The government announced Wednesday that a South Korean company, the Cosmo Group, will assume control of the country’s beleaguered shipping registry within the month.
Seng Lim Neou, an undersecretary of state at the Council of Ministers, told reporters that a 10-year contract was signed last Friday after a committee chose the Cosmo Group from a pool of three applicants. He said the other two companies, which were Cambodian, had no experience running a shipping registry.
Seng Lim Neou said the Cosmo Group, which began in 1984, runs the shipping registries of Panama, Bolivia and other small countries. It is certified by the International Standards Organization and has offices in 19 countries.
Seng Lim Neou would not speak about the contract’s specifics, saying only that the Cosmo Group would pay a $1 million deposit to ensure implementation of the contract and that it also will pay between $400,000 and $1.5 million a year to the government.
“It is a good price for a poor country. It is not too expensive and not too cheap. If we sell it at too low a price then the bad ships will come. This price is similar to that of Panama and Bolivia,” Seng Lim Neou said.
The government has insisted that the Cosmo Group take on all 927 ships currently registered under the Cambodian flag. Seng Lim Neou said this condition was a point of contention as the whereabouts of most of those ships are unknown and their paperwork is shoddy.
The government has apparently made some compromises though. A previously stated condition for the new contract-holder was that the registry must be based in Cambodia. Seng Lim Neou said the registry will be run in South Korea, but that the Cosmo Group will have an office in Cambodia and the government will be able to access the registry by Internet.
“The income [from the registry] is not important. It is not so much. But the dignity of the Cambodian flag is at stake. We need to rebuild our reputation, which has suffered. [That] will not be easy because we don’t know where the 927 ships are,” Seng Lim Neou said as the news conference broke up.
The Singapore-based Cambodian Shipping Corp, which previously maintained the registry, was brought under government investigation after a Cambodian-registered freighter, the Winner, was seized last June carrying nearly 2 tons of cocaine.
A series of similar maritime mishaps provoked international criticism of Cambodia’s “flag of convenience” and resulted in the government’s seizure of the registry from its private operators.
