Britain-based Global Witness said that rights to exploit the resources have been allocated behind closed doors by a small number of power brokers around Prime Minister Hun Sen and other senior officials.

Over the past few years, Cambodia has been buzzing with excitement — and anxiety — about an oil discovery by U.S. energy giant Chevron Corp. off the southwestern coast. There have also been discoveries of other minerals including bauxite, iron ore, copper and chromium, while onshore oil reserves are also being explored.

Some estimate that in coming years Cambodia may reap some $1 billion in annual oil revenues, enough to cut its ties to foreign development aid if the funds are properly utilized.

More than 75 companies, including such internationals as Chevron Corp. and BHP Billiton, were already working in the mining and oil sectors and have paid upfront sums to the government, the report said.

“Companies need to come clean on what they have paid to the government to secure access to these natural resources, or risk becoming complicit in a corrupt system,” the report said.

Of the mine sites investigated in 2008, Global Witness said every one was controlled or owned by members of Cambodia’s political and military elite, including top military commanders and relatives of Hun Sen and cabinet ministers.

The full report is available for download here [PDF - 4.5 MB]

It started all here on Dec. 26th by ChinaSmack, when Chinese Netizens noticed in pictures the Commissioner of the Nanjing Housing Administration Bureau was smoking very expensive cigarettes and wearing an expensive watch that a government official should not be able to afford [Read: on his salary]. ChinaSmack has translated in his post the numerous comments originally from Tanya. [Update: this link has been "harmonized"]

Yesterday, The Strait Times revealed this Government Official had been dismissed and that authorities in Jiangsu province where Internet users exposed an allegedly corrupt official’s taste for luxury have made posting information about private life illegal.

The ruling Communist Party’s parliament in eastern Jiangsu province approved a law making it illegal for people in the city of Xuzhou to publish ‘private information’ on the Internet, the China Daily reported.

But now, anyone in Xuzhou who posts ‘private information’ online will be fined up to 5,000 yuan and could be barred from using the Internet for six months.

Today the news has been reported by Shanghaiist and China Digital Times [Proxy required] as well.

One year later, this strong message seems to have been totally unheard. Behind the growing baby milk scandal, the scandal reveals more than a recurrent regulatory problem, CSM reports, what appears to be an ethical gap in China’s business.

It pointed to a deeper malaise in Chinese society where private profit often trumps the public good as the country races to create a market economy that has outstripped government regulators.

“China has the problems of any transitional economy,” says Yanzhong Huang, a global health expert at Seton Hall University in South Orange, N.J. “But the deeper and more fundamental challenge China faces is a systematic lack of business ethics.”

Among the companies under investigation for having produced melamine-tainted milk, the Sanlu case is rather embarrassing, since the company has been exempted from government food safety inspections since December 2005.

Such certification means that “the products are exempted from quality monitoring and inspection conducted by the government,” the website explains. In return, it adds, “internal inspection should be reinforced.”

Forty-seven Chinese dairy companies currently enjoy such an exemption, according to AQSIQ, after demonstrating that they have “a complete quality guarantee system,” among other criteria.

The incident became public only after Sanlu’s New Zealand partner, Fonterra, which holds three seats on the company board, informed New Zealand diplomats who told Chinese government officials in Beijing of the problem.

Today, Shanghai Daily revealed that more melanine was found in national milk check, in three of China’s leading brands – Mengniu, Yili and Bright. What will be next ?

Learning from the past is obviously not the answer, what is needed here is definitely a ethic and cultural shift in the way of doing business.

This makes my day !

BEIJING, September 15 (RIA Novosti) – Three Chinese tourists have bought a 274-kg (604-lb) piece of depleted uranium and brought it home from Kyrgyzstan as a souvenir, the China Daily newspaper reported Monday.

The three tourists from the city of Aksu in the Xinjiang Uygur autonomous region bought “the glittering treasure” for $2,000 at a flea market in Kyrgyzstan, hoping to make money by reselling it in China.

Not knowing what they had actually bought, the tourists sliced off a piece of the stone and took it to experts from Beijing’s Tsinghua University. After identifying the souvenir as a piece of depleted uranium, the scientists called the police.

Local prosecutors decided against filing charges of nuclear trafficking as the men obviously had no idea what they had bought.

The three men were taken to a local clinic for medical examination, but doctors found no signs of radiation poisoning.

Kyrgyzstan has a number of uranium disposal sites left from Soviet-era uranium mining.

Depleted uranium is a weakly radioactive by-product of uranium enrichment. A radiation dose from it would be about 60% of those of natural uranium with the same mass and because of its long half-life it has no significant detrimental health effects.

Depleted uranium is used for radiation shielding in medical radiation therapy, industrial radiography equipment, and containers for transporting radioactive materials.

I just wonder what they were planning to do with a 274 kg piece of uranium… and how they went through the border with this ?

Read the original post here.