Chinese courts go after ‘notorious’ Cambodian conglomerate
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Chinese courts go after ‘notorious’ Cambodian conglomerate
Sahajak Boonthanakit, a Thai actor, will never forget the day he met Chen Zhi.
“He was very much – I don’t want to make this too dramatic – but very much like a godfather. He didn’t say much, I believe, except hello,” Sahajak recalled in an interview with RFA. “He seemed so powerful.”
Chen, a Chinese émigré, is indeed one of Cambodia’s best-connected tycoons. At the time of the 2018 meeting, he held a position equal to secretary of state as an adviser to Cambodia's Interior Ministry. He later became an adviser to then-Prime Minister Hun Sen and today holds the same position for Hun Sen’s successor and son, Prime Minister Hun Manet, according to royal decrees granting him the roles. His Prince Group conglomerate, which includes real estate, malls, banks and more across Cambodia, has raked in billions of dollars.
To Sahajak, though, the short, pale, goateed 30-year-old was just the enigmatic “money man” financing his latest film and hosting a meal at a Phnom Penh villa overlooking the Mekong river.
After luxury cars ferried the cast and crew to Chen’s home, Sahajak and his colleagues were led to a banquet hall. A large round table seating roughly 20 was laid with fine wines and delicacies, including shark-fin soup, which regularly sells for hundreds of dollars a bowl.
The film they were celebrating was Cambodia’s first attempt at a homegrown, Hollywood-style action flick. “The Prey” centers on Xin, a Chinese detective wrongly imprisoned in a remote Cambodian prison while working undercover to penetrate a violent gang engaged in unspecified but lucrative cybercrimes.
In backing Cambodia’s first big-budget action movie, Chen likely sought to establish himself as a tycoon of consequence.
But it was also a sort of Freudian slip of the checkbook. Chinese police have been investigating whether much of Chen’s wealth is drawn from illegal activities similar to those featured in the film, RFA has learned.
Chen Zhi was a backer of “The Prey,” Cambodia’s first attempt at producing its own Hollywood-style action movie.
Previously unreported Chinese criminal court judgments dating from 2020 to 2022 describe Chen’s Prince Group as a “notorious transnational online gambling criminal group” that has generated at least 5 billion yuan ($700 million) in illicit revenue. In May 2020, Beijing police established a special task force to investigate the Prince Group, court records show. Since then, there have been at least seven judgments from separate Chinese provincial courts convicting low-level Prince Group or Prince Group-linked employees of gambling and money laundering offenses.
The Prince Group itself and Chen so far do not appear to have become the subjects of a Chinese prosecution. A representative of Prince Group told RFA the company denies all the allegations, which it believes are the result of “impersonation by criminal elements.”
But to understand how Prince Group could draw such scrutiny, it is necessary to look at how Chen transformed from an unknown small business owner in his native China to a multibillionaire Cambodian citizen. Today, he boasts deep connections to Cambodia’s most powerful officials, which may well have protected him and other Prince Group executives — at least thus far.
This is the first of three stories examining how his Prince Group came to rise so rapidly, where the wealth came from and why Chinese law enforcement is looking at it so closely.
A princely rise to power
Chen was born on Dec. 16, 1987, in Fujian, which has for centuries been a hub of international trade. He was “a young business prodigy,” according to a biography posted on the website of DW Capital Holdings, the Singapore fund manager for his personal investments. Before the age of three, the biography claims, he was assisting with a family business in Shenzhen.
Chen’s first solo venture was apparently a small internet café in Fujian’s capital, Fuzhou, according to the website. In 2011, the bio noted, Chen sailed off into the “uncharted waters of real estate development in Cambodia.”
Chen’s business ventures came into sharper focus when he emigrated to Cambodia, where opportunities abound for the smart and well-connected.
His first firm was a Phnom Penh-based real estate company established the year he emigrated, according to bank records seen by RFA. In 2015, he founded Prince and it soon became an omnipresent brand on the streets of Cambodian cities.
Its real estate arm, the Prince Group, played a major role in the transformation of Sihanoukville from a quiet, if seedy, coastal resort to a Chinese casino boomtown. Having seen healthy returns on its thousands of Sihanoukville apartments and hotels, the Prince Group branched out into Phnom Penh condominiums, supermarkets and shopping malls. Within a year of its founding, they began offering banking services as a private microfinance institution. Three years later, the group received its commercial bank license.
As Chen’s businesses were growing, so too was his political capital.
2 Chen Zhi with Prime Minister Hun Sen after he was made “neak oknha” on July 20, 2020..jpg
Chen Zhi stands with Cambodia’s then-Prime Minister Hun Sen after Chen was made “neak oknha” on July 20, 2020. (Prince Holding Group)
On Feb. 16, 2014, Chen was naturalized as a Cambodian citizen. Naturalization – which requires an investment or government donation of about $250,000 – has become an increasingly popular route for wealthy foreigners, but few have made the personal inroads Chen has. Three years later, a royal decree declared him an adviser to the Interior Ministry. While unpaid, the role gave Chen status in Cambodia equivalent to that of an undersecretary of state.
Weeks after he received that title in 2017, Chen went into business with Sar Sokha. At the time, Sokha’s father was the powerful interior minister. In 2023, Sokha took over the position himself.
Chen and Sokha’s business – Jinbei (Cambodia) Investment Co. Ltd. – was dissolved in 2021, but it was the first of five companies with names featuring the word Jinbei established by Chen and other Prince executives, according to Cambodian business records. Together, the companies formed the Jinbei Group, whose website today boasts of $300 million invested in the Cambodian tourism sector.
Though they are separate entities, so close is the association between the companies that Chinese authorities have called Jinbei a “subsidiary” of Prince in court documents linking the two – a description Prince Group rejects.
Jinbei’s flagship is arguably a seven-story, 16,500 square meter Sihanoukville hotel and casino called the Jinbei, or Golden Shell, in Mandarin. It opened in 2017.
The resort, which boasts 43 gaming tables spread over a 2,000 square meter casino floor, and two V.I.P. saloons, was one of more than 100 casinos to open in Sihanoukville in the years leading up to 2019 – boom years that saw the city feted as a new Macau.
Speaking to Macau Business in 2019, Jinbei’s marketing manager, Victor Chong, attributed this flourishing to the Cambodian government’s “pro-business” stance, under which he said a casino license was issued to anyone willing to pay the $40,000 annual fee.
4 Jin Bei Casino.jpg
Jinbei Casino in the southern resort city of Sihanoukville, a magnet for Chinese gamblers visiting Cambodia, is seen in this undated photo. The casino is owned by Chen Zhi’s Jinbei Group. (Jin Bei Casino via Facebook)
Online, under the table
Though the laws are not always enforced, gambling is illegal for Cambodian citizens. It was Chinese nationals who made up most of the customers in Sihanoukville’s gambling dens as well as the lion’s share of proprietors.
Throughout the mid- and late-2010s, the gamblers were joined by an influx of Chinese gangsters looking to make quick money as loan sharks and extortionists. Bodies started washing up on the beach. Prostitution, illegal in Cambodia, flourished. Cybercriminals, who had long used Sihanoukville as a base, exploded in numbers. Many scammers targeted their compatriots back in China.
A sense of impunity began to reign with brazen gangland-style shootings in the streets and at restaurants. The intended victims were invariably Chinese, although Cambodians were occasionally caught in the crossfire.
The atmosphere drew China’s ire – but what may have troubled Beijing even more than the upswing in crimes against its nationals was the business model many of the casinos used. Most were hosting online gambling websites targeting customers in China, a clear violation of Chinese law.
Citing the rising crime, and likely bowing to pressure from Beijing, Prime Minister Hun Sen in 2019 outlawed online gambling operations. The consequences for Sihanoukville were nearly instantaneous. More than 200,000 Chinese workers and entrepreneurs abandoned the city, and thousands more were stuck without funds to get home.
