All in the Family: Citizenship, Crime, and Plausible Deniability in Cambodia

From Hun Sen’s watch to Hun To’s boardroom ties, new naturalization records complicate Hun Manet’s narrative of ignorance.

A photo of Prince Happiness Plaza, a real estate development being undertaken by Prince Real Estate Group, part of the Prince Group, one of Cambodia’s largest conglomerates. The photo was posted on the company’s Facebook page on February 7, 2024.

When Chen Zhi (known affectionately by former Prime Minister Hun Sen as “Hun Mazhi”) was extradited to China earlier this year for running a massive online scamming network, Cambodian officials suggested that his citizenship had been “irregularly obtained.” The implication was that it occurred due to procedural error, but little clarity was offered. Hun Manet furthered the narrative in an interview last week with AFP, stating explicitly that Chen had obtained citizenship via forged documents and that “we had no idea he was the kingpin.”

Yet Chen Zhi was no obscure applicant lost in a bureaucracy. He was a naturalized Cambodian citizen yes, but also a cabinet-level adviser to the prime minister, the holder of a diplomatic passport, and a prolific corporate director in a multitude of sectors (at least 45 corporate entities past, present, or “vanished” according to archival versions of the Ministry of Commerce’s corporate registry). His businesses operated across real estate, finance, and digital payments, and many were co-administered by prominent members of the political elite.

The suggestion now that his citizenship was an aberration raises an obvious question: how does someone irregularly naturalized rise so quickly into the highest political and commercial circles of the state?

Recent reporting by Jack Davies in The Times offers a partial potential answer. An indictment in the U.S. Eastern District of New York referenced a luxury watch gifted to a “senior government official.” Davies noted that former Prime Minister Hun Sen began publicly wearing a Patek Philippe shortly after Chen’s naturalization. Phnom Penh has offered no public explanation for the timing. While the episode cannot conclusively prove corruption, it underscores how deeply Chen Zhi had penetrated the upper echelons of Cambodian power.

A newly released naturalization dataset now allows Chen’s case to be placed within a broader structural pattern. This data was scraped from the Royal Gazette’s archipelago of PDFs and anonymously published by the Kouprey Substack on March 6. It is now available for download on Mekong Independent and includes more than 4,000 citizenship grants by the Cambodian government between 2000 and 2024, when the publishing stopped altogether amidst rising scrutiny.

Nationality, though, alone tells only part of the story. Perhaps the most telling linkages emerge when citizenship records are cross-referenced with Cambodia’s own corporate registry.

According to early analysis published on the data by threat intelligence firm Inca Digital, over half of all naturalized individuals appear as directors or shareholders in Cambodian companies and those who do tend to serve on a lot of boards. In total, over 5 percent of Cambodia’s corporate universe includes a naturalized board member. In this sense, Chen Zhi does not appear structurally unique, merely unusually visible.

Cambodia’s corporate boards are the venues through which land concessions are secured, licenses are granted, payment infrastructure is built, and cross-border capital is routed. Effectively, they are the closest thing to a smoking gun linkage available in a system that is fundamentally opaque by design.

The pattern that emerges from the data is not one of isolated investors quietly settling into Cambodian life. It is one of the rapid institutional embeddings.

As noted in the aforementioned Inca Digital analysis, Hun To, a cousin of Prime Minister Hun Manet and nephew of Hun Sen, has served on boards alongside multiple naturalized China-origin directors. Nearly all of those naturalized co-directors have been named in sanctions actions, overseas convictions, legislative targeting, or investigative reporting linking them to Cambodia’s offshore gambling and scam ecosystem.

For such a sustained overlap between an ultra-politically exposed figure like Hun To and high-risk foreign actors to have occurred without awareness at senior levels would require a degree of institutional blindness that strains credulity.

Rather, this suggests criminal coordination at the........

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