Aggressive, exorbitant and misleading lending is mushrooming across social media and mobile phone services, damaging livelihoods and the country’s financial stability, the central bank and National Police said on Thursday, pledging legal action against the lenders.
About 400,000 welfare recipients in Australia were wrongly slapped with fines as the result of an automated debt recovery scheme, known as Robodebt, set up by the former conservative coalition government.
The Cambodian economy has recovered to pre-pandemic levels in several areas, but instability around the world threatens its outlook, a World Bank report said today.
A woman who was allegedly confined by a brick kiln owner in Kampong Cham’s Chelea commune was released after her family agreed to pay a $5,000 debt to the owner.
The watchdog group within World Bank sister organization International Finance Corporation (IFC) will assess a wide swath of the Cambodian microfinance sector after accepting a complaint alleging these lenders’ practices have caused social harms, civil society groups announced today.
Overindebtedness was a growing problem in Cambodia even before the pandemic struck. According to the Cambodia Socio-Economic Survey of 2019-2020, the average outstanding loan of $4,435 per household was an increase of around 85 percent compared to 2017 and a significant increase of 339 percent compared to 2014.
Military police shot Pov Saroath in the spine at a land protest in 2019. Doctors initially left open the possibility of recovery, but last year he was told he would never walk again. Meanwhile, last June, soldiers shot land disputant Mom Chantha. He is now more than $1,000 in medical debt.
Residents say they have no employment opportunities in Kampong Speu’s Oral district, forcing them to log a nearby forest to earn a living, but only after paying local officials a bribe.
As the pandemic spreads through workplaces, income loss and mounting debt are shocking households now and could hold longer-term adverse effects for Cambodia’s economy, according to a series of reports.
An investment firm run by a daughter and niece of two deputy prime ministers is suing ex-board members who it claims cheated the company out of $20 million — though some customers say they want the company to take the responsibility for the loss of their investments.
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