisoned. Punishments for misbehaving exam observers are spelled out in an ACU statement released ...

An existing moratorium on economic land concessions should be no impediment to pouring more cash into the Kingdom’s booming, and highly criticised, rubber trade, industry executives in the capital heard yesterday, as many current ELCs can simply be recycled to a new crop of investors. Ly ...

Following an order from Prime Minister Hun Sen last month to crack down on intimidation and harassment by tax collectors in local markets, City Hall pledged to take legal action yesterday. Phnom Penh governor Pa Socheatvong told municipal and provincial governors that fines for rogue collectors ...

Prince Norodom Ranariddh is officially back in the political game. The Ministry of Interior has approved the former prime minister’s Community of Royalist People’s Party (CRPP), Ranariddh’s cabinet chief, Noranarith Anandayath, said yesterday. ...

The Ministry of Education has vowed to shift its focus from the quantity of the country’s universities to their quality by instituting a moratorium on the approval of new institutions, officials said yesterday. Education Minister Hang Chuon Naron said that with more than 100 universities already ...

The minister of labour has sent a stern warning to garment factories to take measures to end mass faintings or face the consequences. Speaking after a safety workshop yesterday, Ith Sam Heng said the government will get tougher on factories, fining those that didn’t provide safe ...

Despite Cambodia’s unofficial freeze on inter-country adoptions, the Ministry of Social Affairs recently urged partner countries to reforge, in principle, their adoption partnerships with the Kingdom. In a statement issued on Monday, the ministry opened the application process for international adoption agencies, as only adoption agencies ...

Political analyst Kem Ley plans to create a diverse set of independent political parties in the new year, tackling what he says is an autocratic “disease” infecting both the ruling party and the opposition. Using his newly founded “social network” Khmer for Khmer as a springboard, ...

As part of a new safety initiative, the Ministry of Mines and Energy will require all petrol station owners to present a certificate acknowledging that their businesses follow risk-prevention protocols. The directive came in response to a series of petrol fires and explosions that damaged property ...

The Environment Ministry in cooperation with the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) yesterday launched a $5 million, five-year plan to mitigate the effects of climate change on rural communities in four Cambodian provinces. ...

A new collective of transportation workers unions was announced on Sunday by the Cambodia Labour Confederation, Cambodia’s largest association of independent unions.The Cambodian Transport Workers Federation (CTWF) is composed of seven transportation workers unions and currently represents about 2,000 workers, according to Ath Thorn, president ...

More than 600 cadets will be recruited to become military officers, the Ministry of Defence announced yesterday.Recruits for the 2015-2016 class will be selected from candidates of both sexes, aged 18-25, in good health and with clean criminal records. ...

Two new witnesses have been summonsed in the case against former Bavet town governor Chhouk Bandith, as the victims’ lawyer tries to prove he intentionally shot three female protesters outside a shoe factory in February. Nouth Bopinnaroath, Svay Rieng provincial co-ordinator for the rights group Licadho, ...

The Association of Cambodian Recruitment Agencies will consider kicking its most notorious member, T&P Co Ltd, out of the association if the company is found to have falsified documents to conceal the age of a 15-year-old girl rescued from its training centre last week. ACRA ...

At 9 a.m. yesterday, more than 200 soldiers, police and military police officers were gathered outside a large mansion on Street 55 in Phnom Penh’s Daun Penh district. All were waiting for their promised “ang pao” – red envelopes containing cash usually handed out during ...

Cambodia’s ASEAN economic minister said the official launch of the negotiations for the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RCEP) will lead to potentially forming the biggest single market in the region and is much bigger than the traditional markets of the US and the EU. An economist ...