Five buyers took all of the guaranteed part of a Cambodian corporate bond. One of them took 400,000 of the 800,000 units, half the issue, and the issuer’s allotment announcement of 20 August gives that split. Each unit was 100,000 riel, about $25. The smallest order the offer allowed was $500,000. That part came to 80 billion riel, or $20 million. It sold out on 18 August, the last day of a window that had opened on the tenth.
The other part carried no guarantee. It came to 120 billion riel, about $30 million. It paid 7.00 percent, and it let buyers in for $10,000. On the same day, the lender selling both put that part off.
LOLC (Cambodia) Plc (LOLC) did not cancel it. Cambodia’s regulator for share and bond offers (SERC) approved the delay, and LOLC gave its liquidity and funding needs as the reason. Its notice says the part with no guarantee is planned for relaunch in a second phase, to give buyers more time to read the papers, and that a new timetable will follow.
LOLC makes small loans and holds customers’ savings under licence. Both parts of its bond belong to one programme that SERC approved on 22 June 2026.
Behind the sold part stands Cambodia’s state-owned credit guarantee company (CGCC), which Section 9 of the registered offering document describes. The Ministry of Economy and Finance holds 100 percent of it. Sub-Decree 140 set the company up on 1 September 2020, with $200 million paid in by the Royal Government. What it sells is a promise to pay a lender when a borrower does not.
The Ministry approved the company’s bond guarantee framework on 17 May 2023. SERC accredited it as a bond guarantor on 22 August 2023. It took a khAAA rating of its own that December. It launched as Cambodia’s first bond guarantor on 31 January 2024. Those four dates sit on CGCC’s own bond guarantee page, read on 2 September 2026.
The offering document says CGCC had yet to guarantee any corporate bond directly. The guarantee figures in that section run to 31 March 2026. Its only exposure to a bond then ran through somebody else: $10 million standing behind a $70 million guarantee that GuarantCo had written for CamGSM, which trades as Cellcard.
CGCC says on its own channel that its bond guarantees “help reduce perceived default risk, improve access to capital, and expand investor participation”. It published that on 11 August 2025. The guaranteed part went to five buyers whose smallest permitted order was $500,000. The part that let buyers in for $10,000 is on hold.
CGCC publishes the size of bond it will guarantee for any one issuer. It runs between 8 billion and 80 billion riel. Eighty billion riel is the top of that range, so the guaranteed part could not have been larger. That figure sits on a panel on the company’s own channel dated 20 February 2026, six months before the offer opened. On how the two parts would divide, the offering document says the final split would depend on what buyers decided.
Twenty million dollars is 10.97 percent of all the guarantees CGCC had outstanding at 31 March 2026, and 10 percent of the company’s paid-in capital, on this desk’s arithmetic. Both of those totals sit in the same Section 9, which takes them from CGCC’s own accounts. Guarantee fees are a small line in what CGCC earns. It took $1,940,679 from them in 2025, against total income of $17,576,083.
What LOLC pays for the guarantee is not in the registered offering document. The expenses footnote puts the cost of making the issue at about 1.8 billion riel, or $450,000. It lists the outside parties the issue pays: the underwriter, the bondholders’ representative, the registrar, the legal advisers and the exchange. The guarantor is not among them.
The Guarantee Agreement sends the fee to a Reimbursement and Indemnity Agreement dated 17 August 2026, the day before the window closed. That second agreement is not among the twelve appendices filed with the offer. The English text quoted here is marked an unofficial translation on every page, and the Khmer is the registered version.
The guaranteed bond pays 5.75 percent. The postponed one would pay 7.00 percent. LOLC’s existing borrowings run from 5.38 to 8.20 percent.
Cambodia’s rating agency (RAC) put LOLC at khBBB, the guaranteed bond at khAAA and the bond with no guarantee at khBBB. All three are provisional, because the agency says some papers it worked from were still in draft. On its scale khAAA is the top and khBBB is the fourth grade, which it reads as enough capacity to meet financial commitments but more open to harm from a downturn.
The agency expects holders of the guaranteed bond to get all their money back. CGCC’s published floor for an issuer it will guarantee is khB, two grades below where LOLC sits.
If LOLC misses a payment, CGCC pays the bondholders and then gets the money back from LOLC. Its total liability is capped at the most it guaranteed. Here that is 80 billion riel. The offering document says the promise is backed by CGCC’s own capital, which the Royal Government paid in full.
LOLC gave its liquidity and funding needs as its reason for putting off the $30 million. Its 2025 accounts, which its directors signed off on 20 March 2026, put its cash at $174,521,723. Across that year its borrowings and its junior debt together fell from $191,666,384 to $107,227,801, a drop of $84,438,583, on this desk’s arithmetic. Its profit rose 32.2 percent to $52,892,769. Its dividend fell 39.3 percent, to $8,041,058.
The offering document sets out LOLC’s covenant breaches, what caused them, and the fact that its lenders took no action. A covenant is a promise to a lender to keep certain numbers inside set limits. During 2025 LOLC had broken terms with eleven senior lenders, who rank first for repayment, and four junior lenders, who rank last. The year before, the counts were ten and six.
Breaking those terms turned long-term debt into debt repayable on demand. That debt fell 64.4 percent, from $61,553,329 to $21,899,659. A twelfth lender waived its breach for a year, which kept $15,027,849 out of the count. Add it back and the fall is still 40.0 percent. Both figures are this desk’s arithmetic, on the same accounts.
The offering document gives LOLC’s Tier 1 capital ratio, the core measure of a lender’s own money, as 22.2 percent where the rule requires 11 percent. It gives liquidity coverage, the cash a lender keeps against short-term calls, as 177.3 percent where the floor is 100 percent. It gives the overall capital adequacy ratio as 24.2 percent, and sets no floor beside that one.
The same document says what the money is for. Twenty percent of the net proceeds goes to green projects and 80 percent to social projects, inside two years of the issue. The guaranteed part raised $20 million.