The pandemic, China’s tight travel restrictions and its domestic economic struggles have only compounded the problems. Four years on and Sihanoukville’s skyline is a mess. At night, the blinking lights of the few remaining casinos glimmer through skeleton frames of half-finished skyscrapers, abandoned mid-construction.
5 General view of Sihanouokville.jpg
Commuters ride motorcycles along a street in Sihanoukville, Feb. 14, 2020. The city was once hailed as a new Macau, but a ban on online gambling and the COVID pandemic thwarted those dreams. (Tang Chhin Sothy/AFP)
But if there are losers here, the Prince Group isn’t one of them.
On a visit by RFA last year, Jinbei was still welcoming guests through its doors under a gigantic neon clam filled with lucky red dice. The multi-story Prince Mall, home to luxury goods stores, a videogame arcade and the Prince Supermarket, replete with lobster tanks, still beckoned the odd shopper. And at the heart of the mall’s ground floor a display stand for the group’s real estate arm showcased architects’ models for coastal and metro skyscraper apartments.
Even the Nonni II, Chen’s $24 million superyacht with an onboard home cinema and a disco bar, still could be seen docked at Sihanoukville’s ports from time to time.
What has allowed Prince to flourish while so many competitors saw their bubbles burst? The answer, according to court documents, is crime – on a massive scale.
High-tech money mules
According to court records seen by RFA, Chinese law enforcement began openly investigating the Prince Group in 2020 and, in particular, whether at least a third of its estimated $2 billion investment value came from illegal online gambling operations.
In May 2020, the Beijing Municipal Public Security Bureau created a group called the 5.27 Special Task Force. It was formed “to investigate and handle the case of the notorious transnational online gambling criminal group, known as the 'Prince Group,' in Cambodia,” according to a 2021 court judgment. Prince spokesman Gabriel Tan wrote in an email that this task force “is not related to any activities of Prince Holding Group.” In a follow-up note he said that any explicit mention of Prince within court documents is due to “ impersonation issues.”
The judgment describing the task force – from a district court in Henan – was one of several issued in different provinces against individuals linked to the Prince Group who are accused of money laundering and gambling.
Some of these individuals worked directly for the conglomerate, while others worked for Prince-linked companies, including Jinbei. One judgment describes Jinbei as “a subsidiary of the Cambodian Prince Group” that “has developed a series of gambling software and put it on the Chinese network platform.”
The Prince Group is also accused of continuing to run the type of online casinos Hun Sen banned in 2019, the court documents suggest.
Chinese citizens are allowed to move only $50,000 out of the country each year. Those capital controls would stymie the efforts of anyone trying to run illicit online casinos, such as the Prince Group has been accused of doing.
The solution Prince is alleged to have arrived at, the Chinese courts found, was employing a vast network of individuals to ferry bank cards between China and Cambodia. In all, the task force identified 458 people who had allegedly moved money in this way for the Prince Group.
One such money mule, Guo Caina, was 28 when in March 2018 she was recruited from her hometown of Luoyang to work for Prince in Cambodia, according to the court judgment against her. Her job would be a mix of customer service and bookkeeping, she had been told. Once in Cambodia, Guo handed over four Chinese bank cards in her name in exchange for 1,000 yuan ($140) per card. She quit the company after one day and went back to China but was rebuffed when she asked to have her bank cards returned. By the end of April 2018 more than 140 million yuan ($19.5 million) in gambling funds had passed through her bank accounts, according to the judgment.
Guo pled guilty to being part of a conspiracy to open a casino. She was given a suspended sentence and fined 30,000 yuan ($4,200).
7 Prince headquarters.jpg
Chinese law enforcement is openly investigating the Prince Group, whose headquarters in Phnom Penh are seen in this undated photo. (Google Street View)
Guo's case is far from unique. The court judgments reviewed by RFA are littered with mules like Guo being convicted for processing gambling funds, so the Chinese believe, on behalf of the Prince Group and Jinbei.
A July 2022 announcement by the Wancang County Court in Sichuan province estimated the Prince Group’s illicit profits from gambling activities since 2016 at more than 5 billion yuan ($700 million).
Multiple attempts to reach Chen were unsuccessful, but Prince spokesman Tan told RFA that the company “categorically denies any involvement with Jinbei Group and the alleged online gambling operations.”
“The references to ‘Cambodia Prince Group’ in the Chinese court documents are likely the result of impersonation by criminal elements,” Tan wrote in an email, adding that the company is “aware of multiple instances where our company's name has been misused by unauthorized entities, individuals and criminal elements.”
He similarly denied that the company had made use of Chinese employees’ bank cards to transfer online gambling funds, calling the allegations “completely unfounded with respect to the Prince Holding Group.” Jinbei could not be reached for comment.
Too connected to jail?
The prosecutions against Prince’s alleged money mules and betting agents are part of a wider war on gambling announced by the Chinese government in 2018. Beijing views online casinos as a national security threat, estimating gambling to be responsible for 1 trillion yuan ($145 billion) in capital flight each year.
In January 2023, a Macau court sentenced Alvin Chau, one of the island’s most successful gaming tycoons, to 18 years in prison on 162 charges, including heading an organized crime group, fraud and facilitating illegal online gambling.
In August, nine Chinese-born Cambodians were arrested in Singapore as part of the city state’s largest ever money-laundering investigation. Prosecutors accused them of operating illegal gambling websites targeting mainland China. Observers noted that the crackdown came one week after Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi visited Singapore, suggesting that Beijing might have been behind the charges – especially since several of the accused had outstanding arrest warrants in China.
The Prince Group may present a more complex challenge for Beijing. The Chinese police and judiciary appear intent on pursuing a case that Prince and its subsidiaries constitute a criminal group. But the names of Chen and other senior figures in the group – many of whom are his uncles and cousins – have been wholly absent from any Chinese court judgments.
Where they remain present, however, is in the political fabric of China’s most reliable regional ally.
When regional heads of state converged on Phnom Penh in November 2022 for the Association of Southeast Asian Nations’ biannual meeting, Hun Sen presented them with limited-edition luxury watches valued at $20,000 apiece. The face of each timepiece was emblazoned with the name of Chen’s Cambodian watchmaker, Prince Horology.
9 Hun Sen watch2.JPG
Cambodia's then-Prime Minister Hun Sen shows one of the 25 limited-edition watches that were given as gifts after the ASEAN summit in Phnom Penh, Nov. 13, 2022. The watches bear the name of Chen Zhi’s Cambodian watchmaker, Prince Horology. (Cindy Liu/Reuters)
Further afield, in his role as Hun Sen’s personal adviser – a position he has held since 2020 – Chen has accompanied him on a diplomatic mission to Cuba and doled out aid on the government’s behalf to neighboring Laos. He is also a personal adviser to former National Assembly President Heng Samrin and former Interior Minister Sar Kheng. Shortly after Hun Manet became Cambodia’s first new prime minister in four decades, Chen was named one of his 104 advisers. Those ranks give him a rank equal to minister.
Any attempt to charge Chen directly, then, would necessarily implicate Cambodia’s top law enforcement official and embarrass both the former and current prime ministers. Beijing spent decades of diplomatic effort and billions of dollars turning the Hun dynasty into one of China’s most ardent friends.
Sok Eysan, a spokesman for the ruling Cambodian People’s Party, said he could not comment and referred RFA to Cambodian government spokesman Pen Bona, who did not respond to multiple requests for comment.
Cambodian American academic Ear Sophal, who has authored books on Cambodia and China, told RFA it seems unlikely Chen will be heading to prison anytime soon.
“Clearly, someone’s untouchable,” Sophal said. “Is Chen Zhi trying to do something political in China? No. So it's okay, it's just money; his underlings will pay.”
https://www.rfa.org/english/news/cambod ... 24011.html
“He was very much – I don’t want to make this too dramatic – but very much like a godfather. He didn’t say much, I believe, except hello,” Sahajak recalled in an interview with RFA. “He seemed so powerful.”
