Thread: Chinese courts go after ‘notorious’ Cambodian conglomerate

Sahajak Boonthanakit, a Thai actor, will never forget the day he met Chen Zhi.


“He was very much – I don’t want to make this too dramatic – but very much like a godfather. He didn’t say much, I believe, except hello,” Sahajak recalled in an interview with RFA. “He seemed so powerful.”


Chen, a Chinese émigré, is indeed one of Cambodia’s best-connected tycoons. At the time of the 2018 meeting, he held a position equal to secretary of state as an adviser to Cambodia's Interior Ministry. He later became an adviser to then-Prime Minister Hun Sen and today holds the same position for Hun Sen’s successor and son, Prime Minister Hun Manet, according to royal decrees granting him the roles. His Prince Group conglomerate, which includes real estate, malls, banks and more across Cambodia, has raked in billions of dollars.


To Sahajak, though, the short, pale, goateed 30-year-old was just the enigmatic “money man” financing his latest film and hosting a meal at a Phnom Penh villa overlooking the Mekong river.


After luxury cars ferried the cast and crew to Chen’s home, Sahajak and his colleagues were led to a banquet hall. A large round table seating roughly 20 was laid with fine wines and delicacies, including shark-fin soup, which regularly sells for hundreds of dollars a bowl.


The film they were celebrating was Cambodia’s first attempt at a homegrown, Hollywood-style action flick. “The Prey” centers on Xin, a Chinese detective wrongly imprisoned in a remote Cambodian prison while working undercover to penetrate a violent gang engaged in unspecified but lucrative cybercrimes.


In backing Cambodia’s first big-budget action movie, Chen likely sought to establish himself as a tycoon of consequence.


But it was also a sort of Freudian slip of the checkbook. Chinese police have been investigating whether much of Chen’s wealth is drawn from illegal activities similar to those featured in the film, RFA has learned.

Previously unreported Chinese criminal court judgments dating from 2020 to 2022 describe Chen’s Prince Group as a “notorious transnational online gambling criminal group” that has generated at least 5 billion yuan ($700 million) in illicit revenue. In May 2020, Beijing police established a special task force to investigate the Prince Group, court records show. Since then, there have been at least seven judgments from separate Chinese provincial courts convicting low-level Prince Group or Prince Group-linked employees of gambling and money laundering offenses.


The Prince Group itself and Chen so far do not appear to have become the subjects of a Chinese prosecution. A representative of Prince Group told RFA the company denies all the allegations, which it believes are the result of “impersonation by criminal elements.”


But to understand how Prince Group could draw such scrutiny, it is necessary to look at how Chen transformed from an unknown small business owner in his native China to a multibillionaire Cambodian citizen. Today, he boasts deep connections to Cambodia’s most powerful officials, which may well have protected him and other Prince Group executives — at least thus far.


This is the first of three stories examining how his Prince Group came to rise so rapidly, where the wealth came from and why Chinese law enforcement is looking at it so closely.



A princely rise to power


Chen was born on Dec. 16, 1987, in Fujian, which has for centuries been a hub of international trade. He was “a young business prodigy,” according to a biography posted on the website of DW Capital Holdings, the Singapore fund manager for his personal investments. Before the age of three, the biography claims, he was assisting with a family business in Shenzhen.


Chen’s first solo venture was apparently a small internet café in Fujian’s capital, Fuzhou, according to the website. In 2011, the bio noted, Chen sailed off into the “uncharted waters of real estate development in Cambodia.”


Chen’s business ventures came into sharper focus when he emigrated to Cambodia, where opportunities abound for the smart and well-connected.


His first firm was a Phnom Penh-based real estate company established the year he emigrated, according to bank records seen by RFA. In 2015, he founded Prince and it soon became an omnipresent brand on the streets of Cambodian cities.


Its real estate arm, the Prince Group, played a major role in the transformation of Sihanoukville from a quiet, if seedy, coastal resort to a Chinese casino boomtown. Having seen healthy returns on its thousands of Sihanoukville apartments and hotels, the Prince Group branched out into Phnom Penh condominiums, supermarkets and shopping malls. Within a year of its founding, they began offering banking services as a private microfinance institution. Three years later, the group received its commercial bank license.


As Chen’s businesses were growing, so too was his political capital.

On Feb. 16, 2014, Chen was naturalized as a Cambodian citizen. Naturalization – which requires an investment or government donation of about $250,000 – has become an increasingly popular route for wealthy foreigners, but few have made the personal inroads Chen has. Three years later, a royal decree declared him an adviser to the Interior Ministry. While unpaid, the role gave Chen status in Cambodia equivalent to that of an undersecretary of state.


