Someone deciding whether to report corruption in Cambodia can read the law in English. It sets the fine for a false complaint at up to 10 million riel. The law the King signed in April 2010 stops at one million. The two figures belong to the same article of the same law.
A law takes force in Cambodia when the King signs and promulgates it, in a sealed text called a Royal Kram. The Royal Kram of 17 April 2010 sets the Article 41 fine at 100,000 to 1,000,000 riel, Cambodia’s money. The article writes that range twice, once in numerals and once again in words.
The English that the Anti-Corruption Unit publishes reads 1,000,000 to 10,000,000. The Unit is the state body that takes corruption complaints and investigates them, and the English sits on its own site, where it read that way on 30 August 2026. The factor is exactly ten at each end of the range. A company whose managers do not read Khmer has the English.
The same figure sits in the full text of the law put out by the Council for the Development of Cambodia, the state body that deals with foreign investors. It was there when the Internet Archive copied that page in January 2022. The council’s original page was not reachable on 30 August 2026, so this desk relied on the archived copy.
In the Royal Kram, Article 41 creates a single crime, and three things have to be true at once for it to bite. A person accuses another of corruption. The person lies in doing it. The accusation then leads to an inquiry that finds nothing. Article 41 does not say what makes an inquiry useless, and nothing else in the chapter defines it.
The English breaks the article into two crimes, “defamation and disinformation”. Neither of them carries the lying. As written, the English reaches a complaint the signed law does not. Under the Royal Kram, a complaint made in good faith that turns out to be wrong falls outside the article.
The two texts line up across the rest of Chapter 6, which runs from Article 32 to Article 49 and sets out what the law punishes. That reading covered both texts on 30 August 2026, and that is as far as it goes. It does not reach the law’s other seven chapters.
The International Monetary Fund recommends that Cambodia derogate from Article 41, meaning carve out an exception to it. Its 2025 country report on Cambodia describes the article as criminalising disclosures made in good faith. The signed article requires a lie. The Fund’s description does not mention one.
On 28 August 2026, Om Yentieng, who heads the Unit, and Kith Meng, president of the Cambodia Chamber of Commerce, a body of private companies, signed a memorandum of understanding at the Unit’s headquarters. A memorandum of understanding is a written deal between two bodies, and it is not a law. This one sends complaints about corruption from companies to the Unit. The Khmer text of their joint statement, carried by the state broadcaster, keeps two routes open. A company can go through the chamber’s contact points, or it can go straight to the Unit, as it could before.
The Unit has been signing deals like this with companies since 2015. It said in April 2022 that 103 others already held the same one. The US State Department’s report on the climate for investors in Cambodia puts the number at around 150, and printed that same figure a year earlier. Chambers of commerce were inside the Unit’s own 2022 count.
English texts of Cambodian laws are translations, and they carry no legal force. The Khmer the King signed governs, and it is the Khmer a Cambodian court applies. Articles 40 and 42, in the same chapter of the same English text, match the Khmer exactly, so the fault does not run through the chapter. Whether the English figure has ever reached a case is not something this desk looked for.
A later law could have raised the fine, leaving the English current and the sealed text stale. The Unit’s site carries the law’s amendments as archives to download, in Khmer and in English. The only amending law in them changes Articles 10 bis, 16 and 57. It leaves Article 41 as the King signed it. Both archives came down and opened on 30 August 2026.
Two more marks sit on the Unit’s English of the same article. It prints the lower bound of the fine as “1000,000”, with the comma in the wrong place. Where the Khmer and the council’s English both name the court, the Unit’s English says “judges”.
In a filing to a United Nations human rights committee, Cambodia said the Unit acts on what it learns about corruption even when the person reporting stays anonymous, and that it guards their safety.
Article 41 in the Royal Kram also carries one to six months in prison. Article 39, in the same chapter, carries one to five years, and Article 40 two to five. The chapter’s lightest prison term sits on the article that punishes an accuser.