Chen, a Chinese émigré, is indeed one of Cambodia’s best-connected tycoons. At the time of the 2018 meeting, he held a position equal to secretary of state as an adviser to Cambodia's Interior Ministry. He later became an adviser to then-Prime Minister Hun Sen and today holds the same position for Hun Sen’s successor and son, Prime Minister Hun Manet, according to royal decrees granting him the roles. His Prince Group conglomerate, which includes real estate, malls, banks and more across Cambodia, has raked in billions of dollars.
To Sahajak, though, the short, pale, goateed 30-year-old was just the enigmatic “money man” financing his latest film and hosting a meal at a Phnom Penh villa overlooking the Mekong river.
After luxury cars ferried the cast and crew to Chen’s home, Sahajak and his colleagues were led to a banquet hall. A large round table seating roughly 20 was laid with fine wines and delicacies, including shark-fin soup, which regularly sells for hundreds of dollars a bowl.
The film they were celebrating was Cambodia’s first attempt at a homegrown, Hollywood-style action flick. “The Prey” centers on Xin, a Chinese detective wrongly imprisoned in a remote Cambodian prison while working undercover to penetrate a violent gang engaged in unspecified but lucrative cybercrimes.
In backing Cambodia’s first big-budget action movie, Chen likely sought to establish himself as a tycoon of consequence.
But it was also a sort of Freudian slip of the checkbook. Chinese police have been investigating whether much of Chen’s wealth is drawn from illegal activities similar to those featured in the film, RFA has learned.
Chen Zhi was a backer of “The Prey,” Cambodia’s first attempt at producing its own Hollywood-style action movie.
Previously unreported Chinese criminal court judgments dating from 2020 to 2022 describe Chen’s Prince Group as a “notorious transnational online gambling criminal group” that has generated at least 5 billion yuan ($700 million) in illicit revenue. In May 2020, Beijing police established a special task force to investigate the Prince Group, court records show. Since then, there have been at least seven judgments from separate Chinese provincial courts convicting low-level Prince Group or Prince Group-linked employees of gambling and money laundering offenses.
The Prince Group itself and Chen so far do not appear to have become the subjects of a Chinese prosecution. A representative of Prince Group told RFA the company denies all the allegations, which it believes are the result of “impersonation by criminal elements.”
But to understand how Prince Group could draw such scrutiny, it is necessary to look at how Chen transformed from an unknown small business owner in his native China to a multibillionaire Cambodian citizen. Today, he boasts deep connections to Cambodia’s most powerful officials, which may well have protected him and other Prince Group executives — at least thus far.
This is the first of three stories examining how his Prince Group came to rise so rapidly, where the wealth came from and why Chinese law enforcement is looking at it so closely.
A princely rise to power
Chen was born on Dec. 16, 1987, in Fujian, which has for centuries been a hub of international trade. He was “a young business prodigy,” according to a biography posted on the website of DW Capital Holdings, the Singapore fund manager for his personal investments. Before the age of three, the biography claims, he was assisting with a family business in Shenzhen.
Chen’s first solo venture was apparently a small internet café in Fujian’s capital, Fuzhou, according to the website. In 2011, the bio noted, Chen sailed off into the “uncharted waters of real estate development in Cambodia.”
Chen’s business ventures came into sharper focus when he emigrated to Cambodia, where opportunities abound for the smart and well-connected.
His first firm was a Phnom Penh-based real estate company established the year he emigrated, according to bank records seen by RFA. In 2015, he founded Prince and it soon became an omnipresent brand on the streets of Cambodian cities.
Its real estate arm, the Prince Group, played a major role in the transformation of Sihanoukville from a quiet, if seedy, coastal resort to a Chinese casino boomtown. Having seen healthy returns on its thousands of Sihanoukville apartments and hotels, the Prince Group branched out into Phnom Penh condominiums, supermarkets and shopping malls. Within a year of its founding, they began offering banking services as a private microfinance institution. Three years later, the group received its commercial bank license.
As Chen’s businesses were growing, so too was his political capital.
2 Chen Zhi with Prime Minister Hun Sen after he was made “neak oknha” on July 20, 2020..jpg
Chen Zhi stands with Cambodia’s then-Prime Minister Hun Sen after Chen was made “neak oknha” on July 20, 2020. (Prince Holding Group)
On Feb. 16, 2014, Chen was naturalized as a Cambodian citizen. Naturalization – which requires an investment or government donation of about $250,000 – has become an increasingly popular route for wealthy foreigners, but few have made the personal inroads Chen has. Three years later, a royal decree declared him an adviser to the Interior Ministry. While unpaid, the role gave Chen status in Cambodia equivalent to that of an undersecretary of state.
Weeks after he received that title in 2017, Chen went into business with Sar Sokha. At the time, Sokha’s father was the powerful interior minister. In 2023, Sokha took over the position himself.
Chen and Sokha’s business – Jinbei (Cambodia) Investment Co. Ltd. – was dissolved in 2021, but it was the first of five companies with names featuring the word Jinbei established by Chen and other Prince executives, according to Cambodian business records. Together, the companies formed the Jinbei Group, whose website today boasts of $300 million invested in the Cambodian tourism sector.
Though they are separate entities, so close is the association between the companies that Chinese authorities have called Jinbei a “subsidiary” of Prince in court documents linking the two – a description Prince Group rejects.
Jinbei’s flagship is arguably a seven-story, 16,500 square meter Sihanoukville hotel and casino called the Jinbei, or Golden Shell, in Mandarin. It opened in 2017.
The resort, which boasts 43 gaming tables spread over a 2,000 square meter casino floor, and two V.I.P. saloons, was one of more than 100 casinos to open in Sihanoukville in the years leading up to 2019 – boom years that saw the city feted as a new Macau.
Speaking to Macau Business in 2019, Jinbei’s marketing manager, Victor Chong, attributed this flourishing to the Cambodian government’s “pro-business” stance, under which he said a casino license was issued to anyone willing to pay the $40,000 annual fee.
4 Jin Bei Casino.jpg
Jinbei Casino in the southern resort city of Sihanoukville, a magnet for Chinese gamblers visiting Cambodia, is seen in this undated photo. The casino is owned by Chen Zhi’s Jinbei Group. (Jin Bei Casino via Facebook)
Online, under the table
Though the laws are not always enforced, gambling is illegal for Cambodian citizens. It was Chinese nationals who made up most of the customers in Sihanoukville’s gambling dens as well as the lion’s share of proprietors.
Throughout the mid- and late-2010s, the gamblers were joined by an influx of Chinese gangsters looking to make quick money as loan sharks and extortionists. Bodies started washing up on the beach. Prostitution, illegal in Cambodia, flourished. Cybercriminals, who had long used Sihanoukville as a base, exploded in numbers. Many scammers targeted their compatriots back in China.
A sense of impunity began to reign with brazen gangland-style shootings in the streets and at restaurants. The intended victims were invariably Chinese, although Cambodians were occasionally caught in the crossfire.
The atmosphere drew China’s ire – but what may have troubled Beijing even more than the upswing in crimes against its nationals was the business model many of the casinos used. Most were hosting online gambling websites targeting customers in China, a clear violation of Chinese law.
Citing the rising crime, and likely bowing to pressure from Beijing, Prime Minister Hun Sen in 2019 outlawed online gambling operations. The consequences for Sihanoukville were nearly instantaneous. More than 200,000 Chinese workers and entrepreneurs abandoned the city, and thousands more were stuck without funds to get home.
The pandemic, China’s tight travel restrictions and its domestic economic struggles have only compounded the problems. Four years on and Sihanoukville’s skyline is a mess. At night, the blinking lights of the few remaining casinos glimmer through skeleton frames of half-finished skyscrapers, abandoned mid-construction.
5 General view of Sihanouokville.jpg
Commuters ride motorcycles along a street in Sihanoukville, Feb. 14, 2020. The city was once hailed as a new Macau, but a ban on online gambling and the COVID pandemic thwarted those dreams. (Tang Chhin Sothy/AFP)
But if there are losers here, the Prince Group isn’t one of them.