Weeks after he received that title in 2017, Chen went into business with Sar Sokha. At the time, Sokha’s father was the powerful interior minister. In 2023, Sokha took over the position himself.


Chen and Sokha’s business – Jinbei (Cambodia) Investment Co. Ltd. – was dissolved in 2021, but it was the first of five companies with names featuring the word Jinbei established by Chen and other Prince executives, according to Cambodian business records. Together, the companies formed the Jinbei Group, whose website today boasts of $300 million invested in the Cambodian tourism sector.


Though they are separate entities, so close is the association between the companies that Chinese authorities have called Jinbei a “subsidiary” of Prince in court documents linking the two – a description Prince Group rejects.


Jinbei’s flagship is arguably a seven-story, 16,500 square meter Sihanoukville hotel and casino called the Jinbei, or Golden Shell, in Mandarin. It opened in 2017.


The resort, which boasts 43 gaming tables spread over a 2,000 square meter casino floor, and two V.I.P. saloons, was one of more than 100 casinos to open in Sihanoukville in the years leading up to 2019 – boom years that saw the city feted as a new Macau.


Speaking to Macau Business in 2019, Jinbei’s marketing manager, Victor Chong, attributed this flourishing to the Cambodian government’s “pro-business” stance, under which he said a casino license was issued to anyone willing to pay the $40,000 annual fee.


Online, under the table


Though the laws are not always enforced, gambling is illegal for Cambodian citizens. It was Chinese nationals who made up most of the customers in Sihanoukville’s gambling dens as well as the lion’s share of proprietors.


Throughout the mid- and late-2010s, the gamblers were joined by an influx of Chinese gangsters looking to make quick money as loan sharks and extortionists. Bodies started washing up on the beach. Prostitution, illegal in Cambodia, flourished. Cybercriminals, who had long used Sihanoukville as a base, exploded in numbers. Many scammers targeted their compatriots back in China.


A sense of impunity began to reign with brazen gangland-style shootings in the streets and at restaurants. The intended victims were invariably Chinese, although Cambodians were occasionally caught in the crossfire.


The atmosphere drew China’s ire – but what may have troubled Beijing even more than the upswing in crimes against its nationals was the business model many of the casinos used. Most were hosting online gambling websites targeting customers in China, a clear violation of Chinese law.


Citing the rising crime, and likely bowing to pressure from Beijing, Prime Minister Hun Sen in 2019 outlawed online gambling operations. The consequences for Sihanoukville were nearly instantaneous. More than 200,000 Chinese workers and entrepreneurs abandoned the city, and thousands more were stuck without funds to get home.


The pandemic, China’s tight travel restrictions and its domestic economic struggles have only compounded the problems. Four years on and Sihanoukville’s skyline is a mess. At night, the blinking lights of the few remaining casinos glimmer through skeleton frames of half-finished skyscrapers, abandoned mid-construction.

But if there are losers here, the Prince Group isn’t one of them.


On a visit by RFA last year, Jinbei was still welcoming guests through its doors under a gigantic neon clam filled with lucky red dice. The multi-story Prince Mall, home to luxury goods stores, a videogame arcade and the Prince Supermarket, replete with lobster tanks, still beckoned the odd shopper. And at the heart of the mall’s ground floor a display stand for the group’s real estate arm showcased architects’ models for coastal and metro skyscraper apartments.


Even the Nonni II, Chen’s $24 million superyacht with an onboard home cinema and a disco bar, still could be seen docked at Sihanoukville’s ports from time to time.


What has allowed Prince to flourish while so many competitors saw their bubbles burst? The answer, according to court documents, is crime – on a massive scale.



High-tech money mules


According to court records seen by RFA, Chinese law enforcement began openly investigating the Prince Group in 2020 and, in particular, whether at least a third of its estimated $2 billion investment value came from illegal online gambling operations.


In May 2020, the Beijing Municipal Public Security Bureau created a group called the 5.27 Special Task Force. It was formed “to investigate and handle the case of the notorious transnational online gambling criminal group, known as the 'Prince Group,' in Cambodia,” according to a 2021 court judgment. Prince spokesman Gabriel Tan wrote in an email that this task force “is not related to any activities of Prince Holding Group.” In a follow-up note he said that any explicit mention of Prince within court documents is due to “ impersonation issues.”


The judgment describing the task force – from a district court in Henan – was one of several issued in different provinces against individuals linked to the Prince Group who are accused of money laundering and gambling.


Some of these individuals worked directly for the conglomerate, while others worked for Prince-linked companies, including Jinbei. One judgment describes Jinbei as “a subsidiary of the Cambodian Prince Group” that “has developed a series of gambling software and put it on the Chinese network platform.”


