News
River widening divides opinions
More than 30 families living near the Siem Reap River in Siem Reap’s Aranh Sakor village have sent a letter to Prime Minister Hun Sen and member of parliament Seang Nam, asking not to be evicted from their land because of the planned widening of ...
Thailand Asked to Air Two Cambodian TV Channels
Cambodians working in Thailand may soon feel a little more at home if the Thai government approves a proposal to start broadcasting two Cambodian television channels. TVK Director General Kem Gunawadh said that Information Minister Khieu Kanharith made the pitch at a meeting Wednesday with the ...
Journalists Trade Blows Over Cash From Wood Smugglers
Two journalists fought it out over cash being paid to them by a wood smuggler along National Road 7 in Kratie province’s Snuol district, landing one of them in the hospital with a head injury on Wednesday morning, a provincial police official said. Kong Sa Im, ...
Lone Strawberry Farmer To Expand His Business
Cambodia’s lone strawberry farmer has expanded his operations in Mondolkiri province in the past four months to encompass 3 hectares of strawberry fields, a provincial official said yesterday. Heng Sokhum, chief of Mondolkiri provincial agricultural department, said that the strawberry farm of Te Duong Dara ...
Tech businesses among Cambodia’s fastest-growing sectors
More than one-sixth of Cambodian businesses in 2011 were part of the Kingdom’s information and communications sector, a government census showed. Of the 182,439 new enterprises that sprang up in the country between June 2009 and March 2011, some 95,590 serviced the sector, according to the ...
Mixed results for protesters
Two protests by garment factory workers in Phnom Penh yesterday achieved very different outcomes. One strike will continue today, but the other ended when company management agreed to workers’ demands. Din Sam Ath, president of the Cambodian Federation of Labour Unions, said the company would comply ...
http://www.phnompenhpost.com/index.php/2012031555047/National-news/mixed-results-for-protesters.html
Royal Group Denies Toll’s Exit From Local Railway Project
Royal Group chairman Kith Meng yesterday denied reports that Australian company Toll Holdings would be pulling out of a $140 million joint venture project to rehabilitate Cambodia’s railway system. Toll Holdings, in a joint venture with Royal Group, signed a 30-year contract with the government in ...
Road Built on School Land Draws Protest
The water company that sparked four days of protest in Prey Veng province last week has once again drawn criticism, this time from teachers in Kratie province, who say the firm is building a road across their school’s land. Forty-nine teachers at Preah Kossamak High School ...
US Dollar Drops Below 4,000 Riel With Agricultural Harvest
An increase in agricultural trading has caused the value of the US dollar to dip below 4,000 riel in the past three consecutive days, as there is now a higher demand for the Cambodian riel, money exchangers and an official from the National Bank of ...
Soybean Prices Increase as Farmers Move Away From Crop
The decreasing amount of farmers harvesting soybeans last year has limited supply and raised prices at the markets roughly 42 percent to 4,000 riel per kg, or about $1, according to an agricultural official and farmers. Cheam Chan Sorphaon, director of the provincial agriculture department in ...
Maid ‘forced to take drugs’
A mother from Kampong Chhnang’s Rolea Ba’ier district filed a complaint with the rights group Adhoc yesterday, claiming her daughter, a maid in Malaysia, was being forced to take drugs and work without enough food. Im Meoun, 52, said her daughter Phon Sophea, 20, had been ...
http://www.phnompenhpost.com/index.php/2012031555049/National-news/maid-forced-to-take-drugs.html
Boeng Kak Families Protest for More Land Titles
About 100 residents of Phnom Penh’s Boeng Kak area protested in front of City Hall yesterday to demand that 58 more families be given titles to homes from which they are being evicted. In August, Prime Minister Hun Sen ordered that a 12.44-hectare section of the ...
Beeline books $500m charge after overestimating market
VimpelCom, the Netherlands-based parent company of Cambodian mobile operator Beeline, booked an impairment charge of US$527 million on its operations in Cambodia and Vietnam, according to a 2011 company report. The impairment, or revaluation of VimpelCom’s assets in the two Southeast Asian countries, highlighted the company’s ...
Ex-Cambodge Soir Journalists Launch News Website
Asia-Info, an online French news site with journalists based in Cambodia and elsewhere in Southeast Asia focusing on travel and regional issues, launched on Saturday. The website is the brainchild of Jerome Moriniere and Frederic Amat, two former editors of Cambodge Soir—the weekly French-language newspaper that ...
Alleged hotel ‘ransacking’ probed
Four former workers at the Angkor Villa Hotel and Resort appeared in the Appeal Court yesterday for questioning in relation to allegations that they ransacked the hotel during a strike last year. Korng Kimlean, union president of the Cambodian Tourism and Service Workers’ Federation and the ...
Top officials accused by election watchdog
More than 100 high-ranking Cambodian People’s Party and Royal Cambodian Armed Forces officials were named and shamed by a Cambodian election monitoring organisation yesterday at a workshop on misuse of state property. The Committee for Free and Fair Elections in Cambodia (Comfrel) distributed a detailed list ...
Local Forest Patrols Challenge Illegal Logging
Faced with the rapid loss of vast tracts of forest across Cambodia, local communities have begun to fight back, and a growing number of villagers are now organizing their own aggressive forest patrols in order to save the forests on which they have relied for ...
Consolidation on Horizon as Mobile Operators Enter Talks
Cambodia Advance Communications Ltd, operating under the brand qb, is in talks to either merge with or acquire Thai majority-owned Mfone, a senior government official said yesterday. The talks come amid recent speculation that operators in Cambodia’s oversaturated telecommunications market would have to consolidate in order ...
Court Upholds Anti-Corruption Unit Verdict
The Court of Appeal yesterday upheld a verdict sentencing the former Pursat Provincial Court prosecutor, Tob Chan Sereivuth, and two of his bodyguards to between 15 and 19 years in prison for bribery, illegal detention and extortion. Mr. Chan Sereivuth and bodyguards Ros Samnang and Chhit ...
National Census Identifies Half-Million Businesses
Cambodia has a total of 505,134 businesses supported by a workforce of 1,676,263, just 11.56 percent of the total population, according to a nationwide economic census released yesterday by the Ministry of Planning. Of the total number of people employed in the country, 1,026,084, or 61.2 ...
Hul Reaksmey and Philip Heijmans, P.1
Toll Group alleged to be leaving rail project
Australian logistics company Toll Group is allegedly pulling out of its 30-year concession to operate the Kingdom’s national railway, according to the Sydney Morning Herald. Citing “reliable sources”, an SMH report said Toll would leave its US$145 million Toll Royal Railway joint venture with Cambodia’s Royal ...
Battle Over CamKo City Now in Court
A South Korean government agency and Korean investors in CamKo City are locked in an ownership dispute at the Phnom Penh Municipal Court over the half-built residential development project in Russei Keo district, according to court documents obtained yesterday. Following the collapse of the Busan Savings ...
Rubber drives agro investment
The value of approved agricultural projects in 2011 increased by more than 30 per cent compared to the year before, according to data from the Council for the Development of Cambodia. The CDC approved 24 projects worth US$724.9 million last year, $674 million of which was ...
http://www.phnompenhpost.com/index.php/2012031455013/Business/rubber-drives-agro-investment.html
PPWSA stock offering slated to outperform
The Kingdom’s first initial public offering is fast approaching, and demand is expected to be robust. Book-building, the process during which bids for the IPO are taken and a price is set for shares, ended yesterday. The final offering price is expected before the subscription for ...