About the Project

What is Cambodia Corporates?

Global Witness’ Cambodia Corporates site is a publically accessible, fully-searchable database containing information on 22,808 company registration entries, and 7502 amendments. The database was launched in July 2016 to enable citizens, journalists and investors to easily and quickly find out who owns, controls or has major stakes in companies in Cambodia – questions which are time-consuming and difficult to answer in the absence of this data.

The information contained in the Cambodia Corporates database is official government data originally obtained from the Cambodian Ministry of Commerce’s (MoC) publically-available corporate registry. The raw data was first obtained in December 2014, four months before the MoC ‘upgraded’ its corporate registry thereby restricting public access in a number of ways including requiring users to register and login. Global Witness then extracted additional raw data from the upgraded MoC site in February 2016 via its newly-introduced user registration and login process. No additional information has been added to Cambodia Corporates since that date.

To the best of Global Witness’ knowledge, therefore, Cambodia Corporates contains all company registration and amendment records that were stored on the MoC’s corporate registry in February 2016. It does not include other types of data stored by the MoC, namely foreign branches, local branches and dissolutions. However, the MoC registry contains few records in these three categories (less than 500 for each) and Global Witness found they had limited use in terms of enhancing corporate transparency and accountability.

Global Witness has not verified the information contained in the database and therefore cannot guarantee its accuracy. We do not intend to suggest or imply that any persons, companies or other entities included in the Cambodia Corporates database have broken the law or otherwise acted improperly.

The Cambodia Corporates site is accessed via an encrypted connection (https) and no information on users is stored.

In addition to the information displayed by the user interface the raw data spreadsheets, which can be downloaded from the top of every page, also include the following information:

• Company type
• Company objective
• Company term
• Company capital
• Chairman occupation

The manipulation of the original raw data obtained from the MoC’s corporate registry has been kept to an absolute minimum. The original data is stored in English (not Khmer) on the Ministry of Commerce’s corporate registry. The data has been treated in the following ways:

• It was “crawled” and saved as raw html pages
• Untouched registration and amendment information was extracted from those saved html pages into .csv files
• A script was used that normalised data information and created the Cambodia Corporates searchable database. The normalisation process consisted only of:
  • Removing titles from names (e.g. Mr, Ms, Okhna, Lok Chumteav etc)
  • Standardising spellings for known location names such as ‘Phnom Penh’
  • Correcting obvious misspellings such as “Co., Ltd.”

For developers interested in the code behind the database and the scripts for the data manipulation, please go to the GitHub repository where the code is published.

Why has Global Witness created Cambodia Corporates?

Greater company transparency benefits society and the economy as a whole insofar as it leads to enhanced compliance with relevant laws and regulations and encourages investor, employee and wider public confidence in companies and their management.  It is therefore in the public interest to have easy access to company registration data including information on company management, ownership and control.

In April 2015, Cambodia’s Ministry of Commerce (MoC) upgraded its website, including updating the site’s corporate registry. The new registry site launched in early July 2015 but with some key shortcomings:

• The connection to the database is not encrypted, and it's behind a user registration and login process allowing the government to monitor who’s using it and what searches are being conducted.
• While most of the original information was eventually re-added to the new database, the chairman's nationality has noticeably been left out of the database.
• The MoC database has severe search limitations - namely no address search nor amendment text search – and suffers from transliteration and misspelling issues which greatly affects the ease with which it can be searched.

Global Witness is launching Cambodia Corporates to ensure that journalists, investigators and civil society groups, as well as the wider public and foreign investors wanting to conduct due diligence research on potential business partners, can safely and anonymously access Cambodian company registration data with strong search functionalities. It is intended that this will encourage responsible business practices and help to strengthen corporate accountability in Cambodia.

If you would like to contact Global Witness regarding the Cambodia Corporates database please email cambodiacorporates@globalwitness.org. To read about Global Witness’ work in Cambodia or our campaign to tackle corruption and money laundering please visit our website.