Cambodia welcomes its oil wealth, but will it do more harm than good?

Diplomats fret that Cambodia, with endemic corruption and weak institutions that are the legacy of the murderous Khmer Rouge regime, could slide into the mire of a full-blown kleptocracy. “At this stage we’re all rather nervous,” said one senior Western diplomat. “Suddenly there’s going to be this avalanche of cash. There’s endemic corruption and a weak system of governance with few checks and balances on which these huge revenues will be imposed. We’ve only got two or three years’ leverage.”

Oil revenues offer huge new potential for corruption in a country that cleaves to its communist traditions of secrecy.
Most oil contracts have been signed by the powerful deputy prime minister, Sok An, a close ally of the prime minister, Hun Sen, with the senior bureaucrats and even the finance ministry out of the loop. Aid workers wryly look forward to the days of “Lagos on the Mekong” in a nation of 14m that is already “run like an episode of The Sopranos” because everyone gets their cut. “Cambodia’s like a pyramid scheme of corruption,” said one development staffer in Phnom Penh.

Energy-hungry China is keen to get its hands on the oil. It matched international donors’ cash with a “no-strings” $600m gift last year as two global Chinese oil firms compete for contracts.

“My concern is, the government sees these revenues and think they’ve won the lottery,” said one international aid worker. “Right now they’re saying, ‘bring it on, it’s going to save Cambodia’. They don’t understand our caution.”

Guardian