On a visit by RFA last year, Jinbei was still welcoming guests through its doors under a gigantic neon clam filled with lucky red dice. The multi-story Prince Mall, home to luxury goods stores, a videogame arcade and the Prince Supermarket, replete with lobster tanks, still beckoned the odd shopper. And at the heart of the mall’s ground floor a display stand for the group’s real estate arm showcased architects’ models for coastal and metro skyscraper apartments.
Even the Nonni II, Chen’s $24 million superyacht with an onboard home cinema and a disco bar, still could be seen docked at Sihanoukville’s ports from time to time.
What has allowed Prince to flourish while so many competitors saw their bubbles burst? The answer, according to court documents, is crime – on a massive scale.
High-tech money mules
According to court records seen by RFA, Chinese law enforcement began openly investigating the Prince Group in 2020 and, in particular, whether at least a third of its estimated $2 billion investment value came from illegal online gambling operations.
In May 2020, the Beijing Municipal Public Security Bureau created a group called the 5.27 Special Task Force. It was formed “to investigate and handle the case of the notorious transnational online gambling criminal group, known as the 'Prince Group,' in Cambodia,” according to a 2021 court judgment. Prince spokesman Gabriel Tan wrote in an email that this task force “is not related to any activities of Prince Holding Group.” In a follow-up note he said that any explicit mention of Prince within court documents is due to “ impersonation issues.”
The judgment describing the task force – from a district court in Henan – was one of several issued in different provinces against individuals linked to the Prince Group who are accused of money laundering and gambling.
Some of these individuals worked directly for the conglomerate, while others worked for Prince-linked companies, including Jinbei. One judgment describes Jinbei as “a subsidiary of the Cambodian Prince Group” that “has developed a series of gambling software and put it on the Chinese network platform.”
The Prince Group is also accused of continuing to run the type of online casinos Hun Sen banned in 2019, the court documents suggest.
Chinese citizens are allowed to move only $50,000 out of the country each year. Those capital controls would stymie the efforts of anyone trying to run illicit online casinos, such as the Prince Group has been accused of doing.
The solution Prince is alleged to have arrived at, the Chinese courts found, was employing a vast network of individuals to ferry bank cards between China and Cambodia. In all, the task force identified 458 people who had allegedly moved money in this way for the Prince Group.
One such money mule, Guo Caina, was 28 when in March 2018 she was recruited from her hometown of Luoyang to work for Prince in Cambodia, according to the court judgment against her. Her job would be a mix of customer service and bookkeeping, she had been told. Once in Cambodia, Guo handed over four Chinese bank cards in her name in exchange for 1,000 yuan ($140) per card. She quit the company after one day and went back to China but was rebuffed when she asked to have her bank cards returned. By the end of April 2018 more than 140 million yuan ($19.5 million) in gambling funds had passed through her bank accounts, according to the judgment.
Guo pled guilty to being part of a conspiracy to open a casino. She was given a suspended sentence and fined 30,000 yuan ($4,200).
7 Prince headquarters.jpg
Chinese law enforcement is openly investigating the Prince Group, whose headquarters in Phnom Penh are seen in this undated photo. (Google Street View)
Guo's case is far from unique. The court judgments reviewed by RFA are littered with mules like Guo being convicted for processing gambling funds, so the Chinese believe, on behalf of the Prince Group and Jinbei.
A July 2022 announcement by the Wancang County Court in Sichuan province estimated the Prince Group’s illicit profits from gambling activities since 2016 at more than 5 billion yuan ($700 million).
Multiple attempts to reach Chen were unsuccessful, but Prince spokesman Tan told RFA that the company “categorically denies any involvement with Jinbei Group and the alleged online gambling operations.”
“The references to ‘Cambodia Prince Group’ in the Chinese court documents are likely the result of impersonation by criminal elements,” Tan wrote in an email, adding that the company is “aware of multiple instances where our company's name has been misused by unauthorized entities, individuals and criminal elements.”
He similarly denied that the company had made use of Chinese employees’ bank cards to transfer online gambling funds, calling the allegations “completely unfounded with respect to the Prince Holding Group.” Jinbei could not be reached for comment.
Too connected to jail?
The prosecutions against Prince’s alleged money mules and betting agents are part of a wider war on gambling announced by the Chinese government in 2018. Beijing views online casinos as a national security threat, estimating gambling to be responsible for 1 trillion yuan ($145 billion) in capital flight each year.
In January 2023, a Macau court sentenced Alvin Chau, one of the island’s most successful gaming tycoons, to 18 years in prison on 162 charges, including heading an organized crime group, fraud and facilitating illegal online gambling.
In August, nine Chinese-born Cambodians were arrested in Singapore as part of the city state’s largest ever money-laundering investigation. Prosecutors accused them of operating illegal gambling websites targeting mainland China. Observers noted that the crackdown came one week after Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi visited Singapore, suggesting that Beijing might have been behind the charges – especially since several of the accused had outstanding arrest warrants in China.
The Prince Group may present a more complex challenge for Beijing. The Chinese police and judiciary appear intent on pursuing a case that Prince and its subsidiaries constitute a criminal group. But the names of Chen and other senior figures in the group – many of whom are his uncles and cousins – have been wholly absent from any Chinese court judgments.
Where they remain present, however, is in the political fabric of China’s most reliable regional ally.
When regional heads of state converged on Phnom Penh in November 2022 for the Association of Southeast Asian Nations’ biannual meeting, Hun Sen presented them with limited-edition luxury watches valued at $20,000 apiece. The face of each timepiece was emblazoned with the name of Chen’s Cambodian watchmaker, Prince Horology.
9 Hun Sen watch2.JPG
Cambodia's then-Prime Minister Hun Sen shows one of the 25 limited-edition watches that were given as gifts after the ASEAN summit in Phnom Penh, Nov. 13, 2022. The watches bear the name of Chen Zhi’s Cambodian watchmaker, Prince Horology. (Cindy Liu/Reuters)
Further afield, in his role as Hun Sen’s personal adviser – a position he has held since 2020 – Chen has accompanied him on a diplomatic mission to Cuba and doled out aid on the government’s behalf to neighboring Laos. He is also a personal adviser to former National Assembly President Heng Samrin and former Interior Minister Sar Kheng. Shortly after Hun Manet became Cambodia’s first new prime minister in four decades, Chen was named one of his 104 advisers. Those ranks give him a rank equal to minister.
Any attempt to charge Chen directly, then, would necessarily implicate Cambodia’s top law enforcement official and embarrass both the former and current prime ministers. Beijing spent decades of diplomatic effort and billions of dollars turning the Hun dynasty into one of China’s most ardent friends.
Sok Eysan, a spokesman for the ruling Cambodian People’s Party, said he could not comment and referred RFA to Cambodian government spokesman Pen Bona, who did not respond to multiple requests for comment.
Cambodian American academic Ear Sophal, who has authored books on Cambodia and China, told RFA it seems unlikely Chen will be heading to prison anytime soon.
“Clearly, someone’s untouchable,” Sophal said. “Is Chen Zhi trying to do something political in China? No. So it's okay, it's just money; his underlings will pay.”
https://www.rfa.org/english/news/cambod ... 24011.html
Bringing the news. You stay classy, nas, Cambodia.
That's quite the article.
I didn't know who rfa were so I looked them up. Essentially they are an arm of the US Gov - is that correct? Why aren't they blocked?
I didn't know who rfa were so I looked them up. Essentially they are an arm of the US Gov - is that correct? Why aren't they blocked?
They are blocked - if you can access RFA, you're either using a VPN, or your internet provider is going to get a nasty knock on the door sometime soon.
Meum est propositum in taberna mori,
ut sint Guinness proxima morientis ori.
tunc cantabunt letius angelorum chori:
"Sit Deus propitius huic potatori."
ut sint Guinness proxima morientis ori.
tunc cantabunt letius angelorum chori:
"Sit Deus propitius huic potatori."
