From being a familiar face on Australian television, to chiropractor, to drugs busts in Sihanoukville – it’s a pretty steep decline over a couple of decades.  The star of the iconic Australian tv commercials for soft drink Solo, Mark Coutelas, 57, has been arrested by military police in his Sihanoukville guesthouse on drugs charges.

The 57-year-old appeared at Preah Sihanouk provincial court on Tuesday and was charged with the unlawful keeping, transporting or trafficking of narcotics. He is being held in Preah Sihanouk prison and will face trial at a later date.  Court spokesman Lim Bunheng said Coutelas ‘admitted’ to previously being sentenced to two years imprisonment in Thailand for ‘drug trafficking’.

Coutelas was previously arrested in Phuket in 2014 on similar offences, and was sentenced to two years in prison.

After being released, he was expelled from Thailand and seems to have arrived in Cambodia in 2016, setting up a business called Back Pain Solutions, based on his post-television career as a chiropractor.

Earlier this year he posted in his personal Facebook account: ‘Living in Sihanoukville Cambodia at this minute in Phnom Pehn. I LOVE CHANG CLUB!!! I miss you buddy. Me blacklist (sic) for (sic) Thailand 110 years (sic).’

In 2012, a collection of short stories called ‘Phnom Penh Noir’ was released, edited by the highly talented Christopher G. Moore, author of the Vincent Calvino series of books (as well as some very cerebral essays on a number of topics and a few insightful non-fiction books too).

Moore has also just released ‘Memory Manifesto: A Walking Meditation Through Cambodia’, in which he looks back at his own experiences of almost 25 years of visiting Cambodia as well as forays further back in time for the country’s own experiences. You can read a wonderful review of his new book here.

I had revisited ‘Phnom Penh Noir’ a few months back, enjoying the second reading of writers such as John Burdett, Roland Joffe, Suong Mak, Bopha Phorn, and Kosal Kheiv among others when it struck me that there hadn’t been any further Cambodian-based collections of stories since then. The next thought, unsurprisingly, was ‘Well, why not do one now?”

Not long after, a conversation ensued between myself and Mark Bibby Jackson, author of ‘Peppered Justice’ and publisher of Asia-LIFE magazine, and we took the idea a stage further to include a joint competition to try and find two promising Cambodian writers who could be included in the book, with the outright winner also appearing in July’s issue of Asia-LIFE.

As the first entries came in, and as I received submissions from other authors, I realised that the term ‘noir’ was slightly problematic in terms of this collection. Noir is perhaps one of the most contentious descriptions in literature in recent times. Everyone has their own idea of what it means, from the Chandler purists through to the modern offshoots. If we had kept it, there would likely have been an online furore from disgruntled noir fans across the region, beating a path to my door with pitchforks and burning torches. So it was quietly jettisoned with no fuss and the title finalised as ‘Mekong Shadows: Tales from Cambodia.’

The standard of the competition entries was surprisingly high given that the writers were submitting in their second or even third language. But once entries were closed, all three judges were in relative agreement as to the two winners. One thing stood out in the entries we received; there was a lack of male writers entering the competition. Both our winners were not only girls, but also under the age of 20, with our first placed winner being 18, and our second placed writer being 15. It’s great to see that the two schools the girls attend, Liger Learning Centre and Jay Pritzker Academy, encourage creative writing when we normally see emphasis only on STEM subjects. You can read the winning entry here.

One of the other things we decided at an early stage was that all profits from the book would go to a worthy cause. It was Mark who suggested the wonderful Khmer Sight Foundation and I agreed very quickly to his suggestion.

Cataracts are the leading cause of blindness in Cambodia and most of the cases are avoidable. Health Ministry figures showed that in 2007 around 2% of Cambodians suffered blindness in both eyes as a result of cataracts, and more recent figures from 2014 stated that around 5% of the population over five years old had varying degrees of sight impairment (Cambodia Demographic and Health Survey). The good news is that over the last 20 years the prevalence of avoidable blindness has dropped by nearly 70% (The Fred Hollows Foundation). It is still a very real issue though.

In 2015 the Khmer Sight Foundation (KSF) was formed to unify ophthalmology and eye care across the Kingdom, thanks to local philanthropists and to the efforts of ophthalmologists from Australia and New Zealand who regularly donate their time and experience to reducing these figures further and to training young Cambodians. They also arrange scholarships for ophthalmology students to study abroad with the aim of making Cambodia self-reliant.

I’m very grateful for the contributions made to the book from all the writers. We have stories from well-established writers such as John Daysh, John Burdett, and James Newman among others. We also have two excellent contributions from Cambodian writers; Kosal Khiev and Ek Madra, the latter of whom has written Saraswati’s first novel by a Cambodian which is released later this year. There are stories of oppression, of genocide, of love, of hate, a sprinkling of black magic, a couple of forays into The Heart of Darkness, but also a feeling of hope. As with any collection there will be stories you love and stories you dislike; even I have my favourites but it would be unfair to the other writers to single them out. The hardest thing about putting the collection together was deciding the order the stories would go in, a process that saw several changes, but I think (hope) that the final decision is one that sits well with readers.

One of the contributors sent me an email the other day to say ‘well done’ for putting the book together and asking when the next one would be. I cast an eye back at the publication date of ‘Phnom Penh Noir’, thought of the stress of the last few months and answered – with a straight face – ‘2022’.

‘Mekong Shadows: Tales from Cambodia’, edited by Iain Donnelly and published by Saraswati Publishing, launches on August 3rd with an event at the Plantation Urban Resort and Spa in Phnom Penh, and a second event at Bookish Bazaar in Kampot on August 10th. Hard copies will be available at Monument Books and other retailers from August 4th, and the eBook version is available to pre-order now at:
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0749Q5ZGR

Over two years have passed since a brutal killing shocked the relaxed residents of Otres. With the prime suspect recently released without charge and the investigation seemingly closed in both Cambodia and Russia, will we ever know who murdered Denis Goncharov?

When Denis Goncharov’s butchered body was discovered floating in a shallow ditch some 400m from Sihanoukville’s popular Otres Beach on July 19 2015, police quickly identified their prime suspect – the man’s best friend and business partner, Dmitry Sidorov.

The details of this horrific killing shocked the coastal community that was already reeling from a recent surge in violent crime and unrest linked to feuding Russian gangs.

Goncharov had been the victim of a frenzied knife attack that allegedly began while he was still riding his motorcycle. Police allege that the attacker was his passenger, and began knifing him as they travelled together.

Prime Suspect Flees Cambodia

The 29-year-old IT expert was stabbed and slashed 34 times in the back, before the killer also hacked at his throat in what one police officer said was an attempt to decapitate the victim.

Police in Sihanoukville immediately began to focus their investigation on Goncharov’s long-time friend and new business associate, Sidorov.

Some friends and relatives said they had become involved in a bitter business dispute and had been taking drugs together the night of the murder. An arrest warrant was issued and the hunt was on.

The prime suspect, however, acted even swifter than the cops. Within hours he had fled to Phnom Penh, and then to the Thai capital Bangkok, before catching a flight and returning home to Russia.

Cambodian authorities issued an Interpol arrest warrant for their fugitive and Russian police later captured and remanded the suspect in St. Petersburg on suspicion of murder.

Released Without Charge in Russia

Sidorov would be held in a Russian prison in his home city of Petrozavodsk facing murder charges for just over a year.

In the spring of 2017, he is released without charge as Russian prosecutors admit that the case against him has fallen apart.

With Sidorov’s release in Russia, and no other suspects in Cambodia, the killer who butchered Denis Goncharov in Sihanoukville seemingly remains free.

According to reports and statements from prosecutors and investigators in Russia, authorities had worked for over a year to build a case for conviction against Sidorov, but they allege that Cambodian authorities had failed to respond to all of their questions and requests for material linked to the case.

Back in 2015, Cambodian police admitted that they didn’t even know that Sidorov had been arrested in Russia. Some senior police officials couldn’t even remember the names of the victim and his alleged attacker.

Sidorov Innocent? 

According to Dmitry Sidorov, he and Goncharov had been best friends since school and he was shocked and disturbed to learn of his murder upon his return to his motherland. Upon discovering he was a prime suspect and being hunted by police, he was appalled.

His flights to Thailand and later to Russia on the day Goncharov’s body would be found had always been planned, he says, although it’s not known if he showed evidence of this to prosecutors.

Sidorov says that his family and friends were well aware of his travel plans and the theory that he had quickly decided to flee the country as Cambodian police hunted him is false.

He says that the two close friends spent the evening of July 18 together, drinking and smoking marijuana on Otres beach. He admits they shared a motorcycle on the way there, but says that they had parted ways on different motorcycles that evening. This claim, like many of Sidorov’s, also hasn’t been independently verified.

The following morning, attempting to locate his friend to say goodbye, Sidorov claims that Goncharov couldn’t be located. With a flight to catch, he left Sihanoukville just as a gruesome discovery was made and a murder investigation started.

Sidorov and his family and supporters argue that there were no business disagreements between the two of them, and no animosity at all that could trigger such a violent event. They also argue that there is no real evidence of his guilt, an argument that Russian authorities seemed to eventually agree with.

The family of Goncharov meanwhile – including his Chinese widow who lived with the two men in Cambodia – continue to allege that Sidorov had the motive and means to butcher his oldest friend, was also the last person to see him alive and fled the country for the safety of Russia after committing the horrific murder.

Whatever the truth in this murder case, with Sidorov released without charge, the prosecution abandoned in Russia and no open investigation in Cambodia, the killer of Denis Goncharov remains free and justice continues to elude his family and friends.

Jack Laurenson is a British writer and editor who previously lived in Cambodia and reported for a national newspaper here. He’s now based in Ukraine. He has posted the first part of this story on his new blog, here:

https://jacklaurenson.wordpress.com/2017/11/12/the-russian-in-the-river-the-murder-of-denis-goncharov/

It is an indisputable fact that Cambodians love their beer. Whether it’s a simple get-together between friends or a lavish wedding ceremony, it seems that there is always an occasion to crack a can, pour into an ice filled glass and ch’oul moy with fellow drinkers.

For a relatively small country, Cambodia has more than its fair share of home brewed beverages, from recognised international brands, such as Tiger and Heineken, regional tipples like ABC and Anchor, to the local favourite tipples of Angkor, Cambodia and Black Panther.

Whilst the current trend turns to man-bun sporting, bearded millennials sipping craft ale in ironic drinking horns, formulated using micro-brewing techniques, the staple part of the vast majority of locals (and foreigners) drinking is from the cheap and readily available cans, bottles and kegs of commercial grade ‘swill’. Who doesn’t enjoy formaldehyde after a hard day in Cambodia?

Cambodian Breweries

As the standard of living improves across the region, luxury goods, such as relatively expensive imported beers have become widespread, but there are four major breweries knocking out in Cambodia.

The largest and oldest is the Angkor Brewery facility, in Sihanoukville. Designed by the late legendary Khmer architect Vann Molyvann, and officially opened in 1965 by the then Prince Sihanouk, the plant was closed in 1975 due to the on-going civil war.  Taken over by the Malaysian company Cambrew Ltd in 1991, the refurbished factory was once again pumping out beer the following year. Danish brewing giant Carlsberg now controls a 50% stake in the firm.

