New unit to fix prosthetics

The International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) in Cambodia announced yesterday the launch of a new mobile workshop that repairs prosthetics for the disabled in Siem Reap province.

“A mobile workshop – a transformed van equipped with a wide range of modern mobility equipment to provide servicing and repairs for mobility devices of people with disability – is now operating in Siem Reap province,” a Facebook post from the ICRC read.

The mobile workshop, which was launched last week, is travelling around Siem Reap making repairs and adjustments to mobility devices free of charge. The mini-bus is operated out of the Siem Reap Provincial Physical Rehabilitation Centre, with the goal of setting up similar mobile repair shops in Kampong Thom and Preah Vihear by 2017.

ICRC, which differs from the Cambodian Red Cross headed by the prime minister’s wife, Bun Rany, is currently overseeing the project with help from the Ministry of Social Affairs, but intends for the ministry to take full responsibility of the program at some point.

“This is the very first [prosthetics repair] van ever in Cambodia,” Ministry of Social Affairs Secretary of State Sem Sokha was quoted as saying in the ICRC’s Facebook post.

Bart Vermeiren, ICRC head of mission, told the Post that other efforts have been made to bring repair services directly to people with disabilities, but he said this one is more technologically advanced.

“It’s much cheaper and more efficient. It can be set up in 10 minutes,” Vermeiren explained. “There’s nothing magic about it, it’s just good technology,” he added.

Vermeiren also said his organisation is working on implementing a system to alert patients by SMS when the van is in their village.

Man, wife arrested for visa forgery allegations

A husband and wife from Banteay Meanchey province have been arrested in a joint operation between Cambodian and Thai police after the husband was caught allegedly crafting fake visas for Cambodian migrant workers in Thailand.

The pair were arrested on Friday after Thai police apprehended two workers at the border the day before who were carrying passports with counterfeited visas.

Police then laid a trap for the alleged forgers by asking the two visa bearers to call the husband, Yann Chantorn, 29, and arrange a meeting at a market across the Thai border.

He was then arrested, while his wife, Seng Ly, was arrested in their Poipet commune home, where police confiscated 23 passports and 14 faked stamps.

Banteay Meanchey deputy provincial police chief Oum Sophal, who could not confirm if Ly was actively involved in the scheme, said Chantorn had been masterminding fraud for the past two years, charging 8,000 baht ($227) per visa.

Moeun Tola, executive director of labour rights group Central, warned that vulnerable migrants could be “doubly victimised” by passport and visa fraud.

“First they are victimised by being trafficked by the illegal broker . . . And they fall victim again if they are arrested and jailed [with fake documents acquired by the broker],” he said.

“[The Cambodian migrants] often know nothing about whether it is legal or illegal.”

Wife, neighbour held in taxi driver’s murder

A woman and her alleged accomplice were sent to court yesterday after being accused of murdering the woman’s husband and dumping his body in a canal in Phnom Penh’s Por Sen Chey district.

Ly Sophana, spokesman for the Phnom Penh Municipal Court, said that the two suspects were sent to court yesterday morning.

“Municipal military police sent the suspects and case to the court already, and they are being interrogated,” Sophana said.

The victim, Kao Pha, 48, was a taxi driver with four children from Svay Rieng province. A military police officer who spoke on condition of anonymity, said Kao’s wife, Sao Sam Oeun, 46, had hired their neighbour to kill her husband for having an affair with another woman.

On October 13, her neighbour, Sou Pha, 30, allegedly killed her husband for $1,000 after pretending to need a taxi ride to Siem Reap.

The accused allegedly beat his victim to death before driving the body to Phnom Penh and dumping it into a waste canal where it was found the next day.

Spokesmen for the military police could not be reached for comment yesterday.

However, according to a post from the national military police Facebook page, Pha confessed to the murder.

“He secretly put a substance into his juice for the victim to drink and fall asleep. He then attacked him from behind,” the post reads.

Tower sharing for greater efficiency

Infrastructure makes up a substantial proportion of mobile network operators’ capital investments and a large chunk of their operating costs. One way for operators to reduce these costs is to share infrastructure with other operators, letting an independent tower company, or towerco, manage the tower network while they focus on their core business of data transmission and customer service. The Post’s Cam McGrath spoke recently to Suresh Sidhu, CEO of Edotco Group, a subsidiary of Malaysia-based Axiata that operates 70,000 towers in six Asian countries, about how the towerco business model works.

What infrastructure services does an independent tower company (towerco) provide?