The Prince Group is also accused of continuing to run the type of online casinos Hun Sen banned in 2019, the court documents suggest.


Chinese citizens are allowed to move only $50,000 out of the country each year. Those capital controls would stymie the efforts of anyone trying to run illicit online casinos, such as the Prince Group has been accused of doing.


The solution Prince is alleged to have arrived at, the Chinese courts found, was employing a vast network of individuals to ferry bank cards between China and Cambodia. In all, the task force identified 458 people who had allegedly moved money in this way for the Prince Group.


One such money mule, Guo Caina, was 28 when in March 2018 she was recruited from her hometown of Luoyang to work for Prince in Cambodia, according to the court judgment against her. Her job would be a mix of customer service and bookkeeping, she had been told. Once in Cambodia, Guo handed over four Chinese bank cards in her name in exchange for 1,000 yuan ($140) per card. She quit the company after one day and went back to China but was rebuffed when she asked to have her bank cards returned. By the end of April 2018 more than 140 million yuan ($19.5 million) in gambling funds had passed through her bank accounts, according to the judgment.


Guo pled guilty to being part of a conspiracy to open a casino. She was given a suspended sentence and fined 30,000 yuan ($4,200).

Guo's case is far from unique. The court judgments reviewed by RFA are littered with mules like Guo being convicted for processing gambling funds, so the Chinese believe, on behalf of the Prince Group and Jinbei.


A July 2022 announcement by the Wancang County Court in Sichuan province estimated the Prince Group’s illicit profits from gambling activities since 2016 at more than 5 billion yuan ($700 million).


Multiple attempts to reach Chen were unsuccessful, but Prince spokesman Tan told RFA that the company “categorically denies any involvement with Jinbei Group and the alleged online gambling operations.”


“The references to ‘Cambodia Prince Group’ in the Chinese court documents are likely the result of impersonation by criminal elements,” Tan wrote in an email, adding that the company is “aware of multiple instances where our company's name has been misused by unauthorized entities, individuals and criminal elements.”


He similarly denied that the company had made use of Chinese employees’ bank cards to transfer online gambling funds, calling the allegations “completely unfounded with respect to the Prince Holding Group.” Jinbei could not be reached for comment.



Too connected to jail?


The prosecutions against Prince’s alleged money mules and betting agents are part of a wider war on gambling announced by the Chinese government in 2018. Beijing views online casinos as a national security threat, estimating gambling to be responsible for 1 trillion yuan ($145 billion) in capital flight each year.


In January 2023, a Macau court sentenced Alvin Chau, one of the island’s most successful gaming tycoons, to 18 years in prison on 162 charges, including heading an organized crime group, fraud and facilitating illegal online gambling.


In August, nine Chinese-born Cambodians were arrested in Singapore as part of the city state’s largest ever money-laundering investigation. Prosecutors accused them of operating illegal gambling websites targeting mainland China. Observers noted that the crackdown came one week after Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi visited Singapore, suggesting that Beijing might have been behind the charges – especially since several of the accused had outstanding arrest warrants in China.


The Prince Group may present a more complex challenge for Beijing. The Chinese police and judiciary appear intent on pursuing a case that Prince and its subsidiaries constitute a criminal group. But the names of Chen and other senior figures in the group – many of whom are his uncles and cousins – have been wholly absent from any Chinese court judgments.


Where they remain present, however, is in the political fabric of China’s most reliable regional ally.


When regional heads of state converged on Phnom Penh in November 2022 for the Association of Southeast Asian Nations’ biannual meeting, Hun Sen presented them with limited-edition luxury watches valued at $20,000 apiece. The face of each timepiece was emblazoned with the name of Chen’s Cambodian watchmaker, Prince Horology.

Further afield, in his role as Hun Sen’s personal adviser – a position he has held since 2020 – Chen has accompanied him on a diplomatic mission to Cuba and doled out aid on the government’s behalf to neighboring Laos. He is also a personal adviser to former National Assembly President Heng Samrin and former Interior Minister Sar Kheng. Shortly after Hun Manet became Cambodia’s first new prime minister in four decades, Chen was named one of his 104 advisers. Those ranks give him a rank equal to minister.


Any attempt to charge Chen directly, then, would necessarily implicate Cambodia’s top law enforcement official and embarrass both the former and current prime ministers. Beijing spent decades of diplomatic effort and billions of dollars turning the Hun dynasty into one of China’s most ardent friends.


Sok Eysan, a spokesman for the ruling Cambodian People’s Party, said he could not comment and referred RFA to Cambodian government spokesman Pen Bona, who did not respond to multiple requests for comment.