Another major European company, Heineken, also control a 50% stake in the country’s second biggest beer supplier- Cambodia Brewery Ltd (CBL), based in Phnom Penh.

Across town is the only Cambodian owned brewery and relative new kid on the beer block, with production beginning in 2011, The Khmer Brewery, from Khmer Beverages Ltd.

The most recent addition is the German branded Ganzberg, which, thanks to heavy promotion is also a common sight in every province.

These four suppliers produce the most recognised and heavily imbibed amber nectar in the kingdom, so which are from where?

Beers- the 5%ers

The most successful brand produced by Cambrew is their signature Angkor beer. Slightly darker than the pilsner style of its rivals, Angkor is the most ubiquitous ’50 cent Happy Hour’ draught on offer in bars. Although the famous ‘My Country, My Beer’ slogan has been slightly altered, Angkor still claims to be Cambodia’s best selling beer, mainly due to the volume it seems to give away along the riverside in Phnom Penh and the ‘Happy All Day Hour- 50 cent Draft’- which have been causing singlet wearing sexpats and TEFLers alike to forget to extend their visas since shortly after UNTAC rolled out the country.

Taste- **

Quaffability- **

Value- ****

Hangover- *****

Comments: Cheap piss water with a full bodied flavour. Has traditionally had the distinction of giving drinkers a hangover before finishing the glass, although improvements can be noted since Carlsberg has been invovled.

The biggest competitor to Angkor is Anchor Smooth (pronounced An-choor), from CBL. Whilst some would complain it lacks flavour, it is probably the most favoured brew of choice for foreigners, largely due to its ease of drinking uncountable numbers of cold cans on a typically hot day. For the hangover alone, it’s worth the extra 25-50c in a bar. This is also the brew of choice for the Hash House Harriers drinking group.

Taste- ****

Quaffability- ****

Value- ***

Hangover- **

Comments: Light, easy to consume pilsner, lacking in taste other than aluminium.

The third mainstay of the main beers is Cambodia, another pale pilsner, but with a little more flavour than Anchor. Ring pull promotions- from free cans (around 1 in 5 is another can) to motorcycles make Cambodia beer a big seller, in both cities and provinces. Many a session has been extended as another half box is collected from the ‘gift’ pulls, and enough 500r have been collected for the ‘free’ cans.

Taste- ***

Quaffability- ****

Value- *****

Hangover- ***

Comments: Similar enough to Anchor, with a soupçon more metallic bite. Worth it for the winners. It will be interesting to see how long the pull tabs will stay in existence, as many Western countries have already banned them, and it’s increasingly difficult to find production of them.

Coming in at fourth amongst the 5% crowd is German recipe pilsner, Ganzberg, which although seen everywhere and with heavy, and often stupid marketing, still isn’t as popular as the big 3, despite the prizes on offer (free cans around 1 in 6). Most expats seem to reject it outright, but plenty of people must be drinking it, somewhere out there. Having been stuck with a few cases, we can confirm that after about the 5^th or 6^th ice cold can, the negative Gnaztyburg vibes slip away into a woozy feeling of elation and increased self-esteem on a karaoke microphone. The hangovers are bad.

Taste- **

Quaffability- **

Value- ****

Hangover- *****

Comments: Mix the worst parts of Angkor, Anchor and Cambodia together, let it mellow and remove the good parts. Best served ice cold.

The Budgeteers

Another CBL beer is Crown, which at 4.5% packs less of a punch than Anchor, but is a few dollars cheaper on a case of 24, so popular amongst rural Khmer drinkers. The trouble is that it’s watery, and made even more so when consumed on ice, as is the habit out in the Boondocks. Crown also seems to lose is fizz quite quickly, and watery, flat beer makes me vomit; not from the alcohol, but watery and flat beer upsets my delicate gag reflex (the same happens when somebody else starts puking or when a shitty nappy is anywhere close by) – I’d be terrible at gay porn scenes. On the plus side, whenever any Cambodian labourers are doing work on your property, it is customary etiquette to fork out for a box of beer at the end of the week/job. Crown is perfect as it is cheap and there is less worry about them getting home safely that evening on a moto with no headlights.

Taste- **

Quaffability- **

Value- *****

Hangover- ****

Comments: Weaker and and more watery than Sam Rainsy’s resolve. A driving beer.

The king of provincial beers must be the notorious Klang. Better known as domrei, or elephant, the 6% brew not only packs a punch, but is also considerably cheaper than most other offerings in the countryside. Whilst the slightly chemical taste might put of the connoisseur, after a few cans it goes down quicker than your mum on a first date. After flying high like superman on a mix of ethanol, hops and methamphetamine precursors, the elephant comes crashing in the next day, often with sick on the floor, turds like treacle and a mighty klangover.

Taste- **

Quaffability- ***

Value- *****

Hangover- *****

Comments: Without a doubt wears the crown of the khets. Your brain, sphincter and liver will hate you, but who cares when, for a few sweet hours,  you are the lizard king?

The Stouts

Whilst lager-type beers are undoubtedly refreshing, the market for strong, black and malty stouts is huge in Cambodia.

The go-to for middle-class locals is ABC stout.  An 8% black beer, brewed by CBL, and at around 3x the price of a regular beer, is as much a status symbol as a drink. Often seen being drunk by uniformed police officers at 7am, it is the breakfast, lunch and dinner of champions, despite it being relatively expensive and not actually that nice. Whilst difficult to knock back quickly, ABC does pack a punch when compared with the girly lagers.

Taste- ***

Quaffability- *

Value- **

Hangover- ****

Comments: Fool your boss/father in law/local authorities into thinking you are richer, more suave and sophisticated than you really are by arriving at any social occasion with a box of ABC. They’ll all be too busy getting rat arsed on the freebies that they wouldn’t even notice that you have the alcohol tolerance of a teenage Mormon.

Cambrew have two brands of stout out. The 8% Angkor Extra Stout is only available in 330ml and 640ml bottles, and can occasionally be found on tap. Although not too bad, it will always be the poorer cousin of ABC.

Taste- ***

Quaffability- *

Value- ***

Hangover- ****

Comments: It’s a strong beer, but won’t cut no respect in the hood. Plus nobody takes the empties away.

If Angkor Extra Stout is the poorer cousin of ABC, then Cambrew’s second bier noire is unashamedly the trailer trash dwelling, oxycontin smokin’crack whore of the family. Black Panther gets you more fucked up than a blue eyed 10 year old at a priest convention.  It lacks any style and finesse and tastes like a failed homebrew experiment mixed with paint thinners, but at 50 cents a tin, offers a respite from reality for the poor, wretched,  downtrodden and overstayed huddled masses. It’s also a good cooking ingredient for beef, or so I tell the wife when pouring half a can into a wok with frying onions, then shotting the rest back in one, warm.

Taste- **

Quaffability- **

Value- ****

Hangover- *****

Comments: Not for pregnant women, children, those suffering from heart problems, lightweights or poofs.

The budget stout from CBL’s parent company, Asia-Pacific Breweries is a slightly weaker 6.5% Crown Stout- which is essentially the same as Crown, only blacker and stronger. If you’re going to ruin you renal functions and puke blood, with cheap Cambodian stouts, you might as well do it properly with an 8% beverage, rather than pussyfoot around with this one. Crown Stout tastes a bit like burnt rice was used in the brewing process.

Taste- *

Quaffability- *

Value- ****

Hangover- ****

Comments: Why bother summoning Mammon when you can get the direct line to Beelzebub?

Not to be outdone, Khmer Beverages (Cambodia) have begun to produce a dark brew, Barrley Black. It has some adverts making it look all upmarket, but to be honest, I haven’t actually tried any.

International

With further international investment and production capacity growing, international brands, such as Tiger and Heineken are now being produced in Cambodia for local consumption, as well as export. With other smaller breweries, such as Kingdom and Phnom Penh Brewery competing for a pint-sized place in the market, it is easy to see why Cambodians are the region’s heaviest beer swillers and life expectancy for locals and expats alike is pretty low.

Cambodia is changing. On the way out are the wretched, the desperate, the runaways, alkies and deathpats. They don’t suit the new ‘developed’ status that the country now is hell-bent on portraying, albeit fairly unsuccessfully. Out with the beer guts proudly displayed protruding from wife-beater vests! Out with the flip-flops/sandles/thongs! Out with the Walkabout – tear down that Mall!

In with the Chinese and their discreet KTV clubs and restaurants of garish neon, for they shall bring investment and casinos. And they shall inherit the earth, until the debt bubble bursts and the paper tiger collapses like a gambling house of Sihanoukville playing cards.

But white folk aren’t banned, there are still plenty about; it is merely the demographics which are shifting. When the streets were rough, mean and paved with holes, and one could rent the Jacuzzi suite on Rue Pasteur along with 3 Viet hookers dressed in ball gowns, the very idea of a man-bun sporting, waistcoat wearing digital nomad quaffing deconstructed lattes from an ironic drinking horn would have been as alien a concept as 24 hour electricity, work permits or 4g internet.

Of course, your average English teacher or drunk on a budget couldn’t afford one of the thousands of shoddy looking condos springing up like prefab concrete triffids, nor would they be able to spunk a few grand playing baccarat in a windowless cavern. And whilst the sales of second hand Hondas would remain stable, the luxury car market would stagnate.

Backpacker orientated businesses are eagerly trying to sell up for health reasons, or are pushed from town to town by a tsunami of apartment swallowing Sino casino staff and VOIP scammers. TEFL jobbers are increasingly jumping the border over to Vietnam (even Jewsbury’s got work over there FFS), whilst their more well at heel brethren are busy sipping mango daiquiris on the rooftop of Rosewood- or scoffing down swan truffle canapés, hand crafted by an artisan who once worked in a Michelin star restaurant.

Yet Phnom Penh is not downtown Tokyo, trendy Soho or cultured Paris. It’s still an absolute shithole, albeit with a face-lift akin to a dodgy botox injection administered by an unqualified beautician in a back street plastic surgery-cum-abortion clinic. The city is a turd, which can never be polished, or at least not for a long time yet.

So what of the masses? Where should they head, now that the dens of iniquity are undergoing gentrification along Street 51? Most of Street 172 and Bogan bars like Fuel hang on as refuges to the bottom-feeder, but for how long, nobody knows. There are, however, the final strongholds, the last bastions of day time drunks on a budget and they are still to be found across the city. These are the Mini-Marts, and long may they continue.

A good Mini-Mart should offer the following to their clientele- a range of cold beers, cigarettes, snacks and outside seating and not have a strict dress code. Sexual performance medicines, prophylactic sheaths, sanitary products, 24 hour opening and toilet facilities are, of course, a bonus.

There are local institutions, like Neil’s 24 Hour on Street 136, Smile Marts and clones with names like Panda,  Llama, Kiwi, and even now the new kid on the block, US franchise 7-11 (not to be confused with 9-11, which has been open for years, seemingly without realizing the irony).

So, as the Writer’s Page of Khmer440 is gentrified by articles about poncey paint and pinot, or baller banquets in Bangkok (and, please nobody mention fucking Bouchan or Sonoma), the gauntlet was thrown down to find the finest mini-mart in town.