- Felgerkarb
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Common sense and a cursory knowledge of the Cambodian business environment will inform you that those kind of profits are impossible to attain by legitimate businesses in Cambodia.
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1
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Why are the gods such vicious cunts?
Where is the god of tits and wine?
Why are the gods such vicious cunts?
Where is the god of tits and wine?
Nothing says legitimate transaction like the inclusion of a Cypriot passport as insurance.
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2023-08-25/ ... /102767474
https://www.rfa.org/english/news/cambod ... 73308.html
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2023-08-25/ ... /102767474
https://www.rfa.org/english/news/cambod ... 73308.html
- Bong Burgundy
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Part 2 is out- an interesting read following the money to Isle of Man, London and LA.
Can't be read in Cambodia.
https://www.rfa.org/english/news/cambod ... 30529.html
Can't be read in Cambodia.
https://www.rfa.org/english/news/cambod ... 30529.html
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1
Bringing the news. You stay classy, nas, Cambodia.
- chkai chgout
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Correct
The refusal to confirm the origin of bank deposits has little (if nothing) to do with who discovers it and spills the beans.
The law firm Duane Morris has issued a responsive statement on behalf its client, Prince Group, via the The Phnom Penh Post.
I've interacted with counsel from Duane Morris before, so their retention is not surprising in the least. Now about those deposits...
The law firm Duane Morris has issued a responsive statement on behalf its client, Prince Group, via the The Phnom Penh Post.
I've interacted with counsel from Duane Morris before, so their retention is not surprising in the least. Now about those deposits...
- Bong Burgundy
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Statement 1
Prince Holding Group is aware of an article by Radio Free Asia titled “Chinese courts go after ‘notorious’ Cambodian conglomerate” and has engaged Duane Morris & Selvam to advise it on its rights and next course of action.
Prince Holding Group takes the position that the article contains numerous falsehoods and misleading statements, including but not limited to the following:
The article alleges that Prince Holding Group’s revenue is derived from crime, and that the Chinese courts are intent on pursuing a case against Prince Holding Group for ‘massive money laundering’. A deeper review of the article, however, reveals that this is speculative, and the authors had no objective basis for making this allegation.
The article claims that there are at least seven judgments from separate Chinese provincial courts, convicting employees of Prince Holding Group of money laundering and gambling offenses. This is false. Prince Holding Group’s Chairman, management and employees have not been convicted of such offences. This is a case of impersonation of Prince Holding Group by other unlawful individuals who have been brought to justice.
The article suggests that the Jinbei Group, a licensed operator of casinos in Cambodia, is a subsidiary or an affiliate company of Prince Holding Group. This is misleading. Prince Holding Group’s chairman Mr. Chen Zhi had fully divested his shares in Jinbei since 2018. Since then, Mr Chen Zhi and Prince Holding Group have no affiliation with the Jinbei Group.
The article accuses Prince Holding Group of recruiting Ms Guo Caina as a money mule, and using her Chinese bank cards to remit 140 million yuan in gambling funds. This accusation is false. Ms Guo was not recruited by, and was not an employee of Prince Holding Group.
In 2021, a District People’s Court in Henan Province, China, found that Guo had been recruited by an online gambling company which claimed to be part of the “Cambodia Prince Group”. However, in the Court’s written judgment, which has been reviewed by Duane Morris & Selvam, the Court did not make a determination whether this gambling company was in fact related to Prince Holding Group. This would have been evident to any person who read the judgment.
It appears that the article has been penned by two foreign journalists with limited experience in Chinese law, questionable motives and an anti-Cambodia bias. Prince Holding Group is disappointed that these journalists have failed to conduct basic fact checking before penning this article.
Prince Holding Group reserves its right to legal action to protect its reputation and further respond to the article at the appropriate juncture.
By:
Prince Holding Group
Duane Morris & Selvam LLP
https://www.princeholdinggroup.com/2024 ... vam-llp-2/
Prince Holding Group is aware of an article by Radio Free Asia titled “Chinese courts go after ‘notorious’ Cambodian conglomerate” and has engaged Duane Morris & Selvam to advise it on its rights and next course of action.
Prince Holding Group takes the position that the article contains numerous falsehoods and misleading statements, including but not limited to the following:
The article alleges that Prince Holding Group’s revenue is derived from crime, and that the Chinese courts are intent on pursuing a case against Prince Holding Group for ‘massive money laundering’. A deeper review of the article, however, reveals that this is speculative, and the authors had no objective basis for making this allegation.
The article claims that there are at least seven judgments from separate Chinese provincial courts, convicting employees of Prince Holding Group of money laundering and gambling offenses. This is false. Prince Holding Group’s Chairman, management and employees have not been convicted of such offences. This is a case of impersonation of Prince Holding Group by other unlawful individuals who have been brought to justice.
The article suggests that the Jinbei Group, a licensed operator of casinos in Cambodia, is a subsidiary or an affiliate company of Prince Holding Group. This is misleading. Prince Holding Group’s chairman Mr. Chen Zhi had fully divested his shares in Jinbei since 2018. Since then, Mr Chen Zhi and Prince Holding Group have no affiliation with the Jinbei Group.
The article accuses Prince Holding Group of recruiting Ms Guo Caina as a money mule, and using her Chinese bank cards to remit 140 million yuan in gambling funds. This accusation is false. Ms Guo was not recruited by, and was not an employee of Prince Holding Group.
In 2021, a District People’s Court in Henan Province, China, found that Guo had been recruited by an online gambling company which claimed to be part of the “Cambodia Prince Group”. However, in the Court’s written judgment, which has been reviewed by Duane Morris & Selvam, the Court did not make a determination whether this gambling company was in fact related to Prince Holding Group. This would have been evident to any person who read the judgment.
It appears that the article has been penned by two foreign journalists with limited experience in Chinese law, questionable motives and an anti-Cambodia bias. Prince Holding Group is disappointed that these journalists have failed to conduct basic fact checking before penning this article.
Prince Holding Group reserves its right to legal action to protect its reputation and further respond to the article at the appropriate juncture.
By:
Prince Holding Group
Duane Morris & Selvam LLP
https://www.princeholdinggroup.com/2024 ... vam-llp-2/
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- Bong Burgundy
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Statement 2
Shortly after Radio Free Asia’s earlier article, which we have responded to on https://www.princeholdinggroup.com/2024 ... vam-llp-2/, Radio Free Asia has released a second article, titled “Red Flags Abound In Prince Group’s Offshore Dealing” on the eve of the Lunar New Year.
Prince Holding Group wishes to make the following response to the article:
1. The timing of this article is clearly mischievous and is intended to inflict maximum damage on Prince Holding Group. Such a timing appears to be a calculated move by the author, presuming that Prince Holding Group's communications and legal teams would be unavailable, thereby amplifying the harm to its reputation during this typically quiet period.
2. This key allegation in this article is that Prince Holding Group has engaged in money laundering through an alleged subsidiary named Amiga Entertainment. Unsurprisingly, however, the article has not cited any instance of Prince Holding Group transferring or receiving money either to, from or through Amiga Entertainment.
3. Amiga Entertainment is not a subsidiary or affiliate of Prince Holding Group. Contrary to the allegations in the article, Prince Holding Group has no direct or indirect beneficial ownership in Amiga Entertainment.
4. Prince Holding Group has no business relationship, and has never entered into any transactions, with Amiga Entertainment.
5. Prince Holding Group’s business consists of investments and developments within Cambodia. It has no business activities or subsidiaries in Cuba, or the Isle of Man. It adheres strictly to all laws and regulatory standards in countries it operates in.
6. Prince Holding Group does not engage in money laundering or illegal activities, and has not transferred or received funds in the manner alleged, or through the entities named in the article.
7. The author of the article, Jack Adamović Davies, a resident of Serbia, has a history of a vendetta against Prince Holding Group. In a previous article released in 2020, Mr. Davies alleged that Prince Holding Group’s wealth was a result of its political connections in China. In a strange about-turn, Mr. Davies has now alleged that Prince Holding Group is the subject of a clampdown campaign by Chinese authorities. These contradictory narratives suggest that Mr. Davies is more interested in writing sensational stories than the truth.