Cambodian American academic Ear Sophal, who has authored books on Cambodia and China, told RFA it seems unlikely Chen will be heading to prison anytime soon.


“Clearly, someone’s untouchable,” Sophal said. “Is Chen Zhi trying to do something political in China? No. So it's okay, it's just money; his underlings will pay.”

Chinese courts go after ‘notorious’ Cambodian conglomerate — Radio Free Asia

Red flags abound in Prince Group’s offshore dealings

Since its founding eight years ago, the Prince Group has emerged as one of Cambodia’s most ubiquitous brands. Its name touches nearly every corner of the Cambodian marketplace: shopping malls, supermarkets, banks, casinos, apartments, cinemas, office blocks, private jets, pleasure boats, film production, hotels, venture capital firms, ride-hailing services, restaurants and more.


The company’s reach also extends well beyond Cambodia. Its leaders have a controlling interest in at least three companies listed on the Hong Kong stock exchange. Prince Chairman Chen Zhi, an enigmatic 36-year-old Chinese national who rose to become a top adviser to both Cambodia’s current and former prime ministers, owns a quarter of Cuba’s national cigar company, valued at $2.8 billion, as well as a $114 million office building in one of London’s richest neighborhoods.


In total, RFA has identified more than $1.5 billion of assets and investments in 31 countries in which senior Prince Group executives have a stake.


The group, however, has never fully accounted for its wealth. It maintains that its multi-billion dollar growth over the past eight years is due to savvy business practices and what was, until recently, Cambodia’s relentlessly booming property market.


But an RFA investigation that includes court records, banking documents, payment slips and interviews with company insiders tells a different story.


In the first part of our series, RFA examined the Prince Group’s rapid rise, political connections and alleged criminality.


Here we explore how the Prince Group has stealthily moved millions of dollars around the world in a way that experts say bears many of the hallmarks of money laundering.


RFA's investigation has revealed that a company controlled by Chen, Amiga Entertainment, registered in the Isle of Man, is in fact a shell company that uses these suspected money laundering tactics.


RFA’s investigation supports allegations made by Chinese prosecutors that much of the money Prince has used to build its empire was acquired through fraud, including hundreds of millions from illegal gambling and an extensive money laundering network.


RFA has attempted to contact Chen on numerous occasions without success, but the Prince Group disputes the charges against both the company and its chairman. A spokesperson for the company responded to allegations of illegality in Chinese courts by claiming it is a victim of identity theft and that criminals have used its corporate identity to carry out illicit activities.

The wealthy uncle


In December 2018, a company owned by Prince Group founder Chen named Amiga Entertainment applied for an account with the Cayman National Bank in the Isle of Man. The bank rejected the company’s request, despite the fact that by then the Prince Group was a key player in the Cambodian marketplace. A hack of the bank's records 11 months later gives a clue as to why.


Money laundering is the process of making money gained through illegal means appear legitimate. It usually involves bouncing the money through a series of fictitious transactions, often spanning multiple jurisdictions, to give the illusion that it is the product of legitimate business activity.


Emails, transaction records and other documents contained within the hack, which was shared by whistleblowing non-profit Distributed Denial of Secrets, chart Amiga Entertainment’s failed attempt to land an account with Cayman National Bank. The hack showed the Prince Group was unwilling to reveal the source of its money – even when applying for a bank account.


Any time a person or a business applies for a bank account or conducts a large transaction, bank officials are supposed to ask where the money comes from and to verify the claims as best they can. This process is designed to prevent criminals from getting access to the financial system and spending their ill-gotten gains. In the case of Amiga Entertainment, the due diligence carried out by Cayman National Bank shows just how little the mega-conglomerate was willing to share about the source of its funds.


At the time of the application, Amiga’s immediate parent company was an Isle of Man online casino operator named Ableton Prestige Global Limited. An email to the bank by Ableton director John Corteen, which was among the hacked documents, reveals that Ableton’s owners were Prince Group chairman Chen and his wife, Li Caiyun. Corteen included a link to a Prince Group advertisement in the Phnom Penh Post to provide “some details of Mr. Chen’s businesses.”


The bank responded by seeking more information about the origins of Chen’s wealth.


“In respect of Mr. Chen Zhi's source of wealth, Mr. Chen Zhi first obtained a personal loan of US$2 million from his uncle to start Cambodian Heng Xin Real Estate Investment Co. Ltd. sometime in or around 2011,” reads an internal Cayman National Bank file note summarizing the response of Chen’s representatives, dated July 2019.


Chen’s explanation for the origins of his fortune would be unacceptable to most banks, according to financial crime expert Graham Barrow, who spent 25 years working for banks and the wider financial services industry.


“An uncle who lends you $2 million is such a generic statement as to be wholly inadequate for any financial institution to accept because they need to understand the ultimate source of wealth, not an intermediate source,” Barrow told RFA. “It gives the impression that they don’t want anyone to dig too deep into their source of wealth.”


A little over two months after the file note was created, a compliance official at the bank sought more details, in an email dated Oct. 7, 2019. Crucially, she wanted to know the name of the uncle who loaned Chen the $2 million in 2011 and where he got the money.


Chen and his representatives never responded, which is another red flag, according to Oliver Bullough, author of “Moneyland: Why Thieves and Crooks Now Rule the World and How To Take It Back.”


“If someone asks you to explain your wealth and you go away, that’s not a good sign because it isn’t that difficult to do,” Bullough told RFA.


Corteen and Chen did not respond to requests for comment on the issues raised in this story. Emails to the address listed on Amiga's website bounced back with an error message indicating the message had been blocked, while emails to Ableton went unanswered.

Don’t ask, don’t tell


If the mystery funds set off alarm bells, the ownership structure of Amiga may well have rung others.


At the time of its incorporation in October 2018, Amiga Entertainment’s ultimate parent company was the Singapore-registered Infinite Deemarco Pte Ltd. The man listed in Singapore company records as Infinite Deemarco’s owner at that time, a Filipino American lawyer named Henry Yeh, told RFA that he had no idea where the company’s financing came from.


“I was told that it came from China as Prince [management] are all from China,” Yeh said. “They have every right not to tell me or to lie to me as I was just an employee.”


In admitting that he was the owner in name only, Yeh shed light on how Prince Group frequently manages its subsidiaries as a series of shell corporations so that their connection to the group is not apparent from their shareholders and directors. A 2022 report by the World Bank warned that such structures are ripe for abuse.


This “don’t ask, don’t tell” approach to managing billions of dollars is familiar to Kimberly Kay Hoang, a University of Chicago sociology professor who spent 18 months shadowing Southeast Asian investment professionals for her book “Spiderweb Capitalism.” The book reveals the way high-level business is done in the region, allowing politically connected individuals to merge their illicit wealth with legitimate business enterprises.


CEOs like Yeh find themselves “assuming all the criminal and reputational risk and being highly compensated for doing it,” Hoang told RFA. In exchange, they “generally don’t ask questions about the origin and source of funds.” Yeh is not accused of any wrongdoing.


Eighteen months after he founded the company, Yeh transferred his shares to an individual who holds directorships in three Prince Group companies in Cambodia, according to Singaporean and Cambodian corporate records reviewed by RFA.


Ben Cowdock, a senior investigator at Transparency International U.K., also believes Yeh’s description of arrangements at Infinite Deemarco are cause for concern.


“If you have the CEO and shareholder of a company not knowing where their business earns money, they’re either wildly negligent or acting on behalf of someone else,” Cowdock told RFA, having been briefed on Infinite Deemarco's ownership structure. “Those putting their name on official paperwork for a third party is a widely known method of avoiding undue scrutiny from the authorities.”

Slot machines and washing machines


In 2020, Beijing established a special police task force to investigate the Prince Group. Subsequent court cases against low-level employees have determined that at least 5 billion yuan ($700 million) of Prince Group funds are from illegal gambling.


RFA's investigation into Amiga Entertainment sheds additional light on how Prince Group sought to hide where its money came from.


It was during Yeh’s brief tenure as Infinite Deemarco’s owner and CEO that the company incorporated Amiga Entertainment as its subsidiary in the Isle of Man. Yeh told RFA that Amiga Entertainment’s business model was, “to make similar games without infringing IPs [intellectual property].” In essence, to produce cheap knock-offs of already existing video games.


Documents reviewed by RFA show the true business model was more complex.


Amiga Entertainment’s website showcases the games it develops. Each one is essentially a slot machine, with players placing bets in the hope that certain combinations of symbols appear. Such games are legal in the Isle of Man. However, banking records seen by RFA show that Amiga was licensing these games to companies in China, where – outside of the state lottery – all forms of gambling are strictly forbidden.

The contracts specified that the Chinese companies would pay £940,000 ($1 million) a year in exchange for the right to market one of Amiga Entertainment’s games to their customers. Additionally, the Chinese companies would pay 30% of any revenue earned. (Asked about these contracts, Yeh responded, "I don’t know anything about copycat games for millions.")


