Financial and Banking Methodology Helps Cambodia to Sustain

Cambodia's World Bank country manager Qimiao Fan on Tuesday said that Cambodia’s financial and banking regulations have assisted the country to sustain during the tumultuous times of global economic uncertainties. While addressing the workshop on corporate governance, the World Bank official said the success of Cambodia's finance industry was proof that improving corporate governance worked.

Qimiao apprised Cambodia's financial and banking methodology has particularly helped many of Cambodia's commercial banks and micro-finance institutions to raise their standards of corporate governance, which eventually got rewarded with greater investments. Likewise, Chea Chanto, governor of the National Bank of Cambodia opined the recent bad experience of the world financial crisis taught Cambodia the hard way about how the failure of bank and financial system could impact livelihoods.

Chanto also told that Cambodia has learned a lot from the Asian financial crisis, and the National Bank of Cambodia has taken a series of measures to better supervise and regulate the banking and financial system in the country. Banks have an overwhelmingly dominant position in the country's financial system, representing more than 90 percent and are extremely important engines of economic growth, he added.

In contrast, it should be recalled that Qimiao had said in the recently concluded Cambodia Development Cooperation Forum (CDCF) "transparency and accountability in the management of public finances and natural resources" were critical issues. This reference was in line with the international watchdog organization, Global Witness, which slammed donors last week for continuing to hand over huge sums of aid money, despite evidence of widespread corruption and mismanagement of public funds. Overseas donors continued to pledge financial support on the controversial Land Management and Administration Project, or LMAP that supposed to have rendered many homeless.

By Jose Roy