Review Time- Camko Mart *****

Location: Located on Angkor Boulevard at the northern fringes of Toul Kork, the Camko Mart, a focal point for the disappointing utopian dream that is Camko City, isn’t the easiest mart to get to. This shouldn’t put you off, as it keeps away the riff-raff. Along this well built, but barely used modern highway, oriental gentleman in mid-life crisis mode ride expensive carbon framed mountain bikes, replete in their finest lycra livery. Across the road is an open expanse of waste ground, no doubt for sale at a ridiculous price, combining the gritty urban setting with the sweet vibes of mother nature. ****

Ambience: The al fresco seating arrangement at Camko Mart is of a higher standard than lesser marts found near the riverside. Stylish faux wicker chairs and circular tables with real glass tops are the essence of high quality marting, putting Camko Mart a cut above the competition. The noise of Mong Rethy Street is a mere murmur in the background, like a new age soundtrack playing at an unobtrusive volume.

The area is particularly popular amongst Koreans and Japanese, and, as one relaxes in the shade, there is the opportunity to people-watch, as families go past, trying to get their spoiled, morbidly obese offspring to get some exercise through offers of ice cream and energy drinks. ****

Selection: Camko Mart has one of the finest arrays of beverages in the city. A well-stocked refrigerator has something for everyone- on my visit I counted many local lagers, as well as Magner’s cider, and imports including bottles of Fuller’s London Pride, Porter and Honeydew ales. At under $2 a bottle for the rare brews, you’d be hard pushed to find better value for money at other, inferior convenience stores.   

There is also a wide range of wines and spirits on offer, which could in theory be drunk on site, or taken away to continue the party.

To the rear of the store is a poor man’s Toys R Us, which, together with the gelataria, makes Camko Mart a family friendly environment where drunken parents can bribe the kids with plastic tat and ice cream to keep them amused. *****

Clientele: Mostly a young, Asian crowd who like to gather in small groups to discuss hot news and mooch free wi-fi from the coffee shop next door.

A lack of girly bars and knocking shops in Camko City means the eye candy is lackluster, so isn’t particularly suited to pervs and lechers, although the odd diamond in the rough may appear unexpectedly. A few nubile Slavic types from the gated community have been spotted doing sports, and there is the potential for Japanese MILF hunters, if that’s your bag. ***

Food: Hors d’oeuvres such as peanuts, dried peas and squid based snacks may be purchased from the counter, however Mike’s Burger House is a few doors down and BYO burgers are not in any way discouraged by the effusive Camko Mart management. ***

Toilet Facilities: A grey area for chaps, as it is easy to nip over the road and give the bushes a sprinkle. There should be somewhere for number 2’s and a place for the ladies to powder their noses. The coffee shop and burger joint are other, emergency options. **

Overall: Although a little off the beaten path for daytime alcoholics, a trip to Camko Mart is a rewarding day out for the true mini mart connoisseur. Genuine marteteers  will take delight with the pleasant, unpretentious setting and wonderfully well stocked fridge, friendly staff and nearby amenities. Camko Mart stands tall amongst the crowd as a place for upmarket lowlifes to have a boozy weekend afternoon. ***** 

Other Reviews (These are 100% real reviews from facebook and Google):

“It is good place for me, always make fresh over there i really love it.”

“I like the designation right there and the view look cool.”

“I like there”

“Nice place! For buy and we can sit outdoor”

“Very busy little mart from lath afternoon for the local people, drink and chit chat..”

“look so nice ..”

According to the World Bank, Cambodia has the following scores out of 190 countries with regards to doing business:

Over all ease of doing business rank: 135

Paying taxes: 136

Starting a business: 183

Dealing with construction permits: 179

Enforcing contracts: 179

This leaves 65 countries which are worse to do business in, admittedly, such as the DRC, South Sudan and Yemen, which may not be the best places to open a vegan café or Elvis themed dive bar in. Yet fools keep hopping on the carousel of certain financial ruin, going round and round until they feel dizzy and sick, then passing the seat on to the next white man with a wedge and poorly thought out business model.

Running a successful business in a place where you speak the language, understand the culture and can nurture a loyal customer base is tricky enough, but trying it in a place where there are several thousand ‘generals’ and a population which still believes in magic scarecrows and burns witches, means you gotta be crazy.

Cambodia itself is detrimental to your health, and working in Cambodia is even more severely detrimental. Owning a business in Cambodia is the equivalent of smoking 5 packs of Marlboro Reds and drinking 5 pints of whisky a day (also known as ‘breakfast’ for some expat barkeepers).  Holidays are an impossible dream, as staff and customers are ready to load up unsecured stock into a tuk tuk as soon as your taxi leaves for the airport. In short, the stress of running a business can lead to alcoholism, peptic ulcers, cardiovascular problems, strokes and insanity. Thus the main reason for selling ‘profitable, turnkey’ operations is due to poor health.

But before you get sucked in by the idea of shelling out $30k on a shop unit in Kampot with 2 years 8 months left on the lease, here is a quickly complied 7 point list of why you should never open a business in Cambodia. None of this is fiction, but hard stone cold facts from real people and real businesses over the past few years.

1) Return on investment.

If you have money to burn, save yourself the hassle of doing business in Cambodia, and just burn it. Use it to light a Barbie or warm the house, or something actually useful. It is hard enough to make a profit, let alone see any returns on the outlay for setting up the project, especially in the hospitality racket.

Either you pay over the odds for somebody else’s dream, along with the stock and furnishings, or you face the nightmare of local contractors fitting out an empty space to look fashionable and hip enough to draw in paying punters.

When the reality of working 15 hour days just to pay bills and eat finally dawns, then it’s time to get out. The best thing is to do is to get down on your bended knees and pray to your god to deliver a sucker who will reply to your ad for a ‘turnkey operation’. Then practice your best shit eating grin and smother down on a greasy salesman charm offensive until the sap wires through the cash. If luck is on your side, then perhaps breaking even is a possibility. 9/10 you lose.

2) Landlords can be assholes.

Khmer landlords have a reputation for not really playing by Queensbury rules. Contracts are routinely broken, rents are hiked up by 100% and more at the end of a 5 year lease, and deposits are rarely returned. Plus clauses state properties must be in ‘original condition’, which, although means ‘shit hole condition’ actually allows them to keep as many fittings paid for and installed by the tenant as possible, and retaining the deposit as the flaking walls have been repainted and the leaking ceiling patched up. Landlords would often rather lose rental income than face.

If the building owners strike gold and are approached by legitimate businessmen from China, who offer silly money to take over the premises to build a hotel-casino complex, you’ll be turfed out on your ear quicker than you can say egg foo-yung. Just ask the guys down in Little Macao.

3) Partners can be assholes.

Choosing a business partner can be tricky anywhere in the world, with the first rule being ‘trust’. However, in the Kingdom of Wonder there are exactly zero trustworthy characters. Zilch, nada, not one.

It doesn’t matter if you team up with a high flying European investor with cash to burn, a fellow restauranteur who wants to go halves on a pizza parlor and jazz club or a meth addict recently washed up from Pattaya, they’ll all end up doing the dirty somehow.

Legal threats, visits from top brass officials, digging up dirt and slanderous half-truths being leaked on the internet right down to selling the business for cash without consultation, or simply robbing as much as can be carried before legging it across the border are just a few ways those you trust will bend you over and sodomise you with a red hot sledgehammer.

Of course any hint of scandal is eagerly lapped up by the circling gossip-vultures who make up the majority of fellow expats, who like nothing more than to wallow in schadenfreude and revel in the failings of others.

4) Local staff can be assholes.

Labor is cheap in Cambodia. Work ethics can be equally low. Not only do workers receive 27 public holidays a year under National Labor Law, but will also require further days off for:

Weddings

Engagements

Funerals

7/100/365+day funeral ceremonies

Good luck ceremonies

House warmings

Sick relatives

Just ‘busy’

General ‘stomach-aitch’ and ‘head-aitch’.

Much of the working day will be spent glued to a smartphone anyway, with clientele being treated as an inconvenience whenever they have the ill manners to ask for something. Many will have their hands in the till or skim off as many Riel as possible when buying stock from the market.

Staffing problems can be further exasperated by taking on members of the same family, who will close ranks in the event of any dispute, or cover each other’s hides when cash and stock go missing.

Females with a bit of sass may run off with the first white customer to charm his way under her safety shorts, leaving the business understaffed again. Others will relish the provided training, progress well with a great eye for detail before putting all the experience gained into great use by negotiating a local price on a property across the street, bring in the family as helpers and start knocking out the same products at a substantially cheaper rate.

5) Customers are assholes.

Foreigners with cash want good quality and good service, which don’t always skip merrily hand in hand together. Poor teachers, general pond scum and backpackers want everything free. All will use your free wi-fi to leave terrible reviews on Tripadvisor, just for the hell of it. Others will argue the bill or skip it all together. Customers from certain Asian countries may very well use every floor space and furnishing as an ashtray/spittoon and shout a lot. In addition, even not so rarely, somebody might walk in off the street and decide to die on the premises.

6) The ‘Man’ is on your back.

There is a reason for Cambodia being so low down on the whole starting a business thing. Back in the day a hand-painted sign, a few crates of drinks and some furniture in a lakeside shack were all the credentials needed to set up shop. Nowadays it’s a murky world of taxes, business licenses, registrations, staff quotas, work permits, NSSF contributions and other stuff men in uniform seem to make up and enforce at a whim. Shakedowns from various departments are not unheard of, nor are requests for gifts around public holidays. The best thing about these rules and regulations is that nobody actually seems to know anything about them, until they suddenly become a thing, and thus liability is backdated to 1993.

The powers that be might suddenly decide all signage must be in yellow with a flower on, or that everything beginning with the letter P is immoral and has a detrimental effect on the youth, thus illegal to sell. After a national clampdown on pizza and pasta, the law gets forgotten about until the next time a big player’s daughter gets engaged, or when he loses a five figure sum at Naga world.

7) Competition.

No matter what you do, if it works well and others notice you making money, then a string of copycats will pop up in the neighborhood, ripping off everything from your logo down to the color of the staff uniforms. They will change at least one vowel of your registered business name to avoid any confusion over intellectual property rights.

This competition will also pull in the support from family or grab a few teenagers from Prey Veng in a debt bondage scheme, allowing lower overheads to cut costs. The average white tourist knows nothing of this, and would rather buy from a local business than a carpet bagging neo-colonialist who sleeps on a mattress stuffed with dollars made from exploiting the poor natives.

Any complaints will be met with screeching in the streets and a visit from another family member, who just happens to be a high ranking police officer.

In Conclusion

Before the various expat ‘winners’ and Chamber of Commerce members chime in, it is acknowledged that some foreigners have done well for themselves, despite the difficulties mentioned. Yet the great majority does not.

Now, want to buy a bar? Great location, walk in trade, loyal customer base. 3 years left on the lease ($1200 a month), staff (like family) willing to stay on. $33,000, reason for selling- health.