8. Prince Holding Group is one of the most successful companies in Cambodia and it has also contributed significantly through its philanthropic arm towards Cambodia. It is tempting for irresponsible authors like Mr. Davies to attribute its success to illegal or improper sources. Allegations like these drive viewership. However, journalists have an obligation to act responsibly. Mr. Davies’s allegations about Prince Holding Group are based entirely on “anonymous sources” and speculation. This speaks volumes about their credibility.
9. Prince Holding Group reserves its right to legal action to protect its reputation and further respond to the article at the appropriate juncture and is consulting its legal advisors Duane Morris & Selvam LLP.
By:
Prince Holding Group
Duane Morris & Selvam LLP
https://www.phnompenhpost.com/business/ ... lvam-llp-1
Shortly after Radio Free Asia’s earlier article, which we have responded to on https://www.princeholdinggroup.com/2024 ... vam-llp-2/, Radio Free Asia has released a second article, titled “Red Flags Abound In Prince Group’s Offshore Dealing” on the eve of the Lunar New Year.
Prince Holding Group wishes to make the following response to the article:
1. The timing of this article is clearly mischievous and is intended to inflict maximum damage on Prince Holding Group. Such a timing appears to be a calculated move by the author, presuming that Prince Holding Group's communications and legal teams would be unavailable, thereby amplifying the harm to its reputation during this typically quiet period.
2. This key allegation in this article is that Prince Holding Group has engaged in money laundering through an alleged subsidiary named Amiga Entertainment. Unsurprisingly, however, the article has not cited any instance of Prince Holding Group transferring or receiving money either to, from or through Amiga Entertainment.
3. Amiga Entertainment is not a subsidiary or affiliate of Prince Holding Group. Contrary to the allegations in the article, Prince Holding Group has no direct or indirect beneficial ownership in Amiga Entertainment.
4. Prince Holding Group has no business relationship, and has never entered into any transactions, with Amiga Entertainment.
5. Prince Holding Group’s business consists of investments and developments within Cambodia. It has no business activities or subsidiaries in Cuba, or the Isle of Man. It adheres strictly to all laws and regulatory standards in countries it operates in.
6. Prince Holding Group does not engage in money laundering or illegal activities, and has not transferred or received funds in the manner alleged, or through the entities named in the article.
7. The author of the article, Jack Adamović Davies, a resident of Serbia, has a history of a vendetta against Prince Holding Group. In a previous article released in 2020, Mr. Davies alleged that Prince Holding Group’s wealth was a result of its political connections in China. In a strange about-turn, Mr. Davies has now alleged that Prince Holding Group is the subject of a clampdown campaign by Chinese authorities. These contradictory narratives suggest that Mr. Davies is more interested in writing sensational stories than the truth.
8. Prince Holding Group is one of the most successful companies in Cambodia and it has also contributed significantly through its philanthropic arm towards Cambodia. It is tempting for irresponsible authors like Mr. Davies to attribute its success to illegal or improper sources. Allegations like these drive viewership. However, journalists have an obligation to act responsibly. Mr. Davies’s allegations about Prince Holding Group are based entirely on “anonymous sources” and speculation. This speaks volumes about their credibility.
9. Prince Holding Group reserves its right to legal action to protect its reputation and further respond to the article at the appropriate juncture and is consulting its legal advisors Duane Morris & Selvam LLP.
By:
Prince Holding Group
Duane Morris & Selvam LLP
https://www.phnompenhpost.com/business/ ... lvam-llp-1
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- Bong Burgundy
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Part 3 was a bit boring, a rehash of all the pig-butchering stories and forced labor yadda-yadda.
Does focus on Chrey Thom on the Vietnamese border, which has been in the news several times over the years as a strange, lawless gambling town.
Does focus on Chrey Thom on the Vietnamese border, which has been in the news several times over the years as a strange, lawless gambling town.
Bringing the news. You stay classy, nas, Cambodia.
Jack Adamović Davies on the Rise and Rise of Cambodia’s Prince Group
“The era of the ‘shell country’ is having its ascendancy and Cambodia is a prime example of the phenomenon.”
Over the past several weeks, the U.S.-funded broadcaster Radio Free Asia (RFA) has published a three-part investigative report into the clandestine dealings of the Prince Group, a multi-billion-dollar Cambodian conglomerate. Over the past decade, Prince and its enigmatic chief executive, the Chinese national Chen Zhi, have risen from obscurity to the top echelon of Cambodia’s economic elite, with the ear of the country’s top leaders and a place in the inner circle of the ruling Cambodian People’s Party (CPP). The product of three years of work, the RFA reports allege that at least $700 million of Prince Group’s profit is from illegal transnational crime.
Jack Adamović Davies, a former journalist for the English-language Phnom Penh Post who is now based in Belgrade, was the lead investigator and author of the report. He spoke with The Diplomat’s Southeast Asia Editor Sebastian Strangio about Chen’s swift rise, what it says about the structure of Cambodia’s political economy, and the story’s broader relevance.
Your most recent investigation focuses on Chen Zhi, the chairman of the tentacular Prince Group, which in less than a decade has risen to become one of the most prominent conglomerates in Cambodia, and now holds a considerable portfolio of overseas assets.
Who is Chen, how did he end up in Cambodia, and what is the primary source of his wealth, according to your research?
Chen was born in China in 1987 and sometime between now and then he’s become one of Cambodia’s richest and best connected citizens. Three years ago I set out to answer a question: how was this guy able to transform himself from a fresh-faced nobody into a billionaire advisor to the Cambodian prime minister in less than a decade?
We still can’t say for certain where all his money comes from. But, what we have found is that Chinese law enforcement has been investigating his Prince Group of companies for several years now and has identified $700 million in profits they believe Prince has generated from illegal online gambling and money laundering operations.
It’s important to point out that the Prince Group has strenuously – and since we started publishing quite aggressively – denied that they have anything to do with these alleged criminal activities. Prince’s position is that they are the victims of impersonators who have managed to dupe China’s police, prosecutors, and courts.
But that response doesn’t explain other instances we’ve identified in which Chen and other senior Prince Group officials have controlled companies involved in what experts have described as looking an awful lot like money laundering. Nor does it explain the Prince-linked compound on Cambodia’s border with Vietnam that locals say is rife with torture and enslaved workers. To this day the compound is still advertised on a Prince subsidiary’s website. They insist that they merely built it for a client, but we’ve identified plenty of crossover between the Prince Group and the compound’s management.
What does Chen’s sudden prominence say about the ways that business works in Cambodia under the CPP? What does it say about the country’s politics more broadly?
In every country the politically powerful and the mega-wealthy seem to have a magnet-like attraction to one another. What sets Cambodia apart is the almost total lack of societal or regulatory checks on these relationships. Plenty of individuals like Chen have turned up in Phnom Penh with lots of cash and few explanations of where the money came from. And they have been welcomed by the country’s political elites with wide open arms.
For most of its history, Cambodia’s ruling party has kept the wheels of its patronage machine oiled with kickbacks on concessions to strip the country’s forests, parcel out its land, and extract its natural resources. But Cambodia’s forests today are decimated and much of what’s left of them was parceled out to political cronies over the last couple of years in what looked like former Prime Minister Hun Sen securing loyalty ahead of the transfer of power last August to his son and successor Hun Manet. Attempts to tap Cambodia’s undersea oil reserves ended in bankruptcy. The decade-long real estate bubble has burst. Even tourism has failed to recover from the COVID-19 pandemic in line with comparable countries.
Legitimate sources of revenue are fast drying up for the CPP and into that fiscal void have stepped characters like Chen. Cambodia under the CPP has always been something of a protection racket. So long as businesses kicked up bribes to officials and politicians, they would have access to the resources they needed, helpful investment conditions and favorable treatment by the courts. Much of that money would go towards furnishing the officials’ mansions and educating their children at elite foreign schools. But lots of it would also go towards doling out “gifts” to the general population – the carrots to the CPP’s repressive stick that has kept it in power and ensured a stable investment climate for the businesses paying the kickbacks.
