The National Bank of Cambodia has withdrawn five bank and wallet licences since February and put a sixth firm under a temporary manager. On appointing an administrator or a liquidator, the statute requires notice to the firm and to nobody else.
Five Cambodian banks and mobile wallet companies have lost their licences since February, and a sixth went under a provisional administrator, someone put in temporary charge before any decision to close it. Nothing in the banking law the National Bank of Cambodia publishes as the statute it supervises under requires it to tell the public any of that.
It published every one. They sit on the announcements page of its own website, dated as they went up. The first, on 23 February, put a provisional administrator into Panda Commercial Bank. H-Pay Service Plc’s licence went next, in a notice of 10 April.
On 3 August the bank announced the liquidation of three banks at once, CCU Commercial Bank, Heng Feng (Cambodia) Bank and HH (Cambodia) Bank. Tian Xu International Technology Plc’s licence followed on 10 September, with a liquidator named in the same notice.
Four such actions appear on that index between the start of 2024 and this month, among 521 notices. The count is what the headlines carry. Another payment company, Huoy Wan Pay Plc, turns up in two notices of April this year, which already call it a former institution.
The law does name someone who has to be told, and it is the firm. Article 53 treats putting in a provisional administrator or a liquidator as an urgent protective measure, enforceable at once. It requires that the firm concerned be given notice. The Khmer edition reads the same way, and neither names anybody else.
What the law does tell the bank to publish is lists. It has to keep a current list of the institutions it licenses. That list goes in the Official Gazette, the government’s paper of record, and in what the law calls the Bulletin of the National Bank of Cambodia.
A second asks the same of a list of licensed banks. A third covers the regulations the bank issues. A fourth, in the chapter on the law coming into force, is another list. One publishing duty falls on the firms instead: they publish their own accounts. None of it attaches to closing a firm or taking away its licence.
H-Pay and Tian Xu are not banks. They are payment service institutions, licensed companies that hold and move customers’ money, a mobile wallet rather than an account. Their licences come under a prakas of 20 June 2017, a prakas being a regulatory order made below the level of a law. It gives the central bank seven grounds for suspending or withdrawing such a licence, and says nothing about telling anyone it has.
The bank writes rules of this kind when it wants them. Guidance it issued on 10 November last year tells banks and licensed financial firms to report a breakdown in payment services to it, and to say publicly what has stopped and when it will be back. That duty runs from the firm outward, and its subject is service, not licences.
Two of the notices let a gap be measured. The bank decided to take H-Pay’s licence on 20 March and named the firm’s liquidator in its notice of 10 April, twenty-one days later. It took Tian Xu’s on 3 August and published on 10 September, thirty-eight.
Nothing else in the four is comparable. One gives both dates and two give no decision date at all, so two cases since the start of 2024 is the entire set. Neither figure shows what is ordinary here.
There is a reason to wait. Publishing on the day of a decision risks a run on a firm before anyone is in place to pay a claimant. The H-Pay notice gives the company fifteen days to find its own liquidator, which fits that. It also gives a ground: the bank found the company had not kept to its law and regulations. Nothing in these documents tests the point either way, and none sets an order between deciding, appointing and telling anyone.
The central bank can say it makes its supervisory decisions public, and these four actions bear that out. It published every one, and nothing required it to. What the practice does not have is an instrument behind it, so there is no date by which a notice must appear, no form it must take, and nothing that follows if it does not.
That rests on three documents, the 1999 law as the bank publishes it, the 2017 prakas and last year’s guidance. The Official Gazette, the law constituting the central bank and its other regulations are not part of it. A depositor who is not told has nothing to point to.
What a depositor gets is in the notices, not the law. The one of 3 August tells customers of the three banks to gather their documents and take them to the liquidator. It gives the addresses and telephone numbers: REACHS and Partners Co Ltd for CCU Commercial Bank, Baker Tilly (Cambodia) Co Ltd for the other two.
Under Article 64 of the banking law their deposits stand fifth of seven in the order a closed firm pays out. From the day a licence goes, the firm they deal with is the liquidator, not the bank that closed theirs.