The twist, according to a former Prince insider who was familiar with the workings of Amiga Entertainment and its parent companies, is that these transactions were fictitious. The insider asked not to be named for safety reasons.


“[Amiga Entertainment] is the one they used for laundering money,” the person told RFA. “They pumped in all the money through here.”


The companies in China were neither utilizing the games nor paying for them, the source claimed. Instead, the contracts signed between Amiga Entertainment and the Chinese companies were used to justify large cash transfers between Southeast Asia and the Isle of Man.


Typically, businesses move money from one area of their operation to another through a bank. But the money sent to Amiga Entertainment came instead from a money services operator in Hong Kong. Also known as remittance agencies, money services operators transfer funds internationally on behalf of customers, who are frequently people or small businesses that cannot access traditional banking. Some, such as Western Union, have become household names. There are, however, thousands of smaller operators across the world, such as the one used by Amiga Entertainment’s purported Chinese clients. Remittance agencies charge far steeper fees than banks, and it is highly unorthodox for a large company to move money in this way. With the higher fees, though, come fewer questions.


“The remittance company doesn’t care where the real source of money is,” the person said.


Copies of remittance slips, contracts and invoices reviewed by RFA bore details that correlated with payments that could also be identified in the Cayman National Bank leak. While Amiga Entertainment never had an account with the bank, a money services operator that handled payments for the company was a client. (Four payments worth a total of $830,000 were identified within Cayman National Bank’s records as destined for Amiga Entertainment Limited all bore the reference CLA0878, which was also the payment reference used on the remittance slips reviewed by RFA.)


“The Isle of Man will ask what’s the reason for the money, so you need a proxy in China,” the Prince insider said, referring to the licensees. In reality, “the money never originated in China,” they added.


Once the money had been remitted to Amiga Entertainment’s account in the Isle of Man, it would begin its journey up through the various layers of the company’s ownership, the source continued.


Corporate records seen by RFA back up the source’s account and indicate that the ultimate destination for the funds would be Chen and his wife’s family office in Singapore. The money would appear as the legitimate profits from the couple’s investment in successful Isle of Man gambling businesses.


An internal spreadsheet of Amiga Entertainment’s finances viewed by RFA suggests that more than $100 million was moved this way.


Transparency International’s Cowdock said the transactions appeared highly suspicious and called on the Isle of Man to investigate.


“If someone is selling licenses for gambling games to a country where this activity would be illegal, and accepts payments outside of usual banking channels, this is a major red flag that needs investigating,” said Cowdock.


The Prince Group’s director of communications, Gabriel Tan, told RFA in an email that the company’s “primary focus lies in investments and developments within Cambodia” and that it is “not involved in the allegations you mentioned regarding activities in … Singapore, Cuba, or the Isle of Man.”


“In all his business dealings, Chairman Chen Zhi consistently complies with the laws of the jurisdictions in which he operates, as well as with those governing him as a Cambodian citizen,” Tan added.


Messages seeking comment sent to the contact address listed on Amiga Entertainment’s website returned error messages, suggesting the company’s servers were not properly set up to receive emails.


Spread the wealth


Despite his success as a Cambodian citizen, Chen and other senior Prince Group figures in recent years have begun relocating their lives from Phnom Penh to the United Kingdom and the United States.


Chen is listed in British corporate records as the owner of a $114 million office block in the heart of London’s financial district and a mansion worth in excess of $25 million on the city’s exclusive Avenue Road.


Another senior Prince executive is the owner of two British companies that own 17 London apartments purchased for a total of $32 million.

Across the Atlantic, three Prince Group executives own mansions in suburban Los Angeles worth a total of $8 million. One of them also owns a 26-meter Sunseeker pleasure yacht docked off the coast of California, along with a luxury car dealership and a sex toy manufacturer in the state, according to California court and corporate records reviewed by RFA.


High-end homes in London and LA are typical trappings of the ultra-wealthy. But a source close to Cambodia's Interior Ministry suggested another motivation for the Prince executive migration: having a place to run to if China's investigation into the conglomerate expands.


“In 2019, the Chinese ambassador told Chen Zhi to cease all criminal acts and not to interfere in investigations into his people,” the source said, asking not to be named as they were not authorized to speak publicly. “The Chinese government has not come to extradite anyone since Covid began, but they will.”

Red flags abound in Prince Group’s offshore dealings — Radio Free Asia

Torture, forced labor alleged at Prince Group-linked compound

Panha has an idea of the horrors that take place within the Golden Fortune Science and Technology Park in Cambodia’s southeastern border town Chrey Thom. He has witnessed what happens to those who try to leave.