Businesses are teetering on the edge of collapse in almost every sector of the economy. The population is over-indebted and under-employed. The patronage machine needs cash more than ever to assuage the people’s increasing hardship and the pool of profitable enterprises to tap for that cash is draining by the day.
The darkly ingenious solution the party has arrived at is to rent out Cambodia’s sovereignty. The U.N. estimated last year that more than 100,000 people are being held as slaves across the country. The criminals that are holding them captive are only able to do so because they enjoy protection from every level of the Cambodian government, protection that is very well remunerated.
One of the most explosive claims in your investigation is the alleged involvement in cyberscam operations, which have recently attracted a lot of international attention, particularly in Myanmar. Describe these operations for us. What evidence is there tying Prince to these sorts of criminal activities, and what has its response been to the allegations?
The most prevalent form of cyberscam in Southeast Asia today is known as “pig butchering” in which victims are lured via social media into a relationship with the scammer, who is usually posing as an attractive member of the opposite sex. Like a pig being readied for slaughter, the victim is metaphorically fattened up. They are induced to trust the scammer and then gently lured into putting money in a phony investment scheme. Usually, they will be shown astronomic returns on their first few investments to convince them to put more in. They will often be kept on the hook until they don’t have a penny left to invest, at which point the slaughter is complete. The scammer then disappears leaving the victim distraught and destitute.
The actual scammers are usually the enslaved people I mentioned a moment ago. They are forced to commit the scams in captivity under the threat of violence, which is often brutally delivered.
The compound we identified on Cambodia’s border with Vietnam, known as the Golden Fortune Science and Technology Park, bears all the usual characteristics of a cyberscam compound. Local residents consistently told us that they had seen escaped workers hunted down by security guards, beaten mercilessly, and then dragged back inside. A former security guard told us that the compound pays a $50 bounty for every escaped worker he returns to them.
Again, it’s important to stress that the Prince Group insists they were merely the construction contractors for the project. But as we show in our story, the linkages between Prince and the compound go far beyond simple client-contractor relations.
Your story does not only involve domestic political machinations; it also deals with a plethora of offshore financial holdings and shell companies, through which Chen Zhi and his business associates have dispersed and concealed their assets. Explain the role of the international financial system in the story of Prince Group. What role does it play in enabling figures like Chen and the illicit/black economies more generally?
For most of the country’s modern history, the international financial system was something that happened to Cambodia. Shell companies would take custody of tracts of the kingdom’s forests and the trees would disappear, for example. Government officials who suddenly became very rich because of those deals would take their newfound wealth and park it in places like Singapore, Hong Kong, New York and London.
Over the last decade or so, though, the wealthier nations of the world have begun waking up to the fact that welcoming dirty money also means welcoming some pretty unpleasant baggage. Anti-money laundering regulations and corporate transparency laws have been beefed up in response. Shell companies are still living up to the description Global Witness gave them as “the getaway cars for financial crime,” but they’re proving less effective. For example, we were able to identify more than $170 million of Prince-linked real estate in London precisely because of recent improvements in British beneficial ownership legislation. Leaked banking records revealed to us that a shell company beneficially owned by Chen was rejected for a bank account in an offshore jurisdiction because he either couldn’t or wouldn’t comply with their due diligence procedures.
But, as the era of the shell company passes its peak, the era of the “shell country” is having its ascendancy and Cambodia is a prime example of the phenomenon.
It is possible to turn up in Cambodia with boatloads of dirty cash and build not just a web of shell companies to mask it, but instead an entire Potemkin business empire to justify your wealth’s existence – providing you get the right politicians on your side. Cambodia has become a country where an individual or company can choose to tell almost any story about themselves and their wealth.
If you decide a few years later that you’d like your children to grow up in London, Paris or New York, you’re no longer a suspiciously youthful billionaire, you’re a visionary entrepreneur who struck it rich in Cambodia.
Chen’s London mansion is owned through a company in Jersey, a tax haven off the coast of France. He bought it from a consortium of minor Qatari royals, among them a former government minister. On the paperwork filed with the Jersey companies registry to record his takeover of the shell company, Chen was invited to list his occupation, which he (or at least his representatives) did: “Chairman Prince Holding Group.”
What does the story of Prince say about the state of Cambodia-China relations? Do you think Chen’s rise is thinkable without the “ironclad” relationship that has grown between Beijing and Phnom Penh?
I have no doubt that the deep alliance between Cambodia and China provided ample cover for Chen’s rise, as it did many others like him. One of the Prince Group’s investment firms in Phnom Penh is even called Belt Road Capital Management, in a clear nod to Beijing’s Belt and Road policy.
Plenty of dubious characters have waved the Belt and Road banner as cover for activities that most likely had no official approval from Beijing. The Chinese police investigations into the Prince Group that we’ve uncovered suggest that Chen was likely one of them.
The Prince Group first made its name as a real estate business, throwing up apartment blocks primarily catering to Chinese nationals looking for somewhere to park their cash overseas. That market has all but dried up. When I was last in Sihanoukville in early 2023, I popped into a Prince Group shopping mall. On the ground floor there was a huge display of Prince apartment projects, whose units were being sold under a confusing “buy two, get one free” offer, which perhaps spoke to some difficulties in shifting them.
But even now the most plausible explanation I’ve heard as to why the Chinese authorities’ investigation of Prince has not charged any of the company’s management is that targeting them would implicate the Cambodian elites they are so interwoven with, including Premier Hun Manet. Beijing has few regional friends quite so reliable as the Cambodian government, I can imagine at some level a desire by China not to upset that relationship has offered Prince a degree of protection.
https://thediplomat.com/2024/02/jack-da ... nce-group/
“The era of the ‘shell country’ is having its ascendancy and Cambodia is a prime example of the phenomenon.”
Over the past several weeks, the U.S.-funded broadcaster Radio Free Asia (RFA) has published a three-part investigative report into the clandestine dealings of the Prince Group, a multi-billion-dollar Cambodian conglomerate. Over the past decade, Prince and its enigmatic chief executive, the Chinese national Chen Zhi, have risen from obscurity to the top echelon of Cambodia’s economic elite, with the ear of the country’s top leaders and a place in the inner circle of the ruling Cambodian People’s Party (CPP). The product of three years of work, the RFA reports allege that at least $700 million of Prince Group’s profit is from illegal transnational crime.
Jack Adamović Davies, a former journalist for the English-language Phnom Penh Post who is now based in Belgrade, was the lead investigator and author of the report. He spoke with The Diplomat’s Southeast Asia Editor Sebastian Strangio about Chen’s swift rise, what it says about the structure of Cambodia’s political economy, and the story’s broader relevance.
Your most recent investigation focuses on Chen Zhi, the chairman of the tentacular Prince Group, which in less than a decade has risen to become one of the most prominent conglomerates in Cambodia, and now holds a considerable portfolio of overseas assets.
Who is Chen, how did he end up in Cambodia, and what is the primary source of his wealth, according to your research?
Chen was born in China in 1987 and sometime between now and then he’s become one of Cambodia’s richest and best connected citizens. Three years ago I set out to answer a question: how was this guy able to transform himself from a fresh-faced nobody into a billionaire advisor to the Cambodian prime minister in less than a decade?
We still can’t say for certain where all his money comes from. But, what we have found is that Chinese law enforcement has been investigating his Prince Group of companies for several years now and has identified $700 million in profits they believe Prince has generated from illegal online gambling and money laundering operations.
It’s important to point out that the Prince Group has strenuously – and since we started publishing quite aggressively – denied that they have anything to do with these alleged criminal activities. Prince’s position is that they are the victims of impersonators who have managed to dupe China’s police, prosecutors, and courts.
