Thai actor Sahajak Boonthanakit will never forget the day he met Chen Zhi: "Although I don't want to make this too dramatic, Chen Zhi is very much like a godfather.
Besides greeting, he didn't say much," Sahajak recalled in an interview with Radio Free Asia: "He looked very powerful."
Chen Zhi is a Chinese immigrant and one of the most connected business tycoons in Cambodia. Sahajak met Chen Zhi in 2018, when Chen was serving as an advisor to the Cambodian Ministry of Interior, equivalent to the position of Deputy Secretary of State. Later, he became an advisor to then Prime Minister Hun Sen and, according to the royal decree that granted him authority, continues to serve in this advisory role under Hun Manet, who succeeded as Prime Minister. Chen Zhi's Prince Group has earned billions of dollars through establishing malls, banks, and real estate in Cambodia.
For Sahajak, this short, pale-skinned, goatee-bearded 30-year-old man was just a mysterious financier who funded Sahajak's latest movie and hosted him at his villa on the banks of the Mekong River in Phnom Penh.
After a luxury car delivered the actors and film crew to Chen Zhi's villa, Sahajak and his colleagues were taken to a banquet hall, where a large round table capable of seating about 20 people was filled with wine and delicacies, including shark fin soup, which usually costs hundreds of dollars per bowl.
The banquet was to celebrate the completion of the film "The Prey," Cambodia's first attempt at a homemade Hollywood-style action movie. "The Prey" tells the story of a Chinese detective named Xin, who is mistakenly imprisoned in a remote Cambodian prison while undercover investigating a violent online crime gang.
In supporting Cambodia's first major domestic action film production, Chen Zhi tried to portray himself as an important business magnate. However, this movie might be more like his "Freudian slip" investment. According to this station, Chinese police have been investigating whether most of Chen Zhi's wealth comes from illegal activities similar to those depicted in the movie.
Chen Zhi is a supporter of the movie "The Prey," which is also Cambodia's first attempt to produce its own Hollywood-style action film.
Although it has not been reported by the media, according to judgments made by Chinese criminal courts from 2020 to 2022, China's judicial system has described the Prince Group as a "notorious transnational online gambling crime gang," earning 5 billion yuan in illegal income. The Chinese government's crackdown on the Prince Group began in May 2020, when Beijing police established a special task force to investigate the group, and since then, at least seven different provincial courts have ruled that the group's grassroots and related employees committed gambling and money laundering crimes.
As of now, the parent company of the Prince Group and Chen Zhi have not yet been prosecuted in China. A spokesperson for the Prince Group told this station that the company denies all related allegations, stating that the appearance of these allegations is the result of criminals impersonating the Prince Group.
However, to understand why the Prince Group is under detailed investigation by the Chinese government, one must first understand how Chen Zhi, an obscure Chinese small business owner, transformed into a Cambodian citizen with a fortune of millions. Today, Chen Zhi has deep connections with senior Cambodian officials, which so far have sheltered him and the senior executives of the Prince Group.
The Rise of the Prince
Chen Zhi was born on December 16, 1987, in Fujian, a province that has been an international trade center for centuries. According to the website of DW Capital Holdings, a Singapore-based fund management company in which Chen Zhi personally invests, Chen Zhi is "a young business prodigy" who was helping run the family business in Shenzhen before he was three years old.
The website notes that Chen Zhi's first personal venture was investing in a small internet cafe in Fujian Province. In 2011, Chen Zhi ventured into the Cambodian real estate market, developing "uncharted waters."
After Chen Zhi immigrated to Cambodia, his business investments became more prominent because there were many opportunities for smart and well-connected people.
According to bank records investigated by this station, the first company Chen Zhi founded was a real estate company, which was established in Phnom Penh the year he immigrated to Cambodia. In 2015, Chen Zhi founded the Prince Group, and subsequently, the group quickly became a ubiquitous brand on the streets of Cambodian cities.
The real estate branch of the Prince Group transformed Sihanoukville, a quiet, rundown seaside resort, into a thriving city filled with Chinese casinos. After earning huge profits from thousands of apartments and hotels in Sihanoukville, the Prince Group expanded its investments to apartment buildings, supermarkets, and shopping centers in Phnom Penh. Since its establishment, the group has also operated as a private microloan institution providing banking services. Three years later, the group obtained an official commercial bank license.
As Chen Zhi's business continued to grow, