Media report of $10B debt incorrect: government
The government sought to set the record straight on December 22 after local media outlets erroneously reported that the Kingdom’s public debt had reached $10 billion at the end of 2015. Without naming which media outlets had published the skewed figure, which was shared widely on Facebook, the Ministry of Economy and Finance said the error resulted from a misunderstanding of how Cambodia’s national debt was calculated. The media reports appear to have erroneously combined both public and private debt figures that were seemingly taken from an outdated World Bank report. “The figure that said foreign debt in Cambodia reached $10 billion, that is not entirely the debt of the government,” the MEF’s announcement read. “Among the country’s total debt, nearly $4 billion of that belongs to the private sector.” The MEF’s announcement said that the public should not be misled by false claims made by those media outlets because they damage the Kingdom’s economic gains.
