Business News

PHNOM PENH, (APP/AFP) – The World Bank has approved $130 million worth of new loans for Cambodia, ending a five-year freeze in new lending to the country following a spate of controversial forced evictions by the government.
The decision will be welcome news to strongman Prime Minister Hun Sen whose government has clashed with the World Bank over the eviction of thousands of families from the shores of a lake in the capital Phnom Penh.
In a statement published on its website late Thursday, the bank said its board of directors agreed to restart loans for four projects “to provide many communities across Cambodia with better roads, sustainable sources of water, improved livelihoods from agriculture, and increased access to health care”.
“Our new engagement with Cambodia starts with projects aimed to bring
tangible benefits for Cambodians,” Ulrich Zachau, Country Director of the World Bank for Southeast Asia, said in the statement.
The bank froze new lending to the impoverished nation in 2011 over mass evictions at the capital’s Boeung Kak lake — although it continued to
administer loans promised before the freeze and also allowed money held in
trust by the bank for other countries to be passed on to the nation.
Hun Sen’s government leased the lake area to a private company which was headed by a ruling party politician. The company then filled in the lake for commercial development, displacing some 4,000 families along the way.
According to the NGO Inclusive Development, the Boeung Kak evictions are the worst mass expulsions in Cambodia since the evacuation of Phnom Penh by the Khmer Rouge in 1975.