Rent: $43,200

Conservative staff salary: $16,200

Conservative bills: $7200

Tax and ‘extras’: $?000

Purchase: $33,000

That’s at least $100,000 outgoings over the 3 years, without paying yourself a wage. A hell of a lot of beers need to be sold to make a profit. What’ll go first – Your health or your cash?

Last year, I wrote an article bitching and moaning about the U.S. State Department’s stonewalling response to my Freedom of Information Act (“FOIA”) request for documents about a bar fight involving an embassy staffer outside Golden Sorya Mall. That incident was described as follows in the August 2014 edition of Bayon Pearnik magazine:

The Original Response to My FOIA Request

My article discussed that three years after I submitted my FOIA request, the State Department’s FOIA Hearing Officer sent me this rather shameful collection of completely whitewashed documents:

I argued in the article that the State Department’s refusal to provide me with any substantive information about the bar fight violated the department’s FOIA obligations and was quite shameful and hypocritical, in light of how our diplomats continually implore Cambodian authorities to adopt a culture of governmental transparency.

A few months after writing the article, I did what any perfectly sane person with way too much time on his hands would do. I appealed the State Department’s improper response to my FOIA request.

The Appeal

The gist of my 7 page appeal was: (1) there’s nothing private about an embassy staffer fighting in public, (2) no secret law enforcement techniques would be revealed by producing the incident report and photos, and (3) withholding these documents is inconsistent with our government’s regular practice of releasing information when our personnel misbehave, or are the victims of violent crime, in foreign lands.

My appeal was assigned to a FOIA appeals panel of three former U.S. ambassadors:

1. 90 year-old Francis Terry McNamara, who served in the U.S. Navy during World War II before joining the foreign service during President Eisenhower’s first term. He was serving as Consul General in Can Tho, Vietnam in April 1975 when he led a heroic evacuation down the Bassac River at the helm of a landing craft with 300 Vietnamese employees and members their families aboard. They were picked up by a passing freighter after making it to the South China Sea. McNamara later served as ambassador to Gabon and Cape Verde.

2. 77 year-old James F. Mack, an Ivy League graduate (OK, he went to Cornell, but still) and early Peace Corps volunteer who joined the foreign service in 1966 and was promptly posted to our embassy in Saigon working for Ambassador Henry Cabot Lodge. 31 years later Mack was named ambassador to Guyana.

3. 81 year-old William Ryerson, also a Cornell graduate, who joined the foreign service a few days after President Kennedy was sworn in and served in Berlin during Kennedy’s famous visit there. He became an expert on our relations with Eastern Europe, and in 1991 President Bush named him the first U.S. Ambassador to Albania since 1939.

That’s a pretty good panel of accomplished men. They are men of substance, men who devoted their lives to performing essential diplomatic work for the United States, advancing freedom and democracy in difficult and dangerous Cold War hotspots. And now, in their golden years, these three former ambassadors were tasked with reading and ruling on my whiny appeal begging for documents about a knucklehead embassy staffer getting his ass kicked in a bar fight on Street 51.

The Panel’s Response to My Appeal

I am pleased to report that this panel of very wise and super-old white dudes agreed with me and granted my FOIA appeal, for the most part. They released the Local Guard Force Incident Report, which explains that on July 25, 2014 at about 10:55 p.m., an embassy guard posted in at a residence in Boeung Keng Kang 1 encountered an embassy staffer with a serious head wound emitting heavy bloodshed. The staffer explained that “the bad guy hit him and his car at Pit Stop bar #48E0 on Street 51.” He was taken to SOS Clinic for treatment.

The panel also released three previously withheld pages of photos of the incident. Those photos (two of which are nearly identical) were sent to me as poor quality black and white copies on A4 paper. They appear to show a car with a completely smashed driver’s side window as well as damage to the windshield consistent with it having been hit by a can of Anchor or similar object.

Here are even poorer quality photos I just took of these black and white copies with my phone.

The panel decided to withhold the two remaining photos of the incident on the basis of “personal privacy.” I’m guessing these withheld photos show the embassy staffer and his bloody head.

The Bayon Pearnik column mentioned that when the pugilistic embassy staffer initially drove off, locals pelted his car with “stuff.” The photos of the broken window and windshield appear to confirm the veracity of Bayon Pearnik‘s report. The Bayon Pearnik account also mentioned that after the staffer left the scene in his car, embassy SUVs and a K-9 team showed up at the scene of the fight and caused half the customers of Golden Sorya Mall to depart. The Local Guard Force Incident Report does not mention this K-9 team response at all.

The End

As I wrote in my original article:

Look, I’m not naive. I anticipated a bit of gamesmanship and obstruction in response to this FOIA request. I didn’t expect them to just offer up the name of the punchy staffer, or his medical records, or a photo of the ladyboy hookers he was probably sitting with, or anything like that. But I did expect that the State Department would otherwise act like responsible law-abiding grown ups and say “OK, one of our embassy guys was involved in an altercation in a public place, here’s our redacted report showing the date, time and location of the incident along with a general description of what happened and how this incident was totally not his fault.”

Ultimately, after four years, the State Department did the right thing, as I always expected them to do. They produced a brief, self-serving report of this incident stating that “the bad guy” attacked an embassy staffer and his car on Street 51.

I greatly appreciate that the law-abiding grown ups on the State Department’s appeals panel have a better understanding of the department’s obligations under the Freedom of Information Act than the buffoonish hearing officer who sent me the original obstructionist response.

Telephone fraud has been around a long time. The phone offers anonymity between shyster and mark, a separation which makes lies easier to tell and simpler to swallow.

Ever since the 1960’s hard sales techniques have been used by, if not conmen themselves, then those on the payroll.

The first, and perhaps most well-known are “Boiler Rooms”. Often with links to the Mafia, these scams have become synonymous with high-pressure, high rewards and dodgy characters operating from places such as Spain and Thailand.

Although these cocaine sniffing, hard partying westerners are still living it up, and subject to all manner of investigations, internet technology, economic growth and easing of travel restrictions have brought new players to the game.

Less brash, less flash and with a huge recruitment pool, Chinese fraudsters, using what is known as Voice Over Internet Protocol  (VoIP) are operating in such large numbers that entire office blocks and hundreds of staff are regularly getting arrested across South East Asia.

What is VoIP?

In simple terms VoIP means using broadband internet to make telephone calls over a regular telecoms network. Using VoIP transforms your voice into digital bits, and then segments them into separate packets of data that are routed through the Internet and reassembled upon arrival at the other end.

This massively cuts down the costs of making long distance phone calls, and also means that such calls are virtually impossible to trace back to the source.  Numbers can also be ‘spoofed’, so receivers believe that calls are coming from a certain country or locality.

The ‘African Scam’

It was the biggest bust of its kind in Malaysia, and the suspects – 93 Chinese nationals and six Malaysians  were arrested on September 25, 2018, when a luxury office unit was raided in downtown Kuala Lumpur.

The group is accused of offering “shares” from public listed companies in China to lure victims into investing with the promise of handsome returns.

While the majority of the syndicate members worked as “call-centre” operators, some of them had jobs as security guards, translators and even mediators. 21 of the suspects were women.

According to Malaysian Commercial Crime Investigation Department officials, the scam centered on a false stockbroking company, offering dubious shares to the victims in China, locals and the Chinese diaspora across Asia.

Victims were even asked to analyse the stocks using the ‘Tong Da Xin’ app (which tracks share prices in stock markets around the world) before convincing them they could get huge returns on their investments within a short time.

The first few transactions might seem legitimate in order to hook the victims in, according to the CCID director, but then the shares bust, as they were fake.

Posing as a third party entity in buying stocks for the victims, all investments went straight into the syndicate’s bank accounts.

Salary for the call operators was around $600 a month, along with the costs of flights, transport, lodgings and rent for the upmarket offices.

Some estimate that in Hong Kong alone, almost US $2.4 billion is lost to these fake stock scams each year. Almost US $23 million was recently reported to have gone to the scammer syndicates in just 2 months.

The ‘Macau scam’

The term “Macau scam” was possibly coined as it is believed that the fraud either originated from Macau, or that the first victims came from there. However it is unknown whether this is fact or myth.

The scam often starts with a phone call from someone pretending to be an officer from a bank, government agency or debt collector.

The scammer will then claim that the potential victim owes money or has an unpaid fine, often with a very short window of less than an hour, to settle the payment or face “dire consequences”.

These unsuspecting victims will then be asked to make payments to get them off the hook.

With recent clampdowns on corruption, Chinese victims can then be re-targeted for more payments, or face the threat of arrest for committing ‘bribery’ offenses in relation the original payment.

‘Catfishing’

Also known as the romance scam, victims (most often men) are targeted for blackmail. Once a victim is hooked in, threats to reveal the details of steamy online chats to wives, family and bosses leave an embarrassed Lothario no other option than to hand over a sum of cash.

Once on the hook, the victim is targeted over and over in a cycle of rinse and repeat.

Cambodia

Whatever trickery is being pulled in Cambodia, it must be big. On Monday 235 Chinese nationals were arrested by police in rural southern province of Takeo.

Hundreds more at a time have been detained, from all across the country, often in co-operation with police in China. Sadly, although local media are quick to pick up on these arrests, they are less enthusiastic with looking into the hows, wheres and whys.

Cambodian authorities do, on the surface, like to be seen to be tackling the problem, with Chinese nationals paraded past cameras as they prepare to be put on a deportation flight back home, or made to squat in handcuffs with ID cards between their lips.

However, the numbers suggest that this is just the tip of the iceberg, and with the sums of cash being made, these scammers could be around the kingdom for a long time yet.

This is reprinted with permission from CNE.wtf

Last week we celebrated Victory over Genocide Day, with 7 January, 1979 being the day that the Vietnamese military overthrew Pol Pot’s Khmer Rouge regime in Phnom Penh. Here are some photos that we stumbled across, believed to have been taken by the Vietnamese Army Photographers.

For me, the sight that most encapsulated the rebirth of passenger services in Cambodia was the two young children, travelling on a train for the very first time, accompanied by their grandfather or great-grandfather. The looks of awe and excitement on their faces make all the hard work of the team at Royal Railway more than worthwhile.

But then again, that awe and excitement was also on the faces of many of the adult Khmers too. Once we had boarded the train at Phnom Penh , including my scooter in the freight car, my partner, at 37, had that same ‘Xmas morning’ look as those two young children.

While there have been intermittent services over the last few decades, the reality is that it has been 40 years since regular and reliable trains have run here. Before this year, the last passenger train to run was the Phnom Penh to Battambang service, which experienced frequent derailments, in 2009.

To many observers here, the reality of passenger trains returning here seemed a distant hope, and few expected any sort of service before the end of the decade. But Royal Railway, with a 30 year concession to operate the Cambodian Railway Network, has surprised everyone, relaunching the southern railway line passenger services in April 2016. In addition to coaches, there are flatbed cars on which you can load your vehicle for a very small price.

For those of us who have regularly travelled between the capital and Kampot or Sihanoukville, we’ve all experienced those ‘life flashing before you’ white-knuckle moments as the minivan driver overtakes a truck while another lorry hurtles towards you at breakneck speed. We’ve all closed our eyes and offered silent prayers to multiple deities as we see a dog/buffalo/child on bike come rushing onto the road with no awareness of the busy traffic ahead. And we’ve all stretched our legs wearily at some ambiguous halfway point and breathed in the wonderful dust clouds created by passing trucks.

