World Bank Halts Funds Over Evictions

The World Bank has frozen funding to Cambodia, making good on its threat in March to reconsider aid levels to Cambodia in response to the ongoing eviction of thousands of Phnom Penh families from Boeng Kak lake, a Bank official confirmed yesterday…Some 3,000 families have had their lakeside homes flooded with sand or otherwise been forced to abandon land some had lived on for decades in the wake of a high-end real estate project at Boeng Kak headed by CPP Senator Lao Meng Khin. Both the senator’s Shukaku Inc and Erdos Hong Jun Investment, the Chinese firm backing the project with a $2.17 billion plan approved by the government’s foreign investment board earlier this year, have remained silent in the face of the escalating controversy over the forced evictions. Government officials have done the same.