Transnational gangs for years have exploited Cambodia’s passports-for-payment scheme. They have used Cambodian citizenship to evade arrest and conduct illicit activities, including founding a $2.2 billion money laundering syndicate in Singapore.
“With new identities, criminals can cross borders freely, set up companies and move assets,” said Jason Tower, an analyst at the government-supported United States Institute of Peace.
When the new citizenships were made public in the royal gazette, it put a curb on criminals and helped researchers and law enforcement track them down, Tower added.
“Now that this data is secret, it is much easier for criminals to use these passports to evade arrest,” he told OCCRP.
In the 61 gazettes issued this year, just five foreigners were recorded as being naturalised, all of them granted their citizenship in late 2023, OCCRP and Singapore’s The Straits Times found.Â
That’s a huge drop from last year when more than 650 new citizenships were announced, with about half of them for China-born individuals. Hundreds of citizenships were also announced in 2022 and 2021, mostly to people originally from China, a review of the gazettes showed.
The Cambodian government did not respond to repeated requests for comments.
The country was hit by a wave of bad publicity when Singapore authorities last year arrested nine newly-minted Cambodian citizens originally from Fujian, China. They were part of a group that laundered more than $2 billion in real estate, gold, jewellery and cryptocurrencies on behalf of the operators of illegal online casinos and scam centres in Southeast Asia. Â
AÂ further seven of 17 suspected syndicate members still wanted by police were also recently naturalised Cambodians, according to an OCCRP tally.Â
In another case, China-born She Zhijiang – who took the Cambodian name Tang Kriang Kai – is resisting extradition from Thailand to China, where he faces charges of running illegal gaming operations. He has argued that China cannot extradite him, because he is a Cambodian citizen.
Cambodia has become a hub for cybercrime in recent years. The online scam industry alone generates an estimated $7.5 to 12.5 billion each year, about half the country’s GDP, the United Nations anti-crime agency said.Â
Cambodia's Law on Nationality offers citizenships in exchange for investments and donations of at least 1 billion riel ($246,000) or 1.25 billion riel ($308,000 ), respectively.
Real estate companies, legal firms and accountancies advertise services to acquire Cambodian citizenship online. A Chinese-language billboard in Bangkok even publicises the citizenship program.
Eight such agencies – including the one that advertised in Bangkok – declined to give information to reporters. They requested written questions but did not respond, or redirected inquiries to the Cambodian government.  Â
Even as new citizenships disappeared from official announcements, the local media outlet  Fresh News reported that a Brazilian boxer named Alexandra Batista de Mendonca was granted Cambodian citizenship on January 13.Â
His citizenship has not been proclaimed in any of this year’s royal gazettes. In the past, new citizenships would be announced about two months after they were granted.
Similarly, there is no record in the gazettes of Japanese football player Mizuno Hikaru’s naturalisation this year, an event recently publicized in Japanese news reports and by his Cambodian club, Svay Rieng FC.
These are just two of the new Cambodians who publicly spoke about their naturalisations – but questions remain about who else has become Cambodian recently, and whether criminals are among them.Â
Pech Pisey of the advocacy group Transparency International said the exploitation by crime groups of the citizenship program was “damaging Cambodia's reputation and scaring investors."
The solution to Cambodia’s crime wave, he added, was not to hide citizenship data but address the core issues behind it.Â
"It is because of ineffective law enforcement," he said.