Quite simply, we in the industry call this passive infrastructure. It’s mainly building the mast, the structure and the foundation, while the antennae belong to the operators. Our job is to build a tower, rent a tower, and sometimes provide power and a shelter where we keep the equipment. That’s it.

What is your revenue model?

The main revenue we get is rental from our tenants. Our leaseback model is essentially: I agree to pay you X to buy your towers, I will run them, and in return you will pay me Y a month.

All parties share the benefits of more than one operator on the tower. Typically, in the model, the more tenants per tower, the rates go down for everyone. I think this is the classic model for building long-term lock-in, but also long-term win-win solutions. If you come to our tower and you’re a second tenant you’ll probably get a slightly better price than if you were the first tenant alone. However the first tenant also gets a slightly better price as well. The more towers you take from us the more your price drops over time as well.

What other revenue streams do you have?

In Cambodia, the revenue is nearly all lease revenue. In other countries, we have some managed service revenues. We may, for example, provide operations and maintenance services in excess of the normal tower, but all services are linked around the tower.

We have a very focused business model and I take great pains with the team to remind them to stay tower-centric. We’re a telecom infrastructure company, let’s not get too distracted.

So we’ll build buy and operate towers, we’ll lease them out to tenants, we’ll build services around those towers – for example, we could provide energy or active operations and field services, or even provide fibre connectivity – but we’re not going to get into the wholesale fibre business or selling equipment.

How is the tower rental cost calculated?

We have to make sure that the cost that we offer is cheaper than the cost for operators to do it by themselves. In this case, the secret sauce comes from two things: The more people share the more you can amortise some of the costs for operators, and secondly, the more focused you are the more efficient you get at doing it.

For the operator, it’s about lowest cost of ownership over time. For us, it’s about maximising the number of things we can have per tower.

Is there also a sharing model for the energy systems of the towers?

Right now there is one energy system for each operator per tower, and we don’t think that is very efficient. Maybe that could be the next opportunity, both for us for growth, but also for a bit more efficiency between the operators.

How many towers does Edotco have in Cambodia, and how many of those did you build?

We have 1,870 out of around 9,000 in total, so about 20 percent of installed towers in the market. We acquired these towers from Smart, but we started building our own towers this year. I think by year-end, maybe 100 will have been built by us, and we plan to build another 100 by early next year.

Have you convinced the other major mobile network operators (MNOs) to share your towers?

They take some towers from us, but very few. In Cambodia, Smart is our anchor tenant. We essentially are buying the towers from them and offering those towers out to all parties. To an anchor, normally, it’s a sale and leaseback. You agree on a rate and you try and then make income and profit from selling it to more tenants over time. The anchor has to get comfortable that it’s an open infrastructure model, and that other people, including competitors, will come to the site and use it.

Now what’s happened in Cambodia is there’s been huge interest from all the new entrants. The existing MNOs have been a lot slower, but we’re hoping that over the next 12 months we can establish a better relationship with Metfone and Cellcard.

Thieves rob Takeo voter registration location

Thieves rob Takeo voter registration location

Police in Takeo province’s Prey Kabbas district are investigating the theft of equipment from a Prey Lvea commune voter registration office on Thursday.

National Election Committee voter registration department head Top Rithy said the thief or thieves broke the building’s lock and swiped all but the registration laptops, which are stored off site as the office has no electricity to charge the machines.

Calling it “the first of its kind”, Rithy said the theft – which netted a computer monitor, digital camera, fingerprint scanner, flash drive, network cables and a portable charger – did not affect the registration process.

The data on the laptops remained secure and the NEC’s provincial office quickly re-supplied their commune counterparts, he said.

Reached yesterday, Prey Kabbas district police chief Chum Cheoun said officers were investigating the break-in. He said it appeared the intruders had rifled through boxes in the building looking for valuables.

“The officials discovered the theft about 7am the next day,” he said.

“Our brothers had locked the door, but on the night they were not on guard . . . they were careless because it was raining.”

The NEC is currently working to register Cambodia’s 9.6 million eligible voters on new digital lists before the end of next month.

Rithy, of the NEC, said the body often reminded its staff to be cautious of theft.

“The NEC has issued much guidance for its officials and constantly reminds them to be on alert,” he said.

PM bodyguard held over raid on Forestry Administration

The Kampong Chhnang Provincial Court on Saturday detained a captain in the Prime Minister’s Bodyguard Unit on a months-old charges of obstructing a Forestry Administration official after he and a gang of alleged accomplices illegally retrieved his vehicle from impound more than two years ago, according to court spokesman Long Sitha.