“When they recapture escaped workers they beat them until they’re barely alive. I’ve seen it with my own eyes,” Panha told RFA, declining to give his family name. His brother, he said, is head of security at the 15-acre (four-hectare) facility, and Panha has watched him hunt down escapees. “If you don’t beat them they will stop being afraid and more will try to escape.”


While the compound is ostensibly open to the public, and billed as an industrial park, it is surrounded by a 10-foot-high (three-meter) concrete wall topped with barbed wire. Its heavy, metal front gate is manned by uniformed security guards, who bar entry to ordinary visitors.


Built by the powerful and well-connected Prince Group, the facility now counts cyberscam operations among its businesses, according to witnesses, staff and former employees. While the group denies any involvement in the park, it is run by a company headed by Prince executives and bears several other indicators of connections to the group.

Inside, locals allege, trafficked Vietnamese, Malaysian and Chinese nationals are forced to carry out cyberscams. They are part of an enslaved workforce that the U.N. estimates numbers approximately 100,000 people across Cambodia – a claim the government denies.


Fourteen local residents – among them current and former employees working at the Golden Fortune compound – separately told RFA they had witnessed security guards violently subduing escaped workers before returning them to the compound. For security reasons, witnesses requested their names not be used. At least two other Prince Group-linked properties have previously been connected with human trafficking and cyberscam operations, according to local and international media reports.


Prince Group spokesperson Gabriel Tan told RFA that while the conglomerate built the Golden Fortune compound, it did so at the request of a client, whom he declined to identify. Asked about allegations of trafficking and cyberscam operations within the compound he added, “we are unaware of the incident you mentioned.”


Cambodian corporate records suggest that the park’s parent company, Golden Fortune, is run by Ing Dara, a businessman with extensive ties to the Prince Group. He holds directorships in a number of Prince companies, including one cited by the Prince Group’s founder as the ultimate source of his wealth in disclosures to an offshore bank. Ing Dara and Golden Fortune could not be reached for comment.


RFA has previously revealed that Chinese police have established a special task force to investigate the Prince Group’s alleged money laundering and illegal online gambling operations run from Cambodia. In part two of our series, RFA explored how illicit funds appear to be washed and funneled into legal Prince Group-affiliated businesses.


This final installment in the three-part investigation into the company explores allegations that one of its facilities holds victims of Asia’s blossoming cyber-slavery industry.


Dirty jobs


Chrey Thom is a one-road town abutting the Bassac river just a few hundred yards upstream from Vietnam. Like many border communities in Cambodia, the town is thick with casinos built to service foreigners who face restrictions on gambling in their own countries.


A Cambodian government crackdown against online casinos in 2019 forced many to close. In some cases, the empty real estate has been taken over by criminal gangs that force trafficked workers to perform cyber fraud. Such frauds have exploded in recent years, in particular “pig butchering” in which victims are lured into putting large sums of money into phony investment schemes. However, those performing the scams are often also victims held against their will and forced to find people to dupe using various online platforms.


As cyberscam operations have proliferated, they’ve also been found operating in office blocks, apartment complexes and what appear to be purpose-built compounds.

Set on 15 acres of land and surrounded by concrete walls topped with barbed wire, the Golden Fortune facility hosts a soccer field, a basketball court and 18 large dormitory style buildings, all of which were constructed since mid-2019, according to satellite imagery reviewed by RFA.


Metal bars cover the dormitory windows on each of the five floors, suggesting they are designed to keep people in.


Those allegedly imprisoned inside are mostly Vietnamese and Chinese, locals said. Cambodians work inside the compound, too, in security roles. Online Khmer-language advertisements for jobs within the compound seen by RFA called for Cambodians who speak Vietnamese, offering a salary of $600-800 a month on top of three meals a day and accommodation.


Though relatively well-paid, such work is wholly unappealing to 60-year-old Moeun, who asked that her full name not be used. She spoke with RFA reporters while standing in the thigh-high oily water of a drainage canal, catching fish with her bare hands.


“If we don’t do good work and torture they will cut our salaries, so we prefer to come here and catch some fish to get some money,” said Moeun, whose children had worked inside the compound. “Besides working for them, what else can we do?”

Her account was confirmed by a current Golden Fortune employee, who told RFA that disobedient or unproductive workers are detained on the first floor of a building named B1 and violently punished. Many female workers in the complex are forced into prostitution and pornography, the staffer added.


The employee compared the situation inside Golden Fortune to the Chinese thriller “No More Bets,” in which Chinese nationals are trafficked into a Southeast Asia scam compound, where they are abused and forced to help run illegal online gambling scams.


“The problems in there are like what the Chinese movie has revealed,” the staffer said. “Scams and extortion exist in there.”


