Teng Bunma

Teng Bunma (Khmer: ថេង ប៊ុនម៉ា; 1941 – 17 June 2016), also written as Teng Boonma, Theng Boonma, and Theng Bunma, was one of the wealthiest businessmen in Cambodia. He was one the founders of Thai Boon Roong Group and, along with Sok Kong and Meng Retthy, he was well known as one of the “four tigers” of the Cambodian economy after the fall of the Khmer Rouge, between the 1980s-2000s.

Teng Bunma passed away at the age of 75 on June 17, 2016 at 12.45pm in a hospital in Phnom Penh by natural causes, leaving the 133 story Thai Boon Roong Twin Trade Center in Phnom Penh, located next to Nagaworld, unfinished.

In a 2015 paper, Teng Bunma was described as the prototype of the new Khmer oknha by Michiel Verver and Heidi Schnetzinger who explained the “elite pact” between the business and political elites through the oknha system of Cambodia.

At the beginning of the third millennium, Teng Bunma had become "one of the most powerful men in Cambodia", "Cambodia's best-known and wealthiest businessman with total assets estimated at around $400 million." At that time, he began investing in major construction projects worth more 50 millions dollars and to diversify his portfolio with a winder range of activities, such as growing cotton. He took an important role of leadership in the business community to the point of becoming a "kingmaker". In 2000, Guo Dongpo, who was the director of the Overseas Chinese Affairs Office office in Beijing, met Teng Bunma to ask for his assistance in controlling unruly mainland gang activity in the Cambodia, as the latter had become "legendary" among the Chinese Khmer community.

In 1999, King Norodom Sihanouk publicly refused a luxury car that Teng Bunma had offered him, on the grounds that he was being investigated by the United States of America. However, Hun Sen himself intervened to award diplomatic immunity to Teng Bunma for falsifying immigration documents, which was considered abusing ambassadorial powers to evade the law by some human rights group.

In June 1998, Thailand issued an arrest warrant against Teng Bunma on fraud charges. Police determinations took place also in Hong Kong in 1999: there Bunma had submitted a falsified passport for the registration of its enterprise "to Thai Boon Roong". A 1996 article ("Medellin on the Mekong") in the Hong Kong-based Far Eastern Economic Review, by United States journalist Nate Thayer, described Teng Bunma as a significant figure in Cambodia's international drug-smuggling trade. In 1996, he was named in the United States campaign finance controversy during which the Chinese allegedly attempted to influence domestic American politics prior to and during the Clinton administration. Though he was blocked from entering the United States, Teng Bunma received a US visa in 1998.

Teng Bunma, then Cambodia's wealthiest businessman, traveled to Beijing on a special mission shortly before the coup of the 1997 coup d'état led by Hun Sen. Teng Bunma later boasted during a press conference of funding Hun Sen’s coup in 1997, providing also material help by lending his own fleet of helicopters to transfer troops to Western Cambodia. Hun Sen acknowledged that without the financial support of Teng Bunma, his coup would have failed. In October 1997, Teng Bunma received a timber concession of one million acres from the Cambodian government.

Teng Bunma invested heavily in the private sector, especially in real estate, but also supported the development of public infrastructure, such as the construction of “Hun Sen Park” in Phnom Penh in 1996.

In late 1995, Teng Bunma was elected as the first president of the Cambodian Chamber of Commerce.

Teng Bunma was elected as the first president of Cambodia's Chamber of Commerce in 1995, a useful position for networking in a country where wealth is concentrated in the hands of a small group of closely connected politicians, military officials and businessmen.

Rather than chose a side, Teng Bunma was notorious for supporting a plurality of political actors in Cambodia from party officials to royalist party rebels, while others accused him of suppressing the voices critical of the Cambodian People's Party; in 1994, he gave the government an interest-free loan to help make up a budget shortfall. He also donated a bullet-proof Mercedes limousine to Hun Sen, and a $1.8 million aircraft to Norodom Ranariddh, the joint prime minister between 1993 and 1997. It has also been alleged that Teng Bunma was also a financier of a band of politicians who launched a failed coup against Hun Sen in 1994, and was thought to have been close to Hun Sen’s rivals within the Cambodian People's Party, Interior Minister Sar Kheng and National Assembly-chair Chea Sim.

In the early 1990s, Teng Bunma bankrolled key battles in the continued war against the Khmer Rouge. However, Sam Rainsy began accusing Teng Bunma of gold smuggling and customs fraud, and placed him at the center of a wide circle of drug traffickers. In October 1994, this led to a showdown between the two over a Phnom Penh market development that had dispossessed local vendors. Thereafter, Sam Rainsy was dumped from the Cabinet, kicked out of the Funcinpec, and stripped from his seat in Parliament in June 1995.

Teng Bunma is a key example of how the emergence of free market policies in the late 1980s and the rapid privatization of common resources and state assets, legalised the businesses of former traffickers and helped them set up companies which dominate the Cambodian private sector today. In order to bring an end to the ongoing civil war, he bankrolled any groups that were ready to fight against the last Khmer rouge warriors and in return he was awarded state contracts and licences to monopolise particular types of imports. Thus, with his Cambodian business partner Sok Kong, chairman of Sokimex, he helped to fund the recapture of Pailin from the Khmer Rouge in 1994, where he later opened his own casino.

Teng Bunma was one of the first Cambodian businesspeople to invest significantly in Cambodia after the fall of the Khmer Rouge in 1979. Having spent much of his life in Thailand, like many of Cambodia’s early tycoons he began cutting informal deals with the country’s government in the 1980s, before the economy had officially opened.