Government

Cambodia is considered “the most promising country” in the ASEAN community where Thai business entrepreneurs could set up trade and investment projects, according to a noted Thai academic and economist. Roongrote Benjamasuthin, director of the University of Thai Chamber of Commerce’s ASEAN Business & Economic Center, ...

The government has slashed about 250,000 hectares of land from 79 economic land concessions (ELCs), forest concessions and wildlife protection concessions and will return it, replete with land titles, to “poor people”, January’s Royal Book says. The publication, issued on January 17 and obtained yesterday, says ...

Pursat Provincial Court yesterday sentenced a military official, Poung Puthearith, to two years in jail – suspended to six months – on charges of threatening and obstructing the works of a forestry official, a court official said. Puthearith was arrested by the Anti-Corruption Unit ...

Finance Minister Keat Chhon an­nounced a new plan on Thursday to cut down on rampant state corruption by dispersing three-quarters of non-tax revenue to ministries and their employees as financial “rewards.” With Anti-Corruption Unit chief Om Yentieng by his side, Mr. Chhon laid out the bare ...

Prime Minister Hun Sen has urged public institutions to provide clear terms of reference for the services they provide, as part of an effort to attract investment in the Kingdom. Institutions that did not implement this policy would be punished under the law, he said. ...

The government has publicly issued lists showing the costs of fees that businesses must pay to authorities for various services, in an effort to help companies avoid making informal payments made illegal by the anticorruption law. The lists were drafted during the past year after Cambodia ...

The Anti-Corruption Unit (ACU) has arrested two employees of a local company linked to a British biofuel firm currently under investigation by the U.K.’s Serious Fraud Office (SFO), an official said Friday. ACU President Om Yentieng said that International Green Energy (IGE) director Oum Sam­nang, and ...

Customs and Excise Department officials are complaining that a promised salary bonus meant to serve as an incentive to avoid corruption has yet to be doled out, even though the program began last June. The initiative, managed by the Ministry of Economics and Finance, was supposed ...

The government’s Human Rights Committee has visited villagers in a long-running land dispute in Battambang province to find out whether members of their community have been unfairly imprisoned in recent years for land encroachment, local authorities and villagers said yesterday. Officials from committee, which is headed ...

The government of Cambodia has collected 740 million U.S. dollars of tax in 2012, a 25 percent rise year-on-year, the General Department of Taxation said Wednesday. The revenues have been collected from tax on profit, withholding tax, tax on salary, VAT (Value Added Tax), special tax ...

The US Congress has averted the “fiscal cliff” by passing a number of budget agreements, and Cambodian politicians and observers say the experience is a good example of compromise between two sides. Cheam Yiep, a lawmaker for the ruling Cambodian People’s Party and head of ...

Cambodia will spend about 21 million U.S. dollars to cover for the [sic] proceedings of the general elections on July 28, a senior official at the National Election Committee (NEC) said Friday. “The budget for the forthcoming elections is about 21 million U.S. dollars, up from ...

BANGKOK- First bus services between the two Kingdoms of Cambodia and Thailand had their debut on December 29, said the Transport Co., a Thai state enterprise under the Transport Ministry. The service includes the Bangkok-Siem Reap route, a 424-kilometre trip that takes about seven hours. ...

KUALA LUMPUR (Dec 18) : Petronas Chemical Group Bhd (PetChem) said that its top and bottom line growth was going to be in “healthy mode” next year, with prices of its chemical products seen to be firming up. Speaking at a media briefing on Tuesday, its ...

The court system is still “chronically underfunded” and laws on its management are almost 20 years overdue, the U.N. human rights envoy Surya Subedi said yesterday. One year ago, during his sixth mission to Cambodia, Mr. Subedi described reform in the courts as moving at a ...

The European Union’s ambassador to Cambodia yesterday urged the government to heed the advice of the U.N.’s visiting human rights envoy, who has come under increasing rebuke from officials for his unflattering reports. Addressing a crowd of about 3,000, mostly garment factory workers, at Phnom Penh’s ...

The Cambodian government collected $683 million in taxes over the first 11 months of this year, according to data from the General Department of Taxation released last week. An economist said the increase in domestic tax revenue emphasised that Cambodia still has room for improvement in ...

Prime Minister Hun Sen yesterday said that Cambodia’s budget for next year was balanced, claiming that a planned increase in public spending will be made up for by a rise in government revenue. Despite concerns from the opposition that foreign borrowing should be reduced, the National ...

U.N. human rights envoy Surya Subedi, who arrived in Cambodia Sunday on a five-day mission, spent yesterday, International Human Rights Day, in Kompong Chhnang province with about 300 villagers from a community embroiled in a long-running land dispute with the wife of a government minister. James ...

The government is beset with high-level corruption, a lack of transparency in public procurements, poor auditing practices and political interference in the country’s main anti-corruption body, a report produced by the Asian Development Bank (ADB) sent to the media yesterday states. In a 66-page report that ...

Cambodian Commerce Minister Cham Prasidh sees great potential for US companies that want to invest in agriculture, where he says they can do legitimate business relatively free from the graft as Cambodia makes anti-corruption headway. Cham Prasidh was in Washington last week, where he and other ...

The government collected more than $1.4 billion in revenues during the first nine months of the year, a 27 percent increase over the same period last year, figures released Thursday by the Ministry of Economy and Finance show. According to the Table of Government Financial Operations ...

Discussions on restarting World Bank loans to Cambodia will not commence until after the 2013 elections, a bank official said yesterday. After a landmark freeze on loans announced in December 2010, a response to the forced evictions by the government of residents of the Boeung Kak ...

A new report on land grabbing around the world highlights Cambodia as a prime example of the ill effect of the growing global appetite for farmland by industrial scale operations. Released Wednesday in Stockholm by three Swedish NGOs, The Race for Land offers Cambodia as one ...