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May 25, 2026

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Phnom Penh's Perfect Storm Cuts the Forecast

Stephen Higgins of Mekong Strategic Capital had been expecting 4% GDP growth for this year, but he now thinks 2% will be closer to the mark. The revision results partly from a policy dialogue hosted by Sok Siphana, where Higgins and Baker Tilly Cambodia's Tan Khee Meng walked through the intersection of the border dispute, the forced shutdown of scam compounds, energy market volatility, and a property sector that’s sitting on about a decades worth of unsold inventory. The last point is doing particular damage to the banks. Loans in the sector are almost exclusively backed by property, and there’s no real secondary market to clear distressed assets. As a result, NPLs have risen past 9% of total loans, up from 5.4% during 2023. The panel's word for the current business climate was "paralysis." Under normal conditions, Higgins said, the country should be seeing 6 or 7% annual growth.

Read more: Cambodia Investment Review (panel recommendations), Cambodia Investment Review (microfinance NPLs)

Chen Zhi's Empire Gets a House Call

Cambodian police hit buildings connected to jailed Chinese tycoon Chen Zhi on Saturday, nabbing 104 people of six nationalities and taking 800 mobile phones, more than a hundred computers, and what investigators said is “the hardware of a fake investment scheme” that’s been targeting victims worldwide. The same morning, a flight left Techo International Airport carrying 165 Chinese nationals who were deported in coordination with the Chinese Embassy, on orders from Deputy Prime Minister Sar Sokha. The two moves are some of the most aggressive against Chen's network since his arrest earlier this year, and come alongside other actions including a crackdown in which the gambling regulator has revoked at least eight casino licenses since April. You may be surprise to read, however, that no criminal charges have been announced against any casino owner.

Read more: SCMP (raid inventory), Khmer Times (deportation logistics), CamboJA News (casino license revocations)

Garment Workers Pay for their Commute in Blood

Two traffic accidents on Saturday left 14 Cambodian garment factory workers dead and 79 more injured. In Kampong Chhnang, a cargo truck slammed into an open-top truck that was ferrying workers to their factory, killing nine and injuring 44. In a separate incident, a bus veered off the road and overturned in a Svay Rieng accident that killed five and injured 35. Flatbed trucks are still a standard mode of transport to work, and they usually lack seatbelts (and sometimes don’t even have seats). The sector employs up to a million people on salaries of $200 to $300 a month and was responsible for more than $15.5 billion of exports last year.

Strait of Hormuz Hits the Paddy

Ou Puy, a 74-year-old farmer in Battambang's Brakieb village, has cut back his dry-season rice planting because his cost of fertilizer has nearly doubled. Across his 60-hectare rented plot, at five to six sacks per hectare, fertilizer alone could cost him as much as $15,000 that he just can’t afford. He has converted half of his land to higher-value jasmine rice, which needs less fertilizer but won't harvest until November (which is going to cut his expected output in half). Cambodia imported about $420 million of fertilizer last year, $26 million more than the year before.

Hainan or Bust

International arrivals were down by almost half in Q1 to a hair north of one million visitors. Angkor Enterprise is reporting a 32 percent drop of foreign ticket sales. The government's answer is Tourism Minister Huot Hak, who spent the week of May 20-24 working through Hainan like a man with a quota to fill, signing MoUs with Haikou and Sanya, headlining a 150-person roadshow in Haikou, and promoting the four-month visa-free pilot for Chinese nationals that will run from June 15 to October 15. The target is to get half a million Chinese souls to show up this year, from last year’s 300,000 or so. EuroCham has put forward a proposal for 15-to-45-day visa-free access for European travelers; officials say they'll consider it after seeing how the China pilot goes.

Read more: Travel and Tour World (Sanya MoU), Travel and Tour World (EuroCham proposal), Khmer Times (decline causes), Travel and Tour World (Angkor revenue), Travel and Tour World (European arrivals baseline)

a small boat floating on top of a large body of water — Photo by Ryan Chan on Unsplash

36 Months, $36 Million and an Oknha on Bail

About 250 plaintiffs came from all over Cambodia to show up at a Phnom Penh court on Wednesday where they demanded repayment from former oknha Hy Kimhong's Piphup Deimeas Investment in a fraud case that’s nearing its third year. Lawyers for the victims want $26 million in compensation plus about $10 million in moral damages, as well as prison terms of two to five years for Kimhong and 18 associates. Many complainants, most of them from Kampot province, took out bank and microfinance loans to invest and now find themselves unable to keep up with repayments. Kimhong was arrested in August 2023, charged with fraud, and released on bail two months later. A verdict is expected within 30 days.

Kem Sokha's 60-Minute Furlough

Phnom Penh Municipal Court prosecutors let Kem Sokha out of house arrest for exactly an hour on May 20 to visit his ailing mother at a Borey compound. Interior Ministry officials went along for the ride. Co-defendant Pheng Heng posted 29 seconds of the reunion to Facebook, showing the former opposition leader stepping out of a police car to embrace his weakening mother. "Mom, you know that I have never persecuted anyone," he told her. Three weeks earlier, on April 30, the Court of Appeals upheld his 27-year sentence for conspiracy to commit crimes against humanity and added another five-year ban on his foreign travel.

Fake News! Says the Ministry

Cambodia's Defence Ministry dismissed Thai army claims of five more gunshots near Samraong town on May 22 as "false information and slander," the third denial in ten days. Earlier Thai reports alleged 11 shots near the O'Smach border checkpoint on May 13 and M79 grenades launched at Thai positions in Preah Vihear on May 14. Both of those claims were similarly rejected by Phnom Penh. Spokesperson Maly Socheata wants Bangkok to honor the fake-news cooperation clause in their December 27, 2025 joint ceasefire statement.

Read more: Phnom Penh Post ("incite confusion"), Cambodianess (ceasefire clause)

Beer and Bandwidth Pay the Bills

Cambodia's tax haul totaled $6.77 billion in 2025, beating targets on both branches of the collection apparatus. Customs ran 24.5% over budget and the General Department of Taxation doubled its domestic revenue target. Hun Manet gave out Letters of Appreciation to the top ten contributors, and the list is like a map of where formal-economy money moves: Viettel's Metfone at the top, Heineken second, Smart Axiata third, then Honda, ABA Bank, ACLEDA, Amret, KB Prasac, Cambrew, and JTI rounding out the list.

Read more: Cambodia Investment Review (top 10 taxpayers)

Phnom Penh Floats the Atom

Cambodia is openly weighing nuclear power, including small modular reactors, as an answer to an energy noose that keeps tightening. About two-thirds of total energy consumption depends on imports, and demand is climbing fast as the country continues to industrialize and urbanize. Installed capacity was reported at 5,044 MW in 2024, but coal, much of which is imported, still anchors generation.

One Lawyer, Ten Centuries of Missing Gods

A Harvard-trained expat from Connecticut who was running a small Phnom Penh firm read a 2012 op-ed about a DOJ case against Sotheby's over a looted 10th-century Khmer warrior statue, the Duryodhana, and decided to chase down the whole network. The five-foot sandstone figure had been set to headline Asia Week in New York before federal prosecutors intervened, saying that it was stolen property owed to the Cambodian people. Bradley Gordon knew nothing about the international artifact trade, but he'd taught English to Cambodian refugees in the late 1980s and had spent years awed by what the Khmer Rouge and other civil-war combatants had stripped from the temples. Read the whole tale - it’s a good one.

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