News

Sixty villagers from Kratie province staged a protest Friday in Phnom Penh’s Wat Botum Park, claiming that their land had been grabbed by three private companies, and appealed to Prime Minister Hun Sen to intervene in their case. Slesh Vansoekrya, a representative of the villages, said ...

Opposition party lawmaker Son Chhay has sent a letter to Deputy Prime Minister Sok An asking for the immediate suspension of a Vietnamese rubber plantation in the endangered Prey Long forest, accusing the firm of illegal deforestation. In the letter dated Wednesday, Mr Chhay also asked ...

A group of independent trade unions yesterday put forth a list of demands for changes to Cambodia’s first trade union law, which will be finalised by the government in the coming months. Unionists said the revisions were necessary, as the current draft law would undermine unions ...

Cambodia was ranked the ninth most at risk country of being exposed to natural disasters out of 173 countries surveyed in a new report by the UN University’s Institute for Environment and Human Security A UNDP report released in August supported the World Risk report’s findings ...

Mount Borkor Resort, the highest location in Cambodia, located near the coastline, will be inaugurated to welcome tourists from all destinations by the end of 2011, while the road climbing to the plateau’s peak and other tourism structures are about to be completed So far, the ...

The World Economic Forum’s (WEF) Global Competitiveness Index 2011-2012 ranked the Philippines 75th out of 142 economies, up from 85th out of 139 in the 2010-2011 report. Last year’s placing marked a reversal of 2009’s slide to 87th in a list of 133, from 71st ...

A mining company owned by the wife of RCAF Major General Nim Meng has been ordered by the government to pay fines and unpaid taxes after the firm was found to have illegally exported minerals from Cambodia, a report released yesterday by the Cambodian Investment ...

In an attempt to foster tourism on the Cambodia-Thai border, tourism officials this week visited the Cham Yeam border crossing in Koh Kong province. Warming relations with Thailand’s newly elected Prime Minister Yingluck Shinawatra are expected to improve cross-border tourism, which deteriorated after border clashes ...

A delegation of more than 30 Japanese businesspeople yesterday met with the Council for the Development of Cambodia to discuss investment opportunities in the Kingdom, after seeing what they said were vast improvements in domestic legal and tax regulations.  However, no definite decisions had yet ...

As prices continue to climb for freshwater lobster, farming of the crustacean in Cambodia is increasing. A kilogram of top-quality lobster sells for about US$30, up from $10 in 2005, according to lobster farmers. The government is seeking to foster new growth in Cambodia’s wild ...

The Phnom Penh Autonomous Port will transfer 75 per cent of its loading capacity to a new location at Kandal  to better handle the increased shipments passing through the capital, according to PPAP officials. The PPAP had received US$68 mill-ion in financing from the Chinese ...

Cambodian government officials have called on the US-ASEAN Business Council to help finalise implementation of the Kingdom’s first e-commerce law by year’s end. However, US-ASEAN Business Council councillor Frances Zwening said Google did not provide an “in-depth response” to the request for assistance, but added ...

During the past four years, Cambodia has seen drastic decreases in rare species of trees due to illegal logging, community research from the National Resource Protection Group indicates. If continued unabated, illegal logging threatens to wholly deplete Cambodia’s rare tree species, Chut Wutty said. Cambodia’s ...

The biggest names in the apparel industry, including Nike, Puma and Gap, would meet today with officials from the Ministry of Labour to discuss issues plaguing the Cambodian garment manufacturing industry, such as mass fainting and contractual disputes, labour activists said yesterday.  Dave Welsh, country ...

The Asian Development Bank said yesterday problems with a railway rehabilitation project – funded by the bank and AusAID – identified by a local NGO that was suspended by the government last month “may require further investigation or analysis”. In July, STT released a report ...

Road accidents claimed the lives of 1,816 people in 2010, a slight increase from the 1,717 killed in 2009, according to a report by the Cambodia Road Crash and Victim Information System. The total number of casualties from road accidents reached 18,287 in 2010, according ...

Ratanakkiri Provincial Court has summoned for questioning two rights group activists and a journalist over charges that they incited ethnic minority villagers in Lumphat district to violence in 2009, a court official said yesterday. The case against the three men – Adhoc provincial coordinator Pen ...

Kompong Thom provincial authorities have threatened to shut down two NGOs who have been providing free legal education to poor villagers in the province, accusing the groups of fomenting rural unrest against private investors. The NGOs, the Cambodian Center for Human Rights and the Natural ...

PHNOM PENH– Cambodia has received 8.8 billion U.S. dollars of investments from China from 1994 to July 2011, making China the leading country in the investments in the country, according to the reports from the Council for the Development of Cambodia (CDC) on Tuesday. The ...

The Ministry of Environment, the Ministry of Economy and Finance and United Nations Development Program (UNDP) collaborated to launch the 2011 Cambodia Human Development Report (CHDR) on August 30th which identifies climate change as a threat to human development gains and a source of increasing ...

In 2009, the Democrat-led government and the People’s Alliance for Democracy accused ousted former prime minister Thaksin Shinawatra of holding secret talks with Cambodia about exploiting oil and gas reserves in the Gulf of Thailand. The government threatened to revoke a memorandum of understanding on overlapping ...

A US-Asean Business Council delegation representing 11 fortune 500 companies concluded a two-day visit to Phnom Penh on Saturday, the council said in a statement. With Cambodia scheduled to take the chairmanship of Asean next year, members from US companies such as Chevron, GE, Abbot, ...

Cambodian outbound tourist departures rose 29 per cent year-on-year through July, with the bulk of the travellers going to Vietnam and Thailand, according to Ministry of Tourism statistics. Nearly 358,000 Cambodian tourists left the Kingdom in the first seven months of 2011, up from about ...

Eighty-five percent of U.S. companies in Southeast Asia plan to expand their business as the region will become more important in the next two years, the American Chamber of Commerce (AmCham) in Singapore said on Monday. “ASEAN continues to grow in importance for businesses in the ...