It may only have been operating for 6 months but in that time the service has already improved dramatically. While the schedule still advises that Sihanoukville is a 7 hour journey, the reality is that due to better average speeds now, the train often arrives earlier. Kampot is only around 4 hours’ journey by train which is very comparable to the same trip by road.

Inside the carriages are comfortable enough – and this will also improve as new rolling stock arrives and refurbishments continue – and the passenger areas are air conditioned too so are nice and cool for those expat and tourist sensibilities. Staff have refreshments for sale, and when you reach the first station (Takeo) there are vendors with everything from a hot meal to a toothbrush.

For safety reasons – something that is high on Royal Railway’s priority list – the train goes fairly slow as it leaves Phnom Penh. Many people still live beside the tracks and still haven’t lost their curiosity and excitement even after 6 months. Adults smile, children wave, and tourists get a little glimpse of a side of Phnom Penh they might normally miss.

Once we escape the city the locomotive picks up speed – these days they can get to 65km/h on some stretches; hardly world record levels but given they were only managing around half of that when they started, it is testament to the hard work put in by Royal Railway in improving the tracks and the rolling stock while still prioritising safety. But for me the main highlight – other than the avoidance of road travel – is the chance to kick back and watch the stunning Cambodian countryside as you meander along at a relaxing but steady pace.

We arrived in Kampot on schedule – and that was despite a slight delay in leaving due to adding on an extra freight car to accommodate passengers who turned up with motos but no moto tickets.

With services on the Northern Line (Phnom Penh to Poipet) due to start sometime in the next 12 months, the railway network in Cambodia is truly back on track

From being a familiar face on Australian television, to chiropractor, to drugs busts in Sihanoukville – it’s a pretty steep decline over a couple of decades.  The star of the iconic Australian tv commercials for soft drink Solo, Mark Coutelas, 57, has been arrested by military police in his Sihanoukville guesthouse on drugs charges.

The 57-year-old appeared at Preah Sihanouk provincial court on Tuesday and was charged with the unlawful keeping, transporting or trafficking of narcotics. He is being held in Preah Sihanouk prison and will face trial at a later date.  Court spokesman Lim Bunheng said Coutelas ‘admitted’ to previously being sentenced to two years imprisonment in Thailand for ‘drug trafficking’.

Coutelas was previously arrested in Phuket in 2014 on similar offences, and was sentenced to two years in prison.

After being released, he was expelled from Thailand and seems to have arrived in Cambodia in 2016, setting up a business called Back Pain Solutions, based on his post-television career as a chiropractor.

Earlier this year he posted in his personal Facebook account: ‘Living in Sihanoukville Cambodia at this minute in Phnom Pehn. I LOVE CHANG CLUB!!! I miss you buddy. Me blacklist (sic) for (sic) Thailand 110 years (sic).’

In 2012, a collection of short stories called ‘Phnom Penh Noir’ was released, edited by the highly talented Christopher G. Moore, author of the Vincent Calvino series of books (as well as some very cerebral essays on a number of topics and a few insightful non-fiction books too).

Moore has also just released ‘Memory Manifesto: A Walking Meditation Through Cambodia’, in which he looks back at his own experiences of almost 25 years of visiting Cambodia as well as forays further back in time for the country’s own experiences. You can read a wonderful review of his new book here.

I had revisited ‘Phnom Penh Noir’ a few months back, enjoying the second reading of writers such as John Burdett, Roland Joffe, Suong Mak, Bopha Phorn, and Kosal Kheiv among others when it struck me that there hadn’t been any further Cambodian-based collections of stories since then. The next thought, unsurprisingly, was ‘Well, why not do one now?”

Not long after, a conversation ensued between myself and Mark Bibby Jackson, author of ‘Peppered Justice’ and publisher of Asia-LIFE magazine, and we took the idea a stage further to include a joint competition to try and find two promising Cambodian writers who could be included in the book, with the outright winner also appearing in July’s issue of Asia-LIFE.

As the first entries came in, and as I received submissions from other authors, I realised that the term ‘noir’ was slightly problematic in terms of this collection. Noir is perhaps one of the most contentious descriptions in literature in recent times. Everyone has their own idea of what it means, from the Chandler purists through to the modern offshoots. If we had kept it, there would likely have been an online furore from disgruntled noir fans across the region, beating a path to my door with pitchforks and burning torches. So it was quietly jettisoned with no fuss and the title finalised as ‘Mekong Shadows: Tales from Cambodia.’

The standard of the competition entries was surprisingly high given that the writers were submitting in their second or even third language. But once entries were closed, all three judges were in relative agreement as to the two winners. One thing stood out in the entries we received; there was a lack of male writers entering the competition. Both our winners were not only girls, but also under the age of 20, with our first placed winner being 18, and our second placed writer being 15. It’s great to see that the two schools the girls attend, Liger Learning Centre and Jay Pritzker Academy, encourage creative writing when we normally see emphasis only on STEM subjects. You can read the winning entry here.

One of the other things we decided at an early stage was that all profits from the book would go to a worthy cause. It was Mark who suggested the wonderful Khmer Sight Foundation and I agreed very quickly to his suggestion.

Cataracts are the leading cause of blindness in Cambodia and most of the cases are avoidable. Health Ministry figures showed that in 2007 around 2% of Cambodians suffered blindness in both eyes as a result of cataracts, and more recent figures from 2014 stated that around 5% of the population over five years old had varying degrees of sight impairment (Cambodia Demographic and Health Survey). The good news is that over the last 20 years the prevalence of avoidable blindness has dropped by nearly 70% (The Fred Hollows Foundation). It is still a very real issue though.

In 2015 the Khmer Sight Foundation (KSF) was formed to unify ophthalmology and eye care across the Kingdom, thanks to local philanthropists and to the efforts of ophthalmologists from Australia and New Zealand who regularly donate their time and experience to reducing these figures further and to training young Cambodians. They also arrange scholarships for ophthalmology students to study abroad with the aim of making Cambodia self-reliant.

I’m very grateful for the contributions made to the book from all the writers. We have stories from well-established writers such as John Daysh, John Burdett, and James Newman among others. We also have two excellent contributions from Cambodian writers; Kosal Khiev and Ek Madra, the latter of whom has written Saraswati’s first novel by a Cambodian which is released later this year. There are stories of oppression, of genocide, of love, of hate, a sprinkling of black magic, a couple of forays into The Heart of Darkness, but also a feeling of hope. As with any collection there will be stories you love and stories you dislike; even I have my favourites but it would be unfair to the other writers to single them out. The hardest thing about putting the collection together was deciding the order the stories would go in, a process that saw several changes, but I think (hope) that the final decision is one that sits well with readers.

One of the contributors sent me an email the other day to say ‘well done’ for putting the book together and asking when the next one would be. I cast an eye back at the publication date of ‘Phnom Penh Noir’, thought of the stress of the last few months and answered – with a straight face – ‘2022’.

‘Mekong Shadows: Tales from Cambodia’, edited by Iain Donnelly and published by Saraswati Publishing, launches on August 3rd with an event at the Plantation Urban Resort and Spa in Phnom Penh, and a second event at Bookish Bazaar in Kampot on August 10th. Hard copies will be available at Monument Books and other retailers from August 4th, and the eBook version is available to pre-order now at:
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0749Q5ZGR

Over two years have passed since a brutal killing shocked the relaxed residents of Otres. With the prime suspect recently released without charge and the investigation seemingly closed in both Cambodia and Russia, will we ever know who murdered Denis Goncharov?

When Denis Goncharov’s butchered body was discovered floating in a shallow ditch some 400m from Sihanoukville’s popular Otres Beach on July 19 2015, police quickly identified their prime suspect – the man’s best friend and business partner, Dmitry Sidorov.

The details of this horrific killing shocked the coastal community that was already reeling from a recent surge in violent crime and unrest linked to feuding Russian gangs.

Goncharov had been the victim of a frenzied knife attack that allegedly began while he was still riding his motorcycle. Police allege that the attacker was his passenger, and began knifing him as they travelled together.

Prime Suspect Flees Cambodia

The 29-year-old IT expert was stabbed and slashed 34 times in the back, before the killer also hacked at his throat in what one police officer said was an attempt to decapitate the victim.

Police in Sihanoukville immediately began to focus their investigation on Goncharov’s long-time friend and new business associate, Sidorov.

Some friends and relatives said they had become involved in a bitter business dispute and had been taking drugs together the night of the murder. An arrest warrant was issued and the hunt was on.

The prime suspect, however, acted even swifter than the cops. Within hours he had fled to Phnom Penh, and then to the Thai capital Bangkok, before catching a flight and returning home to Russia.

Cambodian authorities issued an Interpol arrest warrant for their fugitive and Russian police later captured and remanded the suspect in St. Petersburg on suspicion of murder.

Released Without Charge in Russia

Sidorov would be held in a Russian prison in his home city of Petrozavodsk facing murder charges for just over a year.

In the spring of 2017, he is released without charge as Russian prosecutors admit that the case against him has fallen apart.

With Sidorov’s release in Russia, and no other suspects in Cambodia, the killer who butchered Denis Goncharov in Sihanoukville seemingly remains free.

According to reports and statements from prosecutors and investigators in Russia, authorities had worked for over a year to build a case for conviction against Sidorov, but they allege that Cambodian authorities had failed to respond to all of their questions and requests for material linked to the case.

Back in 2015, Cambodian police admitted that they didn’t even know that Sidorov had been arrested in Russia. Some senior police officials couldn’t even remember the names of the victim and his alleged attacker.

Sidorov Innocent? 

According to Dmitry Sidorov, he and Goncharov had been best friends since school and he was shocked and disturbed to learn of his murder upon his return to his motherland. Upon discovering he was a prime suspect and being hunted by police, he was appalled.

His flights to Thailand and later to Russia on the day Goncharov’s body would be found had always been planned, he says, although it’s not known if he showed evidence of this to prosecutors.

Sidorov says that his family and friends were well aware of his travel plans and the theory that he had quickly decided to flee the country as Cambodian police hunted him is false.

He says that the two close friends spent the evening of July 18 together, drinking and smoking marijuana on Otres beach. He admits they shared a motorcycle on the way there, but says that they had parted ways on different motorcycles that evening. This claim, like many of Sidorov’s, also hasn’t been independently verified.

The following morning, attempting to locate his friend to say goodbye, Sidorov claims that Goncharov couldn’t be located. With a flight to catch, he left Sihanoukville just as a gruesome discovery was made and a murder investigation started.

Sidorov and his family and supporters argue that there were no business disagreements between the two of them, and no animosity at all that could trigger such a violent event. They also argue that there is no real evidence of his guilt, an argument that Russian authorities seemed to eventually agree with.

The family of Goncharov meanwhile – including his Chinese widow who lived with the two men in Cambodia – continue to allege that Sidorov had the motive and means to butcher his oldest friend, was also the last person to see him alive and fled the country for the safety of Russia after committing the horrific murder.

Whatever the truth in this murder case, with Sidorov released without charge, the prosecution abandoned in Russia and no open investigation in Cambodia, the killer of Denis Goncharov remains free and justice continues to elude his family and friends.

