News

Officials and securities firms yesterday showed little distress at the imminent retirement of Ek Sonn Chan, the man credited with straightening out and preparing the capital’s public water utility for its initial public offering in April. A letter from the Ministry of Industry, Mines and Energy ...

Cambodian villagers demonstrated on Friday against a controversial Lao hydropower dam that activists say is being built in defiance of an agreement to assess its potentially damaging impact on millions of people first. About 200 villagers whose livelihoods depend on the Mekong River urged a halt ...

Cambodian rice millers will increase their capital to purchase unmilled rice this season as bankers agreed to provide more loans, insiders said on Monday. Baitong will increase its capital to purchase up to 140,000 tonnes of fragrant unmilled rice, compared to last year’s 70,000 tonnes said ...

Prime Minister Hun Sen’s June order that land be cut from economic land concessions and returned to displaced villagers – a move that has alternately inspired gratitude and scepticism – now has a high-profile public face: one of his sons. Hun Manith, deputy chief of Hun ...

Manulife Financial Corp, Canada’s largest life insurer, has set up shop in Cambodia, hoping to tap into an emerging middle class in the southeast Asian country. The move is part of the Toronto-based company’s strategy of targeting profit growth in Asia as part of its plan ...

Manulife Financial Corp. (MFC), Canada’s largest insurer, has opened an office in Phnom Penh, Cambodia, its first in the Southeast Asian nation. Manulife has about 40 people in its Cambodian unit, the Toronto-based insurer said today in a statement. ...

Keo Kounila is Cambodian blogger who recently attend the Deutsche Welle Global Media Forum in Bonn, Germany. After meeting amid some 1,500 participants, she told VOA Khmer she had garnered new ideas to help develop Cambodia, including organizing seminars to help university students make better use ...

Forestry Administration officials have seized equipment valued at $1.5 million from a Banteay Meanchey province biofuel plantation, which is being investigated for fraud in the UK, company and forestry officials said yesterday. Sustainable Agro Energy’s assets were frozen in February and investigators at the U.K.’s ...

An appeals court Wednesday ordered the release of 13 women who were jailed for protesting being evicted from their homes without adequate compensation, in a case that had critics had highlighted as an example of injustice. The women cheered in the courtroom, their supporters applauded and ...

Decked out in camouflage military uniforms shipped fresh from Indonesia and wearing soldier’s caps emblazoned with the Ministry of Land Management’s logo, 1,100 students who have volunteered to measure land in an ambitious titling project attended a speech by Prime Minister Hun Sen yesterday. The uniformed ...

While the financial problems of Europe created a worried mood for the Group of 20 leaders at Los Cabos, Mexico, last week, a bright spot was Prime Minister Hun Sen’s representation of Cambodia’s ASEAN chairmanship, according to lawyer and government adviser Sok Siphana, who accompanied ...

Officials and experts yesterday questioned the likelihood of Cambodia and Vietnam’s proposal to hike bilateral trade by more than US$2.5 billion by 2015. The pledge of $5 billion in total trade, made by Cambodian Prime Minister Hun Sen and his Vietnamese counterpart, Nguyen Tan Dung, last ...

Prime Minister Hun Sen has fiercely defended his right to grant economic land concessions after issuing a moratorium on the leases in May, pointing to a loophole in the ban which exempts ELCs that already had in principle approval. Hun Sen attacked the Post and the ...

An alleged accomplice of “secessionist” leader Bun Ratha has confessed and been granted immunity as a witness, Prime Minister Hun Sen said yesterday, a deal he left on the table for any of the four remaining fugitives who are willing to co-operate, including Ratha. Warrants for ...

Thirteen Boeung Kak lake women who were sentenced to two and a half years in jail on Thursday following a lawyer-free trial that lasted just three hours will appeal their convictions, their distraught supporters said yesterday. As the reality of the trial, which rights groups have ...

U.S. fast-food chain Burger King said yesterday that no one holds the rights to open a branch of its restaurant in Cambodia, despite job advertisements appearing online featuring the company’s logo. . “Currently, we do not have any established franchisee in Cambodia,” Tan Ching Ee, marketing ...

Property prices in both in Phnom Penh and the surrounding suburbs have increased around 10 percent in the first half of 2012 as more foreign investors buy up new condominiums and banks provide more housing loans, say real estate experts. After years of flat prices due to weak demand in the wake of ...

Prime Minister Hun Sen yesterday implicated Mam Sonando, owner of the independent Beehive Radio station, in an alleged secessionist movement in Kratie province and announced the government’s intentions to arrest him. “Now, we compete with the ringleader of the Democrats Association, which created the state ...

A large majority of Cambodian small and medium-sized enterprises are operating without conducting good market research, say experts in the field, and relying too heavily on informal information and networks. As a result, they are growing slowly and in some cases, falling behind their competitors. Market research involves gathering information about markets and customers. Laurent Notin, ...

An official at the Sihanoukville Autonomous Port yesterday said the state-owned firm would miss its target of registering with the Securities and Exchange Commission of Cambodia (SECC) next month, a key step before listing on the country’s nascent bourse. Ho Hongsik, director of SBI Royal ...

At the M&V International Manufacturing Factory in Kompong Chhnang province last week, 5,000 workers filed through the gates, sat behind their neat rows of sewing machines and refused to work. A year earlier, hundreds of female workers had fainted at the factory after complaining of ...

The Islamic Republic of Iran on Wednesday invited Cambodian Prime Minister Hun Sen to attend the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM) Conference to be held in Tehran in late September, according to officials. Meanwhile, [Hun Sen], on the bilateral ties, asked Iran to expand relations and cooperation with ...

Cambodia’s government has ignored a suspension on new land concessions to private companies, announcements in an official publication showed, despite ordering a freeze after growing discontent over forced evictions and illegal logging. Prime Minister Hun Sen signed off on 12 sub-decrees on June 7 and 12 ...

Prime Minister Hun Sen has denied media reports he violated his own ban on economic land concessions, saying he only signed contracts that had been agreed upon prior to his decision. Local media have reported in recent days Hun Sen’s signature on multiple land concessions ...