News

About 400,000 garment and footwear makers will get a US$5 a month raise starting in January, and the factories that employ them will receive a two-year tax holiday, Prime Minister Hun Sen said yesterday. The $5 raise, from $61 to $66 a month, is intended to ...

The government was urged yesterday not to start sending domestic helpers to Malaysia again until it had a Memorandum of Understand with Kuala Lumpur guaranteeing protection of Cambodian migrant workers there. Ya Navuth, executive director of Coordination of Action Research on Aids and Mobility, also said ...

As the harvest of the wet season rice crop gets under way in many parts of the country, rice prices have started to increase, rice millers said yesterday. They said prices were now up about 15 percent compared to the same time last year, but ...

Prime Minister Hun Sen Mnounced yesterday that the government would create a one-stop service office for rice millers and exporters in order to reduce red tape and help the country reach its lofty export target of a million tons of milled rice by 2015. “We cannot ...

An 18-year-old Battambang woman who was working as a maid in Malaysia has become the latest in a string of domestic workers to die there this year, and the second to die in less than a month, SRP lawmaker Mu Sochua and the woman’s family ...

Government Palace, the imposing gray headquarters of the Cambodia Development Council next to Wat Phnom, should be buzzing this morning with the country’s top foreign diplomats and government officials discussing aid and reform. Instead, with the government’s decision to indefinitely postpone this year’s Cambodian Development Cooperation ...

A Japan energy company yesterday said it planned to build a rice mill fuelled by rice husks in Cambodia’s Takeo province. New Energy and Industrial Technology Development Organization yesterday signed a memorandum of understanding with the Kingdom’s Ministry of Industry, Mines and Energy (MIME) confirming cooperation ...

Two Cambodian banks have set aside US$200 million for loans to bolster the Kingdom’s struggling rice-milling industry, officials said yesterday. The move comes as the Cambodian government has called on the private sector to boost loans to rice millers during the harvest season as a way ...

The father of an 18-year-old girl who he said had been missing in Malaysia for more than a year, has filed a complaint with the rights group Adhoc against the labour firm that sent her there. Minh Ngi, 46, from Preah Vihear province, said yesterday the ...

The government failed to evaluate social and environmental impacts before granting economic land concessions to private companies, while officials and company staff used the courts to intimidate residents during land disputes, representatives of NGOs said at a conference in the capital yesterday. “The courts are not ...

A group of about 30 families in Koh Kong province’s Botum Sakor district said yesterday that they would continue to resist attempts to evict them in order to make way for a Chinese mega-tourism project, unless authorities improve their compensation offer. Villager Prum Sann said the ...

Following their fourth protest in as many weeks, residents of Phnom Penh’s displaced Borei Keila community yesterday reached a tentative housing agreement with development firm Phanimex, company and village representatives said yesterday. The meeting came after a protest yesterday morning in which more than 100 residents ...

Forestry Administration officials yesterday said they confiscated 1.34 cubic meters of smuggled rosewood from RCAF soldiers even after a lieutenant colonel held a pistol to one of their heads in the hope of scaring them off. Tea Kimsoth, head of the administration’s Siem Reap cantonment, said ...

Devastating floods as well as the economic slowdown in Europe and the US have prompted the World Bank to lower its outlook for Cambodia’s economic growth this year to 6 percent, down from a previous projection of 6.8 percent. In its economic update for the region ...

Cambodia’s garment and textile exports grew by more than 30 per cent year-on-year through October, according to Ministry of Commerce data. The exports increased by nearly US$880 million, reaching $3.47 billion, the data showed ...

A Chinese railway company may conduct a feasibility study on a 700-kilometre rail line in northern Cambodia, officials and local media reported yesterday. Officials from Nanning Survey and Design Institute Co Ltd, a subsidiary of China Railway Siyuan Group, discussed the study with the Ministry of ...

Another family has been asked to come and retrieve the remains of their dead daughter from a recruitment firm after she passed away in Malaysia, and they claim the agency that sent her threatened not to return her ashes if the family pursued legal action. The ...

A director and a former director of recruitment company Champa Manpower Group were sentenced in absentia to seven years’ jail yesterday for detaining three female workers in Phnom Penh last year. Chaing Sinath, presiding judge at the Phnom Penh Municipal Court, ordered that company director Sos ...

Phnom Penh municipal officials yesterday agreed to mark out a plot of land promised to Boeng Kak lake villagers by Prime Minister Hun Sen in order to put a stop to a string of recent protests ...

A group of international NGOs urged the Asian Development Bank (ADB) yesterday to press the government on abandoning its plans for a law regulating the country’s non-governmental groups despite a recent pledge to drop its most controversial provision. “The ADB should convince the Cambodian authorities to ...

A group of about 100 villagers who have been embroiled in a long-running land dispute in Kandal province’s Kandal Stung and Takhmau districts gathered in Phnom Penh yesterday to file a petition with foreign donors seeking help in resolving the dispute. The villagers – part of ...

Small and medium-sized enterprises, which are expected to play a key role in the Kingdom’s emergent stock market, are far from ready to list, insiders say. Most important, many SMEs lack the standardisations and controls required of publicly traded companies by the Securities and Exchange Commission ...

Nearly 10 million Cambodians and 2.6 billion people worldwide do not have access to a toilet on a daily basis, a World Toilet Organisation official said on Saturday. Sum Sokun, program manager for the WTO, gathered to celebrate World Toilet Day with villagers in the Ponhea ...

Although floodwaters are receding, an unknown number of villages in several provinces remain accessible only by boat, and the extent of the damage has yet to be fully assessed, according to aid workers and the latest “situation update” from the United Nations Disaster Management Team. “In ...