According to the employee, besides the scams, prostitution and pornography, extortion is another business model. Victims are released only if their families pull together adequate ransom – a common hallmark of scam compounds.


“If ransom was not provided as demanded, mistreatment, beating and electrocution would be used and video clips [about the torture] are sent to the family to see,” the staffer said.


Another local resident, who lives near the compound told RFA that he had seen security guards knock escapees to the ground with a car and tase them with electric cattle prods before driving them back to the compound. He claimed local police are employed as security guards at the compound.


Local Sampav Poun commune police chief Khuth Bunthorn told RFA that he was unaware of any cases of detention or forced labor in his commune.


A former security guard at the Golden Fortune compound told RFA that trafficked scam employees worked 12 hours a day and would usually be sold on to another compound within six to 12 months. The former guard added that while they were no longer employed at Golden Fortune, they would still occasionally hunt down escaped workers from the compound. Local residents told RFA that Golden Fortune doles out $50 bounties for returned escapees.


Interior Ministry Secretary of State Chou Bun Eng, who is secretary general of the National Committee for Counter Trafficking, told RFA that she was unaware of any trafficking cases in Chrey Thom.


A bustling compound


RFA reporters were barred from entering the Golden Fortune compound when they visited Chrey Thom last year, with security guards declining to say why.


Footage posted to social media in September showcases an array of restaurants, massage parlors and even a small hospital within its walled kingdom. Both the videos and satelite imagery indicate it is home to more and higher quality paved roads than the surrounding village. In one video, a billboard within the park can be glimpsed advertising 6,700-square-foot (622-square-meter) villas in Phnom Penh.


The Golden Fortune compound is listed on the official website of Prince Huan Yu Real Estate – a subsidiary of the Prince Group – and its location is pinpointed on its “property distribution map.”

The Prince Group bills itself as one of Cambodia’s hottest conglomerates, with interests in everything from real estate to film production. It was founded a little under a decade ago by Chen Zhi, a politically connected Chinese émigré who became a naturalized Cambodian in 2014. Chinese court documents have termed his conglomerate a “notorious transnational online gambling criminal group” and alleged at least 5 billion yuan ($700 million) of its revenue came from illegal online gambling.


In 2022, a court in the Chinese county of Wancang announced that 45 individuals had been found guilty of establishing illegal online casinos in collaboration with the Prince Group. The announcement listed three locations in Cambodia where this had taken place, among them was “Caitong City,” the Chinese name for Chrey Thom.


The eyewitness testimony related to RFA would suggest that like so many online gambling operations in Cambodia, the Prince Group has pivoted to forced labor.


In a 2022 documentary by Al Jazeera, a victim explained how he had been held captive and forced to scam poor Chinese farmers over messaging apps in a property held by Cambodian Heng Xin Real Estate. That company was founded by Chen; in leaked banking records shared by whistleblowing non-profit Distributed Denial of Secrets, the company is listed as the source of Chen’s wealth. Today, Cambodian Heng Xin Real Estate has two directors, both of whom have extensive links to the Prince Group. One of them, Ing Dara, is listed as the chairman of Golden Fortune Resorts World, whose name and address matches the Chrey Thom complex.


Months before it was shut down by the government, local news outlet Voice of Democracy reported on a human trafficking raid on another Prince Group-linked property.


Such linkages between Prince Group property and cyberscam operations could prove awkward for Prince’s political patrons. These include recently retired Prime Minister Hun Sen, former Interior Minister Sar Kheng, former National Assembly President Heng Samrin, as well as the current Prime Minister Hun Manet – each of whom Chen serves as an officially appointed political adviser.

China, Cambodia’s most forceful sponsor on the world stage, has made clear its intention to crack down on cybercrime overseas. In October, Cambodia’s newly appointed premier, Hun Manet, met with Chinese President Xi Jinping in Beijing. Buried on the third page of a press release issued by Cambodia’s Foreign Ministry after the meeting was a commitment, “to further enhance cooperation in law enforcement, particularly in combating cross-border gambling, drug and human trafficking, cybercrime and fake news.”


For some in Chrey Thom, though, that cooperation could not come soon enough.


One resident of Chrey Thom said he and his neighbors would always try to help whenever they encountered an escapee. He remembered one time in particular, when cries of, “Thief, thief, thief,” preceded a bedraggled man crashing into his home.


“He put his hands together and begged for mercy,” he recalled, adding that he gave the man five dollars before sending him on his way, wishing he could have done more for him.


“We pity them and the injustice they suffer, but we cannot do anything,” he said.


Torture, forced labor alleged at Prince Group-linked compound — Radio Free Asia