Jack Laurenson is a British writer and editor who previously lived in Cambodia and reported for a national newspaper here. He’s now based in Ukraine. He has posted the first part of this story on his new blog, here:

https://jacklaurenson.wordpress.com/2017/11/12/the-russian-in-the-river-the-murder-of-denis-goncharov/

It is an indisputable fact that Cambodians love their beer. Whether it’s a simple get-together between friends or a lavish wedding ceremony, it seems that there is always an occasion to crack a can, pour into an ice filled glass and ch’oul moy with fellow drinkers.

For a relatively small country, Cambodia has more than its fair share of home brewed beverages, from recognised international brands, such as Tiger and Heineken, regional tipples like ABC and Anchor, to the local favourite tipples of Angkor, Cambodia and Black Panther.

Whilst the current trend turns to man-bun sporting, bearded millennials sipping craft ale in ironic drinking horns, formulated using micro-brewing techniques, the staple part of the vast majority of locals (and foreigners) drinking is from the cheap and readily available cans, bottles and kegs of commercial grade ‘swill’. Who doesn’t enjoy formaldehyde after a hard day in Cambodia?

Cambodian Breweries

As the standard of living improves across the region, luxury goods, such as relatively expensive imported beers have become widespread, but there are four major breweries knocking out in Cambodia.

The largest and oldest is the Angkor Brewery facility, in Sihanoukville. Designed by the late legendary Khmer architect Vann Molyvann, and officially opened in 1965 by the then Prince Sihanouk, the plant was closed in 1975 due to the on-going civil war.  Taken over by the Malaysian company Cambrew Ltd in 1991, the refurbished factory was once again pumping out beer the following year. Danish brewing giant Carlsberg now controls a 50% stake in the firm.

Another major European company, Heineken, also control a 50% stake in the country’s second biggest beer supplier- Cambodia Brewery Ltd (CBL), based in Phnom Penh.

Across town is the only Cambodian owned brewery and relative new kid on the beer block, with production beginning in 2011, The Khmer Brewery, from Khmer Beverages Ltd.

The most recent addition is the German branded Ganzberg, which, thanks to heavy promotion is also a common sight in every province.

These four suppliers produce the most recognised and heavily imbibed amber nectar in the kingdom, so which are from where?

Beers- the 5%ers

The most successful brand produced by Cambrew is their signature Angkor beer. Slightly darker than the pilsner style of its rivals, Angkor is the most ubiquitous ’50 cent Happy Hour’ draught on offer in bars. Although the famous ‘My Country, My Beer’ slogan has been slightly altered, Angkor still claims to be Cambodia’s best selling beer, mainly due to the volume it seems to give away along the riverside in Phnom Penh and the ‘Happy All Day Hour- 50 cent Draft’- which have been causing singlet wearing sexpats and TEFLers alike to forget to extend their visas since shortly after UNTAC rolled out the country.

Taste- **

Quaffability- **

Value- ****

Hangover- *****

Comments: Cheap piss water with a full bodied flavour. Has traditionally had the distinction of giving drinkers a hangover before finishing the glass, although improvements can be noted since Carlsberg has been invovled.

The biggest competitor to Angkor is Anchor Smooth (pronounced An-choor), from CBL. Whilst some would complain it lacks flavour, it is probably the most favoured brew of choice for foreigners, largely due to its ease of drinking uncountable numbers of cold cans on a typically hot day. For the hangover alone, it’s worth the extra 25-50c in a bar. This is also the brew of choice for the Hash House Harriers drinking group.

Taste- ****

Quaffability- ****

Value- ***

Hangover- **

Comments: Light, easy to consume pilsner, lacking in taste other than aluminium.

The third mainstay of the main beers is Cambodia, another pale pilsner, but with a little more flavour than Anchor. Ring pull promotions- from free cans (around 1 in 5 is another can) to motorcycles make Cambodia beer a big seller, in both cities and provinces. Many a session has been extended as another half box is collected from the ‘gift’ pulls, and enough 500r have been collected for the ‘free’ cans.

Taste- ***

Quaffability- ****

Value- *****

Hangover- ***

Comments: Similar enough to Anchor, with a soupçon more metallic bite. Worth it for the winners. It will be interesting to see how long the pull tabs will stay in existence, as many Western countries have already banned them, and it’s increasingly difficult to find production of them.

Coming in at fourth amongst the 5% crowd is German recipe pilsner, Ganzberg, which although seen everywhere and with heavy, and often stupid marketing, still isn’t as popular as the big 3, despite the prizes on offer (free cans around 1 in 6). Most expats seem to reject it outright, but plenty of people must be drinking it, somewhere out there. Having been stuck with a few cases, we can confirm that after about the 5^th or 6^th ice cold can, the negative Gnaztyburg vibes slip away into a woozy feeling of elation and increased self-esteem on a karaoke microphone. The hangovers are bad.

Taste- **

Quaffability- **

Value- ****

Hangover- *****

Comments: Mix the worst parts of Angkor, Anchor and Cambodia together, let it mellow and remove the good parts. Best served ice cold.

The Budgeteers

Another CBL beer is Crown, which at 4.5% packs less of a punch than Anchor, but is a few dollars cheaper on a case of 24, so popular amongst rural Khmer drinkers. The trouble is that it’s watery, and made even more so when consumed on ice, as is the habit out in the Boondocks. Crown also seems to lose is fizz quite quickly, and watery, flat beer makes me vomit; not from the alcohol, but watery and flat beer upsets my delicate gag reflex (the same happens when somebody else starts puking or when a shitty nappy is anywhere close by) – I’d be terrible at gay porn scenes. On the plus side, whenever any Cambodian labourers are doing work on your property, it is customary etiquette to fork out for a box of beer at the end of the week/job. Crown is perfect as it is cheap and there is less worry about them getting home safely that evening on a moto with no headlights.

Taste- **

Quaffability- **

Value- *****

Hangover- ****

Comments: Weaker and and more watery than Sam Rainsy’s resolve. A driving beer.

The king of provincial beers must be the notorious Klang. Better known as domrei, or elephant, the 6% brew not only packs a punch, but is also considerably cheaper than most other offerings in the countryside. Whilst the slightly chemical taste might put of the connoisseur, after a few cans it goes down quicker than your mum on a first date. After flying high like superman on a mix of ethanol, hops and methamphetamine precursors, the elephant comes crashing in the next day, often with sick on the floor, turds like treacle and a mighty klangover.

Taste- **

Quaffability- ***

Value- *****

Hangover- *****

Comments: Without a doubt wears the crown of the khets. Your brain, sphincter and liver will hate you, but who cares when, for a few sweet hours,  you are the lizard king?

The Stouts

Whilst lager-type beers are undoubtedly refreshing, the market for strong, black and malty stouts is huge in Cambodia.

The go-to for middle-class locals is ABC stout.  An 8% black beer, brewed by CBL, and at around 3x the price of a regular beer, is as much a status symbol as a drink. Often seen being drunk by uniformed police officers at 7am, it is the breakfast, lunch and dinner of champions, despite it being relatively expensive and not actually that nice. Whilst difficult to knock back quickly, ABC does pack a punch when compared with the girly lagers.

Taste- ***

Quaffability- *

Value- **

Hangover- ****

Comments: Fool your boss/father in law/local authorities into thinking you are richer, more suave and sophisticated than you really are by arriving at any social occasion with a box of ABC. They’ll all be too busy getting rat arsed on the freebies that they wouldn’t even notice that you have the alcohol tolerance of a teenage Mormon.

Cambrew have two brands of stout out. The 8% Angkor Extra Stout is only available in 330ml and 640ml bottles, and can occasionally be found on tap. Although not too bad, it will always be the poorer cousin of ABC.

Taste- ***

Quaffability- *

Value- ***

Hangover- ****

Comments: It’s a strong beer, but won’t cut no respect in the hood. Plus nobody takes the empties away.

If Angkor Extra Stout is the poorer cousin of ABC, then Cambrew’s second bier noire is unashamedly the trailer trash dwelling, oxycontin smokin’crack whore of the family. Black Panther gets you more fucked up than a blue eyed 10 year old at a priest convention.  It lacks any style and finesse and tastes like a failed homebrew experiment mixed with paint thinners, but at 50 cents a tin, offers a respite from reality for the poor, wretched,  downtrodden and overstayed huddled masses. It’s also a good cooking ingredient for beef, or so I tell the wife when pouring half a can into a wok with frying onions, then shotting the rest back in one, warm.

Taste- **

Quaffability- **

Value- ****

Hangover- *****

Comments: Not for pregnant women, children, those suffering from heart problems, lightweights or poofs.

The budget stout from CBL’s parent company, Asia-Pacific Breweries is a slightly weaker 6.5% Crown Stout- which is essentially the same as Crown, only blacker and stronger. If you’re going to ruin you renal functions and puke blood, with cheap Cambodian stouts, you might as well do it properly with an 8% beverage, rather than pussyfoot around with this one. Crown Stout tastes a bit like burnt rice was used in the brewing process.

Taste- *

Quaffability- *

Value- ****

Hangover- ****

Comments: Why bother summoning Mammon when you can get the direct line to Beelzebub?

Not to be outdone, Khmer Beverages (Cambodia) have begun to produce a dark brew, Barrley Black. It has some adverts making it look all upmarket, but to be honest, I haven’t actually tried any.

International

With further international investment and production capacity growing, international brands, such as Tiger and Heineken are now being produced in Cambodia for local consumption, as well as export. With other smaller breweries, such as Kingdom and Phnom Penh Brewery competing for a pint-sized place in the market, it is easy to see why Cambodians are the region’s heaviest beer swillers and life expectancy for locals and expats alike is pretty low.

Cambodia is changing. On the way out are the wretched, the desperate, the runaways, alkies and deathpats. They don’t suit the new ‘developed’ status that the country now is hell-bent on portraying, albeit fairly unsuccessfully. Out with the beer guts proudly displayed protruding from wife-beater vests! Out with the flip-flops/sandles/thongs! Out with the Walkabout – tear down that Mall!

In with the Chinese and their discreet KTV clubs and restaurants of garish neon, for they shall bring investment and casinos. And they shall inherit the earth, until the debt bubble bursts and the paper tiger collapses like a gambling house of Sihanoukville playing cards.

But white folk aren’t banned, there are still plenty about; it is merely the demographics which are shifting. When the streets were rough, mean and paved with holes, and one could rent the Jacuzzi suite on Rue Pasteur along with 3 Viet hookers dressed in ball gowns, the very idea of a man-bun sporting, waistcoat wearing digital nomad quaffing deconstructed lattes from an ironic drinking horn would have been as alien a concept as 24 hour electricity, work permits or 4g internet.

Of course, your average English teacher or drunk on a budget couldn’t afford one of the thousands of shoddy looking condos springing up like prefab concrete triffids, nor would they be able to spunk a few grand playing baccarat in a windowless cavern. And whilst the sales of second hand Hondas would remain stable, the luxury car market would stagnate.

