News

PHNOM PENH, Cambodia — Throughout the drama this spring revolving around the dismissal of the ambitious Chinese official Bo Xilai and the investigation of his wife as a murder suspect, the most mysterious figure has been a French architect named Patrick Henri Devillers. When Mr. Bo ...

Authorities in Kratie province have denied entry to journalists and rights workers to the site of violent land clashes that led to the death of a teenage girl on Wednesday. Rights workers say they fear for the safety of villagers in Broma village, but police say ...

Security forces have sealed off a village in eastern Cambodia and denied entry to human rights workers after the fatal shooting of a teenager in the latest violent eviction aimed at clearing land for development. Soldiers said they needed to secure the area around Proma village, ...

The government needs to act – and act now – to review all economic land concessions, which un­derscore the Kingdom’s dark disease of violent land disputes, rights groups said yesterday. Ten days after Prime Minister Hun Sen signed a regulation for an immediate and indefinite moratorium ...

Rapidly increasing logistics costs and low regional rice prices would hinder Cambodia’s rice-export target this year, with one expert saying that milled-rice exports could fall to half of last year’s shipments. The cost of shipping rice to Europe climbed by more than 50 per cent between ...

An increase in the amount of cigarettes smuggled into Cambodia has forced the country’s largest cigarette manufacturer to scale down production by nearly half, leaving local tobacco farmers with little choice than to sell their crop at a reduced price to Vietnam. According to Tola Ponlu, ...

Government security forces shot dead a teenage girl in Kratie province yesterday morning in a coordinated operation to arrest protesters locked in a long-running land dispute with a rubber company accused of stealing their land. The provincial governor said the joint forces opened fire to defend ...

Rising oil prices fuelled a month-to-month inflationary increase of 5.4 per cent through February and March, according to data from the National Institute of Statistics. Factors such as sanctions on Iranian oil, as well as floods that depleted Cambodian crops last year accounted for the rise ...

The Cambodian Center for Study and Development in Agriculture (Cedac) said yesterday it would begin exporting organic rice to Europe in June for the first time as part of a one-year agreement with a German-based equitable trade organization. “We’re looking to break more into the international ...

A report by a U.K.-based charity has highlighted the low pay of Cambodian garment workers and called on the British government to intervene in disputes involving Southeast Asian factories supplying British retailers. Restricting Rights, a report published Tuesday by anti-poverty charity War on Want, looks at ...

Chinese, Korean and local investors have shown interest in Meoun Chey border crossing in Prey Veng province’s Komchay Mear district between Cambodia and Vietnam, provincial officials said yesterday. Komchay Mear district governor Prak Savann said the potential investors are looking for land in the area to ...

Two Cambodians were repatriated yesterday after being rescued from a fishing vessel at a port in Senegal on Friday, thanks to collaborative intervention by the International Organization for Migration and Senegalese authorities. Toy Koeun, 29, from Pursat province, and Som Pich, 20, from Kampot province, said ...

A conclusive settlement has been reached in the long-running dispute between a Thai seafood factory and its Cambodian employees, Cambodian ambassador to Thailand You Ay said yesterday. Rights groups and workers at the Phatthana Seafood factory in Thailand’s Songkhla province, which employs 1,050 Cambodians, have accused ...

Thai police investigating allegations of myriad labor violations at a seafood factory employing hundreds of Cambodian migrant workers have given the facility a clean bill of health. A report last week by a Cambodian NGO, the Community Legal Education Center (CLEC), based on interviews with workers ...

More than 20 union members and workers at a factory in Kandal province rallied around a union leader yesterday, fearing that he would be arrested after police called him in for questioning. Lor Sopheak, national secretary-general of the Khmer Workers Power Co-operation Union [KWPCU] and an ...

American packaging firm Crown Holdings Inc. announced Tuesday it would build a new can manufacturing plant in Sihanoukville that will become operational in the second half of 2013. Although it did not say how much the project was worth, the factory will produce 725 million 33 ...

Fugitive former ambassador to Brunei Nan Sy had been ordered to sell his two properties to pay back funds embezzled from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and International Co-operation, officials said yesterday. ...

A new US$3.5 million casino will open in Ratanakkiri province, according to a representative of Try Pheap Import Export Company. “We’ll have a similar kind of casino to what they have in Bavet,” Bee Chivoan Dara said. Try Pheap Mittapheap Casino Entertainment Resort is built on more ...

Villagers in Battambang province’s Phnom Proek district have called on the government to shut down several unlicensed gold mines being blamed for the deaths of cattle that drank from a pond contaminated by chemical runoff. “Three of the village’s cows died and two became sick after ...

Cambodia’s exports to Thailand jumped 55 per cent year on year in the first quarter of 2012 on what experts and officials said was a smoother political relationship between the countries, as well as an easing of Thai border regulations. The Kingdom shipped US$85.4 million in ...

Cambodia has moved up 27 places on a biennial World Bank list that ranks the ease of importing, exporting and transporting goods in different countries. Cambodia was ranked 101 out of the 155 countries included in the World Bank’s report titled Trade Logistics in the Global ...

The owner of the $240 million Gold Tower 42 project in Phnom Penh has entered into arbitration with the project’s builder, in a bid to get work started again after construction halted on the project in September 2010 due to poor unit sales and cost ...

The number of construction permits issued by the Ministry of Land Management in the first quarter of this year came close to par for the same period last year, declining just 10 issuances to 489, according to ministry data released yesterday. Despite the slight drop, capital generated from those ...

Kampong Thom provincial authorities blocked Sam Rainsy Party officials’ plans to hold a non-violent demonstration today to call attention to frequent power outages, according to an official letter from deputy governor Sorm Sophath obtained by the Post. ...