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 apex of the party-state and demonstrates how citizenship, corporate governance, and political proximity converged repeatedly within elite-mediated networks. In other words, if Chen Zhi’s case was an irregularity, it occurred within a remarkably consistent architecture.

Cambodia has been widely reported as one of the world’s primary hubs for offshore scam operations in recent years. This industry depends on corporate layering, real estate (compounds), a vulnerable financial system, and sweeping regulatory work-arounds. It also depends on insulation from law enforcement, extradition, and abrupt political shifts.

Cambodia has offered these things in abundance over the years. In such a system, citizenship can function as part of a sort of sovereign shield for actors involved in illicit activities. This too is not limited to the case of Chen Zhi.

She Zhijiang, another Chinese businessman — who also: 1) appears in the dataset as having naturalized to Cambodia; 2) is closely associated with regional gambling operations; and 3) claimed prior collaborations with Chinese intelligence — was detained in Thailand in 2022. During his detention, his lawyers lobbied for him to be deported to Cambodia rather than China as his Cambodian citizenship appeared to offer him a safer jurisdictional landing point.

She, like Chen, was ultimately extradited to China, certainly complicating any assumption that Cambodian citizenship guarantees permanent protection (and possibly meaningfully shifting the calculus for an entire generation of Cambodian-naturalized China-origin criminals). But the fact that prominent transnational figures obtained and wielded Cambodian citizenship as a strategic hedge is telling.

Citizenship confers permanence. It anchors assets, complicates extradition politics, and embeds individuals within domestic legal frameworks and corporate systems. Even if it does not ultimately prevent surrender to regional hegemons, it can buy time, leverage, and plausible deniability for all sides. When naturalization coincides with board appointments alongside politically exposed figures, the protective logic becomes even stronger.

Largely absent from the international stage since his dynastic appointment as prime minister in 2023, Hun Manet and his PR team have worked effectively in recent weeks to project an image distinct from his father’s long tenure. On visits to Washington and European capitals, he cultivated a gentle, professorial demeanor. Manet’s interviews with Western media outlets, which largely refrained from asking him any difficult follow-up questions, repeatedly highlighted the continuing official ignorance about Cambodia’s massive scam industry (until very recently) and a desire for “partnership” in efforts to tackle illicit activity.

As I suggested in this column a few weeks ago, the regime’s increasingly polished public relations posture and crackdown posturing reflects an acute awareness of strategic vulnerability.

Moreover, the government’s decision to halt publication of naturalization decrees in 2024 reduced transparency precisely when today’s scrutiny was intensifying. That move again suggests that elite sensitivity to reputational, financial, and legal risk is the Kingdom’s key operating principle relative to the outside world.

Emerging from this elite risk-mitigating grand strategy, Chen Zhi’s case is presented by the regime as an unfortunate deviation. In effect, “he was an individual who slipped through the cracks.” Kouprey’s naturalization data complicates that narrative. As does the history, of course.

Years of investigative reporting, sanctions designations, and criminal indictments have documented the Cambodian government’s role in facilitating large-scale scam operations. In that light, the question is no longer how one man obtained a passport. It is how a system functioned,  and who benefited from it.

The challenge now is for the international community broadly conceived – global media outlets eager for an interview with a reclusive head of government; Western governments desperate for signs of realignment; legacy NGOs fearful of a repressive regime; and others – to break from their suspended disbelief about the nature of this party-state and the family that controls it, and recognize the obvious patterns which render Manet’s most recent denials implausible.

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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 apex of the party-state and demonstrates how citizenship, corporate governance, and political proximity converged repeatedly within elite-mediated networks. In other words, if Chen Zhi’s case was an irregularity, it occurred within a remarkably consistent architecture.

Cambodia has been widely reported as one of the world’s primary hubs for offshore scam operations in recent years. This industry depends on corporate layering, real estate (compounds), a vulnerable financial system, and sweeping regulatory work-arounds. It also depends on insulation from law enforcement, extradition, and abrupt political shifts.

Cambodia has offered these things in abundance over the years. In such a system, citizenship can function as part of a sort of sovereign shield for actors involved in illicit activities. This too is not limited to the case of Chen Zhi.

She Zhijiang, another Chinese businessman — who also: 1) appears in the dataset as having naturalized to Cambodia; 2) is closely associated with regional gambling operations; and 3) claimed prior collaborations with Chinese intelligence — was detained in Thailand in 2022. During his detention, his lawyers lobbied for him to be deported to Cambodia rather than China as his Cambodian citizenship appeared to offer him a safer jurisdictional landing point.

She, like Chen, was ultimately extradited to China, certainly complicating any assumption that Cambodian citizenship guarantees permanent protection (and possibly meaningfully shifting the calculus for an entire generation of Cambodian-naturalized China-origin criminals). But the fact that prominent transnational figures obtained and wielded Cambodian citizenship as a strategic hedge is telling.

Citizenship confers permanence. It anchors assets, complicates extradition politics, and embeds individuals within domestic legal frameworks and corporate systems. Even if it does not ultimately prevent surrender to regional hegemons, it can buy time, leverage, and plausible deniability for all sides. When naturalization coincides with board appointments alongside politically exposed figures, the protective logic becomes even stronger.

Largely absent from the international stage since his dynastic appointment as prime minister in 2023, Hun Manet and his PR team have worked effectively in recent weeks to project an image distinct from his father’s long tenure. On visits to Washington and European capitals, he cultivated a gentle, professorial demeanor. Manet’s interviews with Western media outlets, which largely refrained from asking him any difficult follow-up questions, repeatedly highlighted the continuing official ignorance about Cambodia’s massive scam industry (until very recently) and a desire for “partnership” in efforts to tackle illicit activity.

As I suggested in this column a few weeks ago, the regime’s increasingly polished public relations posture and crackdown posturing reflects an acute awareness of strategic vulnerability.

Moreover, the government’s decision to halt publication of naturalization decrees in 2024 reduced transparency precisely when today’s scrutiny was intensifying. That move again suggests that elite sensitivity to reputational, financial, and legal risk is the Kingdom’s key operating principle relative to the outside world.

Emerging from this elite risk-mitigating grand strategy, Chen Zhi’s case is presented by the regime as an unfortunate deviation. In effect, “he was an individual who slipped through the cracks.” Kouprey’s naturalization data complicates that narrative. As does the history, of course.

Years of investigative reporting, sanctions designations, and criminal indictments have documented the Cambodian government’s role in facilitating large-scale scam operations. In that light, the question is no longer how one man obtained a passport. It is how a system functioned,  and who benefited from it.

The challenge now is for the international community broadly conceived – global media outlets eager for an interview with a reclusive head of government; Western governments desperate for signs of realignment; legacy NGOs fearful of a repressive regime; and others – to break from their suspended disbelief about the nature of this party-state and the family that controls it, and recognize the obvious patterns which render Manet’s most recent denials implausible.

Jacob Sims is a columnist for The Diplomat, a Visiting Fellow at Harvard University’s Asia Center, and a leading expert voice on transnational crime and human rights in Southeast Asia.

Cambodia scam operations

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