But that response doesn’t explain other instances we’ve identified in which Chen and other senior Prince Group officials have controlled companies involved in what experts have described as looking an awful lot like money laundering. Nor does it explain the Prince-linked compound on Cambodia’s border with Vietnam that locals say is rife with torture and enslaved workers. To this day the compound is still advertised on a Prince subsidiary’s website. They insist that they merely built it for a client, but we’ve identified plenty of crossover between the Prince Group and the compound’s management.
What does Chen’s sudden prominence say about the ways that business works in Cambodia under the CPP? What does it say about the country’s politics more broadly?
In every country the politically powerful and the mega-wealthy seem to have a magnet-like attraction to one another. What sets Cambodia apart is the almost total lack of societal or regulatory checks on these relationships. Plenty of individuals like Chen have turned up in Phnom Penh with lots of cash and few explanations of where the money came from. And they have been welcomed by the country’s political elites with wide open arms.
For most of its history, Cambodia’s ruling party has kept the wheels of its patronage machine oiled with kickbacks on concessions to strip the country’s forests, parcel out its land, and extract its natural resources. But Cambodia’s forests today are decimated and much of what’s left of them was parceled out to political cronies over the last couple of years in what looked like former Prime Minister Hun Sen securing loyalty ahead of the transfer of power last August to his son and successor Hun Manet. Attempts to tap Cambodia’s undersea oil reserves ended in bankruptcy. The decade-long real estate bubble has burst. Even tourism has failed to recover from the COVID-19 pandemic in line with comparable countries.
Legitimate sources of revenue are fast drying up for the CPP and into that fiscal void have stepped characters like Chen. Cambodia under the CPP has always been something of a protection racket. So long as businesses kicked up bribes to officials and politicians, they would have access to the resources they needed, helpful investment conditions and favorable treatment by the courts. Much of that money would go towards furnishing the officials’ mansions and educating their children at elite foreign schools. But lots of it would also go towards doling out “gifts” to the general population – the carrots to the CPP’s repressive stick that has kept it in power and ensured a stable investment climate for the businesses paying the kickbacks.
Businesses are teetering on the edge of collapse in almost every sector of the economy. The population is over-indebted and under-employed. The patronage machine needs cash more than ever to assuage the people’s increasing hardship and the pool of profitable enterprises to tap for that cash is draining by the day.
The darkly ingenious solution the party has arrived at is to rent out Cambodia’s sovereignty. The U.N. estimated last year that more than 100,000 people are being held as slaves across the country. The criminals that are holding them captive are only able to do so because they enjoy protection from every level of the Cambodian government, protection that is very well remunerated.
One of the most explosive claims in your investigation is the alleged involvement in cyberscam operations, which have recently attracted a lot of international attention, particularly in Myanmar. Describe these operations for us. What evidence is there tying Prince to these sorts of criminal activities, and what has its response been to the allegations?
The most prevalent form of cyberscam in Southeast Asia today is known as “pig butchering” in which victims are lured via social media into a relationship with the scammer, who is usually posing as an attractive member of the opposite sex. Like a pig being readied for slaughter, the victim is metaphorically fattened up. They are induced to trust the scammer and then gently lured into putting money in a phony investment scheme. Usually, they will be shown astronomic returns on their first few investments to convince them to put more in. They will often be kept on the hook until they don’t have a penny left to invest, at which point the slaughter is complete. The scammer then disappears leaving the victim distraught and destitute.
The actual scammers are usually the enslaved people I mentioned a moment ago. They are forced to commit the scams in captivity under the threat of violence, which is often brutally delivered.
The compound we identified on Cambodia’s border with Vietnam, known as the Golden Fortune Science and Technology Park, bears all the usual characteristics of a cyberscam compound. Local residents consistently told us that they had seen escaped workers hunted down by security guards, beaten mercilessly, and then dragged back inside. A former security guard told us that the compound pays a $50 bounty for every escaped worker he returns to them.
Again, it’s important to stress that the Prince Group insists they were merely the construction contractors for the project. But as we show in our story, the linkages between Prince and the compound go far beyond simple client-contractor relations.
Your story does not only involve domestic political machinations; it also deals with a plethora of offshore financial holdings and shell companies, through which Chen Zhi and his business associates have dispersed and concealed their assets. Explain the role of the international financial system in the story of Prince Group. What role does it play in enabling figures like Chen and the illicit/black economies more generally?
For most of the country’s modern history, the international financial system was something that happened to Cambodia. Shell companies would take custody of tracts of the kingdom’s forests and the trees would disappear, for example. Government officials who suddenly became very rich because of those deals would take their newfound wealth and park it in places like Singapore, Hong Kong, New York and London.
Over the last decade or so, though, the wealthier nations of the world have begun waking up to the fact that welcoming dirty money also means welcoming some pretty unpleasant baggage. Anti-money laundering regulations and corporate transparency laws have been beefed up in response. Shell companies are still living up to the description Global Witness gave them as “the getaway cars for financial crime,” but they’re proving less effective. For example, we were able to identify more than $170 million of Prince-linked real estate in London precisely because of recent improvements in British beneficial ownership legislation. Leaked banking records revealed to us that a shell company beneficially owned by Chen was rejected for a bank account in an offshore jurisdiction because he either couldn’t or wouldn’t comply with their due diligence procedures.
But, as the era of the shell company passes its peak, the era of the “shell country” is having its ascendancy and Cambodia is a prime example of the phenomenon.
It is possible to turn up in Cambodia with boatloads of dirty cash and build not just a web of shell companies to mask it, but instead an entire Potemkin business empire to justify your wealth’s existence – providing you get the right politicians on your side. Cambodia has become a country where an individual or company can choose to tell almost any story about themselves and their wealth.
If you decide a few years later that you’d like your children to grow up in London, Paris or New York, you’re no longer a suspiciously youthful billionaire, you’re a visionary entrepreneur who struck it rich in Cambodia.
Chen’s London mansion is owned through a company in Jersey, a tax haven off the coast of France. He bought it from a consortium of minor Qatari royals, among them a former government minister. On the paperwork filed with the Jersey companies registry to record his takeover of the shell company, Chen was invited to list his occupation, which he (or at least his representatives) did: “Chairman Prince Holding Group.”
What does the story of Prince say about the state of Cambodia-China relations? Do you think Chen’s rise is thinkable without the “ironclad” relationship that has grown between Beijing and Phnom Penh?
I have no doubt that the deep alliance between Cambodia and China provided ample cover for Chen’s rise, as it did many others like him. One of the Prince Group’s investment firms in Phnom Penh is even called Belt Road Capital Management, in a clear nod to Beijing’s Belt and Road policy.
Plenty of dubious characters have waved the Belt and Road banner as cover for activities that most likely had no official approval from Beijing. The Chinese police investigations into the Prince Group that we’ve uncovered suggest that Chen was likely one of them.
The Prince Group first made its name as a real estate business, throwing up apartment blocks primarily catering to Chinese nationals looking for somewhere to park their cash overseas. That market has all but dried up. When I was last in Sihanoukville in early 2023, I popped into a Prince Group shopping mall. On the ground floor there was a huge display of Prince apartment projects, whose units were being sold under a confusing “buy two, get one free” offer, which perhaps spoke to some difficulties in shifting them.
But even now the most plausible explanation I’ve heard as to why the Chinese authorities’ investigation of Prince has not charged any of the company’s management is that targeting them would implicate the Cambodian elites they are so interwoven with, including Premier Hun Manet. Beijing has few regional friends quite so reliable as the Cambodian government, I can imagine at some level a desire by China not to upset that relationship has offered Prince a degree of protection.
https://thediplomat.com/2024/02/jack-da ... nce-group/
- Felgerkarb
- Sir Felgerkarb, Kt Pb
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BRI in Africa...is/was the key to the equation of all the money flowing through Cambodia...follow the corporate links and it because clear as mud, but the river flowed from there.
====================
Why are the gods such vicious cunts?
Where is the god of tits and wine?
Why are the gods such vicious cunts?
Where is the god of tits and wine?
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