The Daily Mail reports that Britain is to stop giving aid to 16 countries, including Cambodia, after a review found they were no longer in poverty, following an inquiry ordered by Britain’s International Development Secretary Andrew Mitchell.

Other countries to lose out are Russia, Serbia, China, Vietnam and Moldova. Aid to India will also be frozen rather than stopped.

The aid budget will actually increase by £4billion in the next four years. Vast amounts of extra money – 30 per cent of the budget – will be pumped into unstable hotspots such as Yemen and Somalia, to help them crack down on terrorism. Critics will question whether that is prudent, as there will be no way for Britain to check whether the money is being spent wisely, or being embezzled by officials.

Britain’s move is part of a global trend to reduce bilateral aid – partly because of a belief that countries like Cambodia need to demonstrate greater self-reliance and partly because of economic difficulties donors are experiencing at home. Mitchell established separate reviews into Britain’s bilateral and multilateral aid budgets after the general election.

Britain’s aid budget is one of the few areas protected from cuts, unlike defence, education and the police, which are  having to make deep savings. The total spent on aid will rise from £7billion to £11billion by 2015 – at the same time as front-line public services at home are being slashed.

Aid to Yemen, regarded by Britain as a failing state whose lack of economic development provides a fertile recruiting ground for al-Qaeda, will instead be doubled from £46.7m this year to £90m by 2015.

The UNESCO, a possible victim of the review of Britain’s support for multilateral organisations, will have to meet a series of targets to justify its aid after the review found that it wasted the £12m it receives from Britain each year.

Mitchell told the BBC Politics Show that the reviews would lead to Britain’s aid budget being “much better focused” on areas of greatest need. “People who live in conflict states are very much part of that,” he said.

The reviews are designed to answer opponents on the right and left who have criticised the government’s approach to aid from different angles.

A focus on developing countries in greatest need, with a hard-headed payments by results system, is meant to show sceptical Tories that the aid budget is being spent in a sensible way. Many Tories believe it was wrong of David Cameron to ringfence the aid budget, after the prime minister pledged to maintain Britain’s commitment to meet the UN target of spending 0.7% of gross national income on aid by 2013.

Targeting resources at a country such as Yemen, some of whose territory is used by al-Qaida as a training ground, is also designed to show that concerns on the left about the securitisation of Britain’s aid budget are unfounded.

Charities have warned that aligning aid priorities with Britain’s overall foreign and trade policy could lead to a return to the 1990s when the Pergau dam in Indonesia was funded with British aid money. Harriet Harman, the shadow international development secretary, voiced these fears when she warned of “subsuming aid activities into military activities”.

Mitchell said resources also will be focused on the 27 poverty-stricken countries that suffer three-quarters of the world’s maternal mortality and malaria deaths, including Ghana and Afghanistan.

Melbourne’s The Age newspaper reveals that high-ranking Chinese officials insist there can be no limit to the expansion of Beijing’s nuclear arsenal.

Records of secret defence consultations between the US and China reveal that US diplomats have repeatedly failed to persuade the rising superpower to be more transparent about its nuclear forces. Chinese officials, meanwhile, privately admit that a desire for military advantage underpins continuing secrecy.

This is amidst growing regional fears that it will eventually equal that of the United States, with profound consequences for Asia’s strategic balance.

According to US diplomatic cables obtained by WikiLeaks, the deputy chief of China’s People’s Liberation Army General Staff, Ma Xiaotian, told US Defense and State Department officials in June 2008 that the growth of China’s nuclear forces was an ”imperative reality” and there could be “no limit on technical progress”.

Rejecting American calls for China to reveal the size of its nuclear capabilities, Lieutenant-General Ma bluntly declared: ”It is impossible for [China] to change its decades-old way of doing business to become transparent using the US model.”

While claiming in a further July 2009 discussion that Beijing’s nuclear posture has “always been defensive” and that China would “never enter into a nuclear arms race”, General Ma acknowledged that, “frankly speaking, there are areas of China’s nuclear program that are not very transparent”.

China’s assistant foreign minister He Yafei similarly told US officials in June 2008 that there will be an ”inevitable and natural extension” of Chinese military power and that China ”cannot accept others setting limits on our capabilities”.

Other leaked US cables reveal Japan fears China’s nuclear arsenal will grow to equal that of the US, and Tokyo has urged Washington to retain strong nuclear capabilities to deter an “increasingly bold” China from ”doing something stupid”.