Backpacker orientated businesses are eagerly trying to sell up for health reasons, or are pushed from town to town by a tsunami of apartment swallowing Sino casino staff and VOIP scammers. TEFL jobbers are increasingly jumping the border over to Vietnam (even Jewsbury’s got work over there FFS), whilst their more well at heel brethren are busy sipping mango daiquiris on the rooftop of Rosewood- or scoffing down swan truffle canapés, hand crafted by an artisan who once worked in a Michelin star restaurant.

Yet Phnom Penh is not downtown Tokyo, trendy Soho or cultured Paris. It’s still an absolute shithole, albeit with a face-lift akin to a dodgy botox injection administered by an unqualified beautician in a back street plastic surgery-cum-abortion clinic. The city is a turd, which can never be polished, or at least not for a long time yet.

So what of the masses? Where should they head, now that the dens of iniquity are undergoing gentrification along Street 51? Most of Street 172 and Bogan bars like Fuel hang on as refuges to the bottom-feeder, but for how long, nobody knows. There are, however, the final strongholds, the last bastions of day time drunks on a budget and they are still to be found across the city. These are the Mini-Marts, and long may they continue.

A good Mini-Mart should offer the following to their clientele- a range of cold beers, cigarettes, snacks and outside seating and not have a strict dress code. Sexual performance medicines, prophylactic sheaths, sanitary products, 24 hour opening and toilet facilities are, of course, a bonus.

There are local institutions, like Neil’s 24 Hour on Street 136, Smile Marts and clones with names like Panda,  Llama, Kiwi, and even now the new kid on the block, US franchise 7-11 (not to be confused with 9-11, which has been open for years, seemingly without realizing the irony).

So, as the Writer’s Page of Khmer440 is gentrified by articles about poncey paint and pinot, or baller banquets in Bangkok (and, please nobody mention fucking Bouchan or Sonoma), the gauntlet was thrown down to find the finest mini-mart in town.

Review Time- Camko Mart *****

Location: Located on Angkor Boulevard at the northern fringes of Toul Kork, the Camko Mart, a focal point for the disappointing utopian dream that is Camko City, isn’t the easiest mart to get to. This shouldn’t put you off, as it keeps away the riff-raff. Along this well built, but barely used modern highway, oriental gentleman in mid-life crisis mode ride expensive carbon framed mountain bikes, replete in their finest lycra livery. Across the road is an open expanse of waste ground, no doubt for sale at a ridiculous price, combining the gritty urban setting with the sweet vibes of mother nature. ****

Ambience: The al fresco seating arrangement at Camko Mart is of a higher standard than lesser marts found near the riverside. Stylish faux wicker chairs and circular tables with real glass tops are the essence of high quality marting, putting Camko Mart a cut above the competition. The noise of Mong Rethy Street is a mere murmur in the background, like a new age soundtrack playing at an unobtrusive volume.

The area is particularly popular amongst Koreans and Japanese, and, as one relaxes in the shade, there is the opportunity to people-watch, as families go past, trying to get their spoiled, morbidly obese offspring to get some exercise through offers of ice cream and energy drinks. ****

Selection: Camko Mart has one of the finest arrays of beverages in the city. A well-stocked refrigerator has something for everyone- on my visit I counted many local lagers, as well as Magner’s cider, and imports including bottles of Fuller’s London Pride, Porter and Honeydew ales. At under $2 a bottle for the rare brews, you’d be hard pushed to find better value for money at other, inferior convenience stores.   

There is also a wide range of wines and spirits on offer, which could in theory be drunk on site, or taken away to continue the party.

To the rear of the store is a poor man’s Toys R Us, which, together with the gelataria, makes Camko Mart a family friendly environment where drunken parents can bribe the kids with plastic tat and ice cream to keep them amused. *****

Clientele: Mostly a young, Asian crowd who like to gather in small groups to discuss hot news and mooch free wi-fi from the coffee shop next door.

A lack of girly bars and knocking shops in Camko City means the eye candy is lackluster, so isn’t particularly suited to pervs and lechers, although the odd diamond in the rough may appear unexpectedly. A few nubile Slavic types from the gated community have been spotted doing sports, and there is the potential for Japanese MILF hunters, if that’s your bag. ***

Food: Hors d’oeuvres such as peanuts, dried peas and squid based snacks may be purchased from the counter, however Mike’s Burger House is a few doors down and BYO burgers are not in any way discouraged by the effusive Camko Mart management. ***

Toilet Facilities: A grey area for chaps, as it is easy to nip over the road and give the bushes a sprinkle. There should be somewhere for number 2’s and a place for the ladies to powder their noses. The coffee shop and burger joint are other, emergency options. **

Overall: Although a little off the beaten path for daytime alcoholics, a trip to Camko Mart is a rewarding day out for the true mini mart connoisseur. Genuine marteteers  will take delight with the pleasant, unpretentious setting and wonderfully well stocked fridge, friendly staff and nearby amenities. Camko Mart stands tall amongst the crowd as a place for upmarket lowlifes to have a boozy weekend afternoon. ***** 

Other Reviews (These are 100% real reviews from facebook and Google):

“It is good place for me, always make fresh over there i really love it.”

“I like the designation right there and the view look cool.”

“I like there”

“Nice place! For buy and we can sit outdoor”

“Very busy little mart from lath afternoon for the local people, drink and chit chat..”

“look so nice ..”

According to the World Bank, Cambodia has the following scores out of 190 countries with regards to doing business:

Over all ease of doing business rank: 135

Paying taxes: 136

Starting a business: 183

Dealing with construction permits: 179

Enforcing contracts: 179

This leaves 65 countries which are worse to do business in, admittedly, such as the DRC, South Sudan and Yemen, which may not be the best places to open a vegan café or Elvis themed dive bar in. Yet fools keep hopping on the carousel of certain financial ruin, going round and round until they feel dizzy and sick, then passing the seat on to the next white man with a wedge and poorly thought out business model.

Running a successful business in a place where you speak the language, understand the culture and can nurture a loyal customer base is tricky enough, but trying it in a place where there are several thousand ‘generals’ and a population which still believes in magic scarecrows and burns witches, means you gotta be crazy.

Cambodia itself is detrimental to your health, and working in Cambodia is even more severely detrimental. Owning a business in Cambodia is the equivalent of smoking 5 packs of Marlboro Reds and drinking 5 pints of whisky a day (also known as ‘breakfast’ for some expat barkeepers).  Holidays are an impossible dream, as staff and customers are ready to load up unsecured stock into a tuk tuk as soon as your taxi leaves for the airport. In short, the stress of running a business can lead to alcoholism, peptic ulcers, cardiovascular problems, strokes and insanity. Thus the main reason for selling ‘profitable, turnkey’ operations is due to poor health.

But before you get sucked in by the idea of shelling out $30k on a shop unit in Kampot with 2 years 8 months left on the lease, here is a quickly complied 7 point list of why you should never open a business in Cambodia. None of this is fiction, but hard stone cold facts from real people and real businesses over the past few years.

1) Return on investment.

If you have money to burn, save yourself the hassle of doing business in Cambodia, and just burn it. Use it to light a Barbie or warm the house, or something actually useful. It is hard enough to make a profit, let alone see any returns on the outlay for setting up the project, especially in the hospitality racket.

Either you pay over the odds for somebody else’s dream, along with the stock and furnishings, or you face the nightmare of local contractors fitting out an empty space to look fashionable and hip enough to draw in paying punters.

When the reality of working 15 hour days just to pay bills and eat finally dawns, then it’s time to get out. The best thing is to do is to get down on your bended knees and pray to your god to deliver a sucker who will reply to your ad for a ‘turnkey operation’. Then practice your best shit eating grin and smother down on a greasy salesman charm offensive until the sap wires through the cash. If luck is on your side, then perhaps breaking even is a possibility. 9/10 you lose.

2) Landlords can be assholes.

Khmer landlords have a reputation for not really playing by Queensbury rules. Contracts are routinely broken, rents are hiked up by 100% and more at the end of a 5 year lease, and deposits are rarely returned. Plus clauses state properties must be in ‘original condition’, which, although means ‘shit hole condition’ actually allows them to keep as many fittings paid for and installed by the tenant as possible, and retaining the deposit as the flaking walls have been repainted and the leaking ceiling patched up. Landlords would often rather lose rental income than face.

If the building owners strike gold and are approached by legitimate businessmen from China, who offer silly money to take over the premises to build a hotel-casino complex, you’ll be turfed out on your ear quicker than you can say egg foo-yung. Just ask the guys down in Little Macao.

3) Partners can be assholes.

Choosing a business partner can be tricky anywhere in the world, with the first rule being ‘trust’. However, in the Kingdom of Wonder there are exactly zero trustworthy characters. Zilch, nada, not one.

It doesn’t matter if you team up with a high flying European investor with cash to burn, a fellow restauranteur who wants to go halves on a pizza parlor and jazz club or a meth addict recently washed up from Pattaya, they’ll all end up doing the dirty somehow.

Legal threats, visits from top brass officials, digging up dirt and slanderous half-truths being leaked on the internet right down to selling the business for cash without consultation, or simply robbing as much as can be carried before legging it across the border are just a few ways those you trust will bend you over and sodomise you with a red hot sledgehammer.

Of course any hint of scandal is eagerly lapped up by the circling gossip-vultures who make up the majority of fellow expats, who like nothing more than to wallow in schadenfreude and revel in the failings of others.

4) Local staff can be assholes.

Labor is cheap in Cambodia. Work ethics can be equally low. Not only do workers receive 27 public holidays a year under National Labor Law, but will also require further days off for:

Weddings

Engagements

Funerals

7/100/365+day funeral ceremonies

Good luck ceremonies

House warmings

Sick relatives

Just ‘busy’

General ‘stomach-aitch’ and ‘head-aitch’.

Much of the working day will be spent glued to a smartphone anyway, with clientele being treated as an inconvenience whenever they have the ill manners to ask for something. Many will have their hands in the till or skim off as many Riel as possible when buying stock from the market.

Staffing problems can be further exasperated by taking on members of the same family, who will close ranks in the event of any dispute, or cover each other’s hides when cash and stock go missing.

Females with a bit of sass may run off with the first white customer to charm his way under her safety shorts, leaving the business understaffed again. Others will relish the provided training, progress well with a great eye for detail before putting all the experience gained into great use by negotiating a local price on a property across the street, bring in the family as helpers and start knocking out the same products at a substantially cheaper rate.

5) Customers are assholes.

Foreigners with cash want good quality and good service, which don’t always skip merrily hand in hand together. Poor teachers, general pond scum and backpackers want everything free. All will use your free wi-fi to leave terrible reviews on Tripadvisor, just for the hell of it. Others will argue the bill or skip it all together. Customers from certain Asian countries may very well use every floor space and furnishing as an ashtray/spittoon and shout a lot. In addition, even not so rarely, somebody might walk in off the street and decide to die on the premises.

6) The ‘Man’ is on your back.

There is a reason for Cambodia being so low down on the whole starting a business thing. Back in the day a hand-painted sign, a few crates of drinks and some furniture in a lakeside shack were all the credentials needed to set up shop. Nowadays it’s a murky world of taxes, business licenses, registrations, staff quotas, work permits, NSSF contributions and other stuff men in uniform seem to make up and enforce at a whim. Shakedowns from various departments are not unheard of, nor are requests for gifts around public holidays. The best thing about these rules and regulations is that nobody actually seems to know anything about them, until they suddenly become a thing, and thus liability is backdated to 1993.

