Hunsenomics and Its Discontents - Hun Sen's Cambodia - page 132

has been renewed every five years since. 2 In 2005 a Siem Reap tourism operator that tried
to bid for the ticketing contract was knocked back, and officials at the Apsara Authority,
the government's official temple management body, reportedly said they had “no choice
besides Sokimex.” 3
Sokha Hotels is admirably efficient in its handling of the ticketing operation, but
without an open bidding process there is no way of knowing whether the government
might have received a better deal. Son Chhay, a parliamentarian from the Cambodia Na-
tional Rescue Party, has been investigating the Angkor ticketing scheme since the early
2000s. An affable man with thick-rimmed glasses and a lingering drawl from his years as
a refugee in Australia, Chhay says the public remains in the dark about the Angkor ticket
revenues. In 2005 Kong told the local press that 15 percent of ticket proceeds were go-
ing to Apsara, with the remainder split 80-20 between the government and his company. 4
But Sokimex releases no official profit-loss statements. Nor does it publish detailed in-
formation about its contract with the government. “We raise this problem and they re-
spond that [Sokimex] has been doing a good job, so they will keep on doing it,” Chhay
said, sitting in his office at the National Assembly in Phnom Penh, a framed painting of
the temple city gracing his wall. Even today, the amount of money being raised by the
Angkor temples—Cambodia's national treasure and pride—remains a closely guarded
secret.
According to his own investigations, Chhay estimates that about 80 percent of visitors
to Cambodia visit the temples, most of whom shell out for a three-day or seven-day pass.
Even assuming each tourist spends just $30 on tickets, the total annual revenue from the
temples could well approach $150 million. Apsara does occasionally release annual rev-
enue figures—it claimed $51 million was raised from ticket sales in 2012 5 —but without
further details it's impossible to know if this was the full figure, or where this money
ended up. Chhay argues that as much as $120 million could be disappearing into private
pockets. Some of the money undoubtedly goes to Apsara for conservation, staffing, and
park maintenance, but again there's no way of knowing how much. Most major temple
conservation projects are funded from abroad, and Chhay says he has found no evidence
that ticket proceeds have been used for this purpose. “Maybe [Sokimex] pays a couple of
local people to guard the temples—you can see a number of people there—but they pay
them something like $30 a month,” he said. “That's peanuts.”
For Sok Kong, the Angkor ticketing concession is just one part of a sprawling business
empire rooted in the fertile ground where business meets politics. In the 1980s the
Vietnamese-speaking Kong got his start supplying the Cambodian government with rub-
ber products, military uniforms, food, aluminum, and medicine imported from Vietnam. 6
When subsidized Soviet fuel imports were cut off in 1990 he founded Sokimex, which
became the main supplier of fuel to the Cambodian military. 7 In 1996 Sokimex purchased