A senior Japanese Foreign Ministry official also warned that China’s “troubling” nuclear build-up had to be viewed in the context of its other activities, including its 2007 anti-satellite test, cyber-attacks and growing naval capabilities.

“If China perceives the United States having difficulty accessing the region, it is more likely to do something stupid,” said Japan-US Security Treaty Division senior coordinator Yusuke Arai.

A senior Japanese official said that while China had declared a ”no first-use” nuclear weapons posture, “no nuclear expert believes this is true”. The International Institute for Strategic Studies estimates China has up to 90 intercontinental ballistic missiles (66 land-based and 24 submarine-launched) and more than 400 intermediate range missiles targeting Taiwan and Japan. The US intelligence community predicts that by the mid-2020s, China could double the number of warheads on missiles capable of threatening the US.

The market is going blue in the face waiting for the outcome of the battle of the suitors for a stake in CamGSM, the parent of local mobile phone company Mobitel – part of Khmer conglomerate Royal Group.

In December 2010, Reuters reported that France Telecom and Telekom Indonesia were both vying for a place at the Mobitel table, with the former bidding to buy a minority 40% interest while the latter was negotiating the acquisition of a majority stake, apparently valued at over $US500m, in CamGSM.

CamGSM, fully owned by Cambodia’s Royal Group after it bought Millicom Group’s 58.4% stake in 2009 for $346 million, was until recently the largest mobile operator in Cambodia through its Mobitel and Cellcard brands. At that time, France Telecom had been rumoured to be in negotiations to buy the whole company, but the deal apparently fell over at the last hurdle.

Up until being saddled with the massive interest bill from its bridging loan used for the buyout of Millicom, Mobitel had been Royal Group’s cash cow. However, Royal was left with an unsustainable debt from a bridging loan financed by Standard Chartered and ANZ after the France Telecom deal fell over. Since then, however, this appeared to have been remedied when Royal pulled off a coup in November 2010 by refinancing the debt on much more favourable terms through a loan from the Bank of China.

At the same time, Mobitel inked a five-year deal worth $500 million for the supply of equipment and services from China’s Huawei Technologies, building on an initial three-year $200 million deal at the beginning of the year.

Telekom Indonesia’s bid puts the total valuation of Mobitel at around $US1 billion, a stunning 60% premium on its value at the time of the Millicom buy-out. This seems somewhat rich given that statistics from Cambodia’s Ministry of Posts and Telecommunications (reported by the Phnom Penh Post) in November 2010 that showed Mobitel had dropped to become the number two by subscriber numbers.

Analysts are now curious why a deal with either France Telecom or Telekom Indonesia has not been struck?

Is it possible that the deal that helped secure the loan from BoC, involving what many regard as an unnecessary revamp of Mobitel’s infrastructure, is now holding up sealing the deal? Any undisclosed ancillary conditions to the loan could make valuations of CamGSM’s assets extremely difficult to reach agreement on.

Is this what is holding up agreement on the dowry?

The expat community here in the Penh is comparatively small, with estimations varying between six and eight thousand. It is also fairly fluid, with lots of people coming and going.

It is not always easy to establish a social context or to make the contacts. In fact, finding out what is going on and who is doing what here can be a nightmare.

Penh Pal is hoping to address this deficiency by inviting anyone living or working here in the Penh to send us their profile so we can post it on the site. Free!

If your running an NGO and want people to know what you’re doing, or feel that your skill set or small business is not getting the recognition it deserves, please let us know.

Let’s get connected!

Email Tom@penhpal.com

Community advocates and law- and policymakers recently joined experts from the Global Commission on HIV and the Law, an independent body comprising some of the world’s most respected legal, human rights and HIV leaders to discussed and debated region-wide experiences of restrictive and enabling legal and social environments faced by the key affected populations in the Asia-Pacific region, including people living with HIV. It was the first in a series of regional debates to be held across the world this year.

The vast majority of countries in the Asia-Pacific region still have laws on the books obstructing the rights of people living with HIV and populations at higher risk of HIV exposure, according to the UN-sponsored conference in Bangkok last week. These laws often have the effect of increasing the risks rather than ameliorating them and can undermine other programmes designed to contain the disease.  http://www.asiasentinel.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=3017&Itemid=392