Government

The government had reclassified four economic land concessions as state property, reclaiming almost 20,000 hectares earlier handed to private firms to use for rubber plantations. ...

The Constitutional Council yesterday approved four sets of controversial amendments to Cambodia’s election laws, greenlighting changes that will pave the way for the main opposition party’s parliamentary seats to be redistributed in the event of its dissolution. ...

The central bank officially held a soft launch last Friday for its central shared switch mechanism, which connects account records of three of the Kingdom’s leading financial institutions, allowing them to operate ATM and point-of-sale (POS) terminals in tandem. ...

​Former Deputy Prime Minister and ex-Funcinpec official Lu Lay Sreng left the country for Thailand yesterday morning, the day after the royalist party and Prime Minister Hun Sen vowed to file lawsuits against him for disparaging the King and accusing the government of bribing Funcinpec. ...

Villagers and NGOs have accused local authorities, including forestry and environmental officials, of accepting bribes from illegal loggers in exchange for unfettered logging expeditions in Preah Vihear province’s Preah Roka protected forest. ...

China will fund a restoration project, slated to start in mid-2018, at an ancient royal palace complex within the Angkor Thom archaeological site in Siem Reap province, officials said yesterday. Long Kosal, spokesman for the Apsara Authority, said the palace is centuries old, and while ...

Prime Minister Hun Sen has allocated about $40 million per year from next year after the garment and footwear industry workers’ minimum wage increased to $170 per month. ...

Nearly 3,000 cases have been detected in a crackdown on fisheries and forest crime in the first nine months of this year.​ The results were in a Ministry of Agriculture and Fishery report published on Friday. ...

Prime Minister Hun Sen has promised CNRP commune officials they can keep their positions once their party is dissolved, so long as they disavow their former party and join the ruling CPP. ...

The Ministry of Environment is asking Japan for help mapping Cambodia’s forests using satellite imagery, one week after it vehemently refuted a report of such imagery showing accelerating forest loss in the Kingdom. ...

A Swedish diplomat yesterday warned that the potential dissolution of the Cambodia National Rescue Party could lead the Scandinavian country to rethink its relationship with the Kingdom, though she didn’t detail which actions were on the table. ...

The Senate has approved four amendments to the election laws related to the redistribution of the seats of the CNRP and local councilors if the main opposition party is dissolved. ...

A senior Ministry of Defence official yesterday claimed that housing rights group Sahmakum Teang Tnaut (STT) had received close to half a million dollars a year from the United States to foment “colour revolution” among the land dispute groups it worked with – a claim ...

Workers from the Pou Yuen Cambodia garment factory in Sen Sok district yesterday protested outside the premises after the management decided to offer them only three-month contract extensions. ...

In a speech to some 15,000 garment workers in Phnom Penh yesterday, Prime Minister Hun Sen returned to the topic of the United States’ war legacy in Cambodia, pledging to build a health centre for people purportedly suffering the after-effects of American chemical weapons in Svay ...

A new agriculture scholarship and research grant were launched yesterday with the aim of nurturing local expertise by providing students opportunities to pursue graduate degrees and conduct research. ...

With the fate of the CNRP still in the Supreme Court’s hands, the National Assembly yesterday paved the way for all of the main opposition party’s seats to be handed over to a smattering of smaller parties and, at the local level, to the ruling ...

Anticipating popular unrest surrounding the “treason” trial of opposition leader Kem Sokha, Minister of Interior Sar Kheng on Friday instructed provincial governors, police chiefs and officers to block people from travelling to the capital and to prevent any attempts at demonstrations. ...

The seemingly impending demise of Cambodia’s main opposition, and the snap draft laws put in motion to replace them in parliament, threatens to throw a handful of obscure parties into the political arena at the highest level. ...

“They talk about the multi-party problem, but I want to confirm that when the one party is dissolved, there will be five parties that will replace it. That means that it will go from two parties to six parties in the National Assembly,” Hun Sen ...

The Ministry of Environment released a statement late Tuesday night vehemently refuting University of Maryland data that showed a 30 percent spike in forest cover loss in 2016 over the year before, pointing instead to its own data showing only minimal deforestation over the same ...

Six month after announcing its intentions to invest in local silk production, a Japanese beauty company, in partnership with the Ministry of Agriculture, has released a new study on silkworms and their potential for the cosmetics industry, paving the way for more concrete action to ...

Prime Minister Hun Sen has ordered the Health Ministry to investigate the well-being of villagers living within the vicinity of an estimated 15 chemical bomb sites in Svay Rieng province’s Korki commune. ...

The General Department of Taxation collected $1.54 billion in tax revenue during the first nine months of the year, a 29 percent increase compared to the same period last year, it said in a press release yesterday. ...