The rector versus the tycoon

The morning before the verdict was handed down at the Appeals Court on March 12, the mood among those working on the defence team for Heng Chheang and his wife Tep Kolap was almost optimistic. They, along with relatives of the couple and academics from Phnom Penh International University, were gathered in Tep Kolap’s office at the university, with most saying they had not been able to sleep the night before. The consensus was that the former PPIU rector had a 50:50 chance of being released, though they thought it was unlikely her husband would be released that day due to a “confession” he had made on January 1, 2011, taking responsibility for the apparent loss of about US$630,000 from one of Senator tycoon Kok An’s companies: Anco Brothers. “We find it impossible to imagine that the court would ignore bank statements that prove claims made against Tep Kolap and Heng Chheang were false,” Kong Bunthy, a law lecturer at the university, said. “How can they be accused of embezzling when more money flowed back into the [Anco] account than flowed out?” asked Hen Sam Ath, senior vice-rector at the university and a friend of Tep Kolap since their time as students in Bangkok when she was studying international relations on a scholarship from that country’s king. Kong Bunthy and Hen Sam Ath were referring to almost 10 years of financial transactions at Union Commercial Bank in which more than $100 million flowed back and forth between personal accounts, two of which were used by Anco Brothers, which distributes Evian water, British Tobacco products and Budweiser beer in Cambodia. The company did not have a corporate account. Instead, it used at least two accounts registered in the names of the company’s director, Kok An’s wife Sok Im, and her cousin, Heng Chheang, who began working for Kok An in the early ’90s by overseeing a cigarette warehouse in Phnom Penh. Heng Chheang described himself as the company’s treasurer, but Kok An’s lawyers referred to him as the company’s executive director. (The distinction is important because Heng Chheang has argued that as treasurer he was not in a decision-making process and that all transactions were approved by more senior executives.) …

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