The cost of doing business
DRIVE NORTH OUT of Phnom Penh for 10 minutes or so and you’ll reach a flat stretch of dark yellow sand where the southernmost shore of Pong Peay lake used to be. At first it doesn’t look like much: children play in the remaining streets of the shanty town, rickety stalls sell drinks to a handful of Khmer idling on parked motorbikes. Then comes the sign: a huge arch proclaiming "New History is COMING" straddles the dirt road, and in the background cranes tower over half-built apartment blocks that dominate the flat land around them. A new city is being built.
Funded by Korean banks and built by Korea’s Hanil Engineering, Camko City – the name is a conflation of Cambodia and Korea – will offer apartments, houses, villas, a hospital, a school and a business district to house Cambodia’s new stock exchange....