The powers that be might suddenly decide all signage must be in yellow with a flower on, or that everything beginning with the letter P is immoral and has a detrimental effect on the youth, thus illegal to sell. After a national clampdown on pizza and pasta, the law gets forgotten about until the next time a big player’s daughter gets engaged, or when he loses a five figure sum at Naga world.

7) Competition.

No matter what you do, if it works well and others notice you making money, then a string of copycats will pop up in the neighborhood, ripping off everything from your logo down to the color of the staff uniforms. They will change at least one vowel of your registered business name to avoid any confusion over intellectual property rights.

This competition will also pull in the support from family or grab a few teenagers from Prey Veng in a debt bondage scheme, allowing lower overheads to cut costs. The average white tourist knows nothing of this, and would rather buy from a local business than a carpet bagging neo-colonialist who sleeps on a mattress stuffed with dollars made from exploiting the poor natives.

Any complaints will be met with screeching in the streets and a visit from another family member, who just happens to be a high ranking police officer.

In Conclusion

Before the various expat ‘winners’ and Chamber of Commerce members chime in, it is acknowledged that some foreigners have done well for themselves, despite the difficulties mentioned. Yet the great majority does not.

Now, want to buy a bar? Great location, walk in trade, loyal customer base. 3 years left on the lease ($1200 a month), staff (like family) willing to stay on. $33,000, reason for selling- health.

Rent: $43,200

Conservative staff salary: $16,200

Conservative bills: $7200

Tax and ‘extras’: $?000

Purchase: $33,000

That’s at least $100,000 outgoings over the 3 years, without paying yourself a wage. A hell of a lot of beers need to be sold to make a profit. What’ll go first – Your health or your cash?

Last year, I wrote an article bitching and moaning about the U.S. State Department’s stonewalling response to my Freedom of Information Act (“FOIA”) request for documents about a bar fight involving an embassy staffer outside Golden Sorya Mall. That incident was described as follows in the August 2014 edition of Bayon Pearnik magazine:

The Original Response to My FOIA Request

My article discussed that three years after I submitted my FOIA request, the State Department’s FOIA Hearing Officer sent me this rather shameful collection of completely whitewashed documents:

I argued in the article that the State Department’s refusal to provide me with any substantive information about the bar fight violated the department’s FOIA obligations and was quite shameful and hypocritical, in light of how our diplomats continually implore Cambodian authorities to adopt a culture of governmental transparency.

A few months after writing the article, I did what any perfectly sane person with way too much time on his hands would do. I appealed the State Department’s improper response to my FOIA request.

The Appeal

The gist of my 7 page appeal was: (1) there’s nothing private about an embassy staffer fighting in public, (2) no secret law enforcement techniques would be revealed by producing the incident report and photos, and (3) withholding these documents is inconsistent with our government’s regular practice of releasing information when our personnel misbehave, or are the victims of violent crime, in foreign lands.

My appeal was assigned to a FOIA appeals panel of three former U.S. ambassadors:

1. 90 year-old Francis Terry McNamara, who served in the U.S. Navy during World War II before joining the foreign service during President Eisenhower’s first term. He was serving as Consul General in Can Tho, Vietnam in April 1975 when he led a heroic evacuation down the Bassac River at the helm of a landing craft with 300 Vietnamese employees and members their families aboard. They were picked up by a passing freighter after making it to the South China Sea. McNamara later served as ambassador to Gabon and Cape Verde.

2. 77 year-old James F. Mack, an Ivy League graduate (OK, he went to Cornell, but still) and early Peace Corps volunteer who joined the foreign service in 1966 and was promptly posted to our embassy in Saigon working for Ambassador Henry Cabot Lodge. 31 years later Mack was named ambassador to Guyana.

3. 81 year-old William Ryerson, also a Cornell graduate, who joined the foreign service a few days after President Kennedy was sworn in and served in Berlin during Kennedy’s famous visit there. He became an expert on our relations with Eastern Europe, and in 1991 President Bush named him the first U.S. Ambassador to Albania since 1939.

That’s a pretty good panel of accomplished men. They are men of substance, men who devoted their lives to performing essential diplomatic work for the United States, advancing freedom and democracy in difficult and dangerous Cold War hotspots. And now, in their golden years, these three former ambassadors were tasked with reading and ruling on my whiny appeal begging for documents about a knucklehead embassy staffer getting his ass kicked in a bar fight on Street 51.

The Panel’s Response to My Appeal

I am pleased to report that this panel of very wise and super-old white dudes agreed with me and granted my FOIA appeal, for the most part. They released the Local Guard Force Incident Report, which explains that on July 25, 2014 at about 10:55 p.m., an embassy guard posted in at a residence in Boeung Keng Kang 1 encountered an embassy staffer with a serious head wound emitting heavy bloodshed. The staffer explained that “the bad guy hit him and his car at Pit Stop bar #48E0 on Street 51.” He was taken to SOS Clinic for treatment.

The panel also released three previously withheld pages of photos of the incident. Those photos (two of which are nearly identical) were sent to me as poor quality black and white copies on A4 paper. They appear to show a car with a completely smashed driver’s side window as well as damage to the windshield consistent with it having been hit by a can of Anchor or similar object.

Here are even poorer quality photos I just took of these black and white copies with my phone.

The panel decided to withhold the two remaining photos of the incident on the basis of “personal privacy.” I’m guessing these withheld photos show the embassy staffer and his bloody head.

The Bayon Pearnik column mentioned that when the pugilistic embassy staffer initially drove off, locals pelted his car with “stuff.” The photos of the broken window and windshield appear to confirm the veracity of Bayon Pearnik‘s report. The Bayon Pearnik account also mentioned that after the staffer left the scene in his car, embassy SUVs and a K-9 team showed up at the scene of the fight and caused half the customers of Golden Sorya Mall to depart. The Local Guard Force Incident Report does not mention this K-9 team response at all.

The End

As I wrote in my original article:

Look, I’m not naive. I anticipated a bit of gamesmanship and obstruction in response to this FOIA request. I didn’t expect them to just offer up the name of the punchy staffer, or his medical records, or a photo of the ladyboy hookers he was probably sitting with, or anything like that. But I did expect that the State Department would otherwise act like responsible law-abiding grown ups and say “OK, one of our embassy guys was involved in an altercation in a public place, here’s our redacted report showing the date, time and location of the incident along with a general description of what happened and how this incident was totally not his fault.”

Ultimately, after four years, the State Department did the right thing, as I always expected them to do. They produced a brief, self-serving report of this incident stating that “the bad guy” attacked an embassy staffer and his car on Street 51.

I greatly appreciate that the law-abiding grown ups on the State Department’s appeals panel have a better understanding of the department’s obligations under the Freedom of Information Act than the buffoonish hearing officer who sent me the original obstructionist response.

Telephone fraud has been around a long time. The phone offers anonymity between shyster and mark, a separation which makes lies easier to tell and simpler to swallow.

Ever since the 1960’s hard sales techniques have been used by, if not conmen themselves, then those on the payroll.

The first, and perhaps most well-known are “Boiler Rooms”. Often with links to the Mafia, these scams have become synonymous with high-pressure, high rewards and dodgy characters operating from places such as Spain and Thailand.

Although these cocaine sniffing, hard partying westerners are still living it up, and subject to all manner of investigations, internet technology, economic growth and easing of travel restrictions have brought new players to the game.

Less brash, less flash and with a huge recruitment pool, Chinese fraudsters, using what is known as Voice Over Internet Protocol  (VoIP) are operating in such large numbers that entire office blocks and hundreds of staff are regularly getting arrested across South East Asia.

What is VoIP?

In simple terms VoIP means using broadband internet to make telephone calls over a regular telecoms network. Using VoIP transforms your voice into digital bits, and then segments them into separate packets of data that are routed through the Internet and reassembled upon arrival at the other end.

This massively cuts down the costs of making long distance phone calls, and also means that such calls are virtually impossible to trace back to the source.  Numbers can also be ‘spoofed’, so receivers believe that calls are coming from a certain country or locality.

The ‘African Scam’

It was the biggest bust of its kind in Malaysia, and the suspects – 93 Chinese nationals and six Malaysians  were arrested on September 25, 2018, when a luxury office unit was raided in downtown Kuala Lumpur.

The group is accused of offering “shares” from public listed companies in China to lure victims into investing with the promise of handsome returns.

While the majority of the syndicate members worked as “call-centre” operators, some of them had jobs as security guards, translators and even mediators. 21 of the suspects were women.

According to Malaysian Commercial Crime Investigation Department officials, the scam centered on a false stockbroking company, offering dubious shares to the victims in China, locals and the Chinese diaspora across Asia.

Victims were even asked to analyse the stocks using the ‘Tong Da Xin’ app (which tracks share prices in stock markets around the world) before convincing them they could get huge returns on their investments within a short time.

The first few transactions might seem legitimate in order to hook the victims in, according to the CCID director, but then the shares bust, as they were fake.

Posing as a third party entity in buying stocks for the victims, all investments went straight into the syndicate’s bank accounts.

Salary for the call operators was around $600 a month, along with the costs of flights, transport, lodgings and rent for the upmarket offices.

Some estimate that in Hong Kong alone, almost US $2.4 billion is lost to these fake stock scams each year. Almost US $23 million was recently reported to have gone to the scammer syndicates in just 2 months.

The ‘Macau scam’

The term “Macau scam” was possibly coined as it is believed that the fraud either originated from Macau, or that the first victims came from there. However it is unknown whether this is fact or myth.

The scam often starts with a phone call from someone pretending to be an officer from a bank, government agency or debt collector.

The scammer will then claim that the potential victim owes money or has an unpaid fine, often with a very short window of less than an hour, to settle the payment or face “dire consequences”.

These unsuspecting victims will then be asked to make payments to get them off the hook.

With recent clampdowns on corruption, Chinese victims can then be re-targeted for more payments, or face the threat of arrest for committing ‘bribery’ offenses in relation the original payment.

‘Catfishing’

Also known as the romance scam, victims (most often men) are targeted for blackmail. Once a victim is hooked in, threats to reveal the details of steamy online chats to wives, family and bosses leave an embarrassed Lothario no other option than to hand over a sum of cash.

Once on the hook, the victim is targeted over and over in a cycle of rinse and repeat.

Cambodia

Whatever trickery is being pulled in Cambodia, it must be big. On Monday 235 Chinese nationals were arrested by police in rural southern province of Takeo.

Hundreds more at a time have been detained, from all across the country, often in co-operation with police in China. Sadly, although local media are quick to pick up on these arrests, they are less enthusiastic with looking into the hows, wheres and whys.

Cambodian authorities do, on the surface, like to be seen to be tackling the problem, with Chinese nationals paraded past cameras as they prepare to be put on a deportation flight back home, or made to squat in handcuffs with ID cards between their lips.

However, the numbers suggest that this is just the tip of the iceberg, and with the sums of cash being made, these scammers could be around the kingdom for a long time yet.

This is reprinted with permission from CNE.wtf