Captain Lun Leng’s car was allegedly impounded by Forestry Administration officials with a load full of illegal timber in late 2013, said Sitha, who noted Leng’s charges were not for the transportation of forest products. Rather, Leng was charged in July over his alleged participation in the raid by himself and nine others on January 2, 2014 on the provincial Forestry Administration depot to retrieve the confiscated car.

“When they arrived, they did not ask [permission],” Sitha said. “They pulled the wood out and drove the car away.”

If found guilty, Leng faces between one and five years in prison, as well as a fine of 10 million to 100 million riel ($2,497 to $24,795). He was arrested on Friday morning while eating breakfast at a restaurant in Kampong Chhnang town’s Ba’er commune.

Asked why it took nearly three years to arrest Leng, Sitha said the case had been held up by court procedures.

Sitha said that he was still waiting for confirmation of Leng’s membership in the Bodyguard Unit from the Ministry of Defence, but did confirm the authenticity of a photo of a Bodyguard Unit ID card confiscated from Leng that identified him as a captain and was signed by the unit’s commander, Hing Bun Heang.

Bun Heang could not be reached for comment yesterday.

Meanwhile, the Forestry Administration had a busy weekend, according to postings on the agency’s Facebook page.

Officials in Preah Vihear’s Sangkum Thmei district confiscated a car loaded with 350 kilograms of rosewood in Chamroeun commune on Friday, although the driver fled the scene before they could be arrested.

In nearby Choam Ksan district, officials based at Preah Vihear temple successfully apprehended Heng Ravuth in Choam Ksan commune, whose car was alleged to have been loaded with 73 pieces of rosewood weighing a total of 383 kilograms.

In Siem Reap, provincial Forestry Administration officers stopped a truck loaded with 120 pieces of luxury wood in Svay Leu district’s Boeung Mealea commune. The post did not say whether a suspect was arrested.

Multiple Forestry Administration officials could not be reached yesterday for comment on the busts.

An Agriculture Ministry report issued this month revealed that while timber seizures have gone up dramatically in the past 12 months, the number of suspects being sent to court and fined have fallen.

PM bodyguard held over raid on Forestry Administration

The Kampong Chhnang Provincial Court on Saturday detained a captain in the Prime Minister’s Bodyguard Unit on a months-old charges of obstructing a Forestry Administration official after he and a gang of alleged accomplices illegally retrieved his vehicle from impound more than two years ago, according to court spokesman Long Sitha.

Captain Lun Leng’s car was allegedly impounded by Forestry Administration officials with a load full of illegal timber in late 2013, said Sitha, who noted Leng’s charges were not for the transportation of forest products. Rather, Leng was charged in July over his alleged participation in the raid by himself and nine others on January 2, 2014 on the provincial Forestry Administration depot to retrieve the confiscated car.

“When they arrived, they did not ask [permission],” Sitha said. “They pulled the wood out and drove the car away.”

If found guilty, Leng faces between one and five years in prison, as well as a fine of 10 million to 100 million riel ($2,497 to $24,795). He was arrested on Friday morning while eating breakfast at a restaurant in Kampong Chhnang town’s Ba’er commune.

Asked why it took nearly three years to arrest Leng, Sitha said the case had been held up by court procedures.

Sitha said that he was still waiting for confirmation of Leng’s membership in the Bodyguard Unit from the Ministry of Defence, but did confirm the authenticity of a photo of a Bodyguard Unit ID card confiscated from Leng that identified him as a captain and was signed by the unit’s commander, Hing Bun Heang.

Bun Heang could not be reached for comment yesterday.

Meanwhile, the Forestry Administration had a busy weekend, according to postings on the agency’s Facebook page.

Officials in Preah Vihear’s Sangkum Thmei district confiscated a car loaded with 350 kilograms of rosewood in Chamroeun commune on Friday, although the driver fled the scene before they could be arrested.

In nearby Choam Ksan district, officials based at Preah Vihear temple successfully apprehended Heng Ravuth in Choam Ksan commune, whose car was alleged to have been loaded with 73 pieces of rosewood weighing a total of 383 kilograms.

In Siem Reap, provincial Forestry Administration officers stopped a truck loaded with 120 pieces of luxury wood in Svay Leu district’s Boeung Mealea commune. The post did not say whether a suspect was arrested.

Multiple Forestry Administration officials could not be reached yesterday for comment on the busts.

An Agriculture Ministry report issued this month revealed that while timber seizures have gone up dramatically in the past 12 months, the number of suspects being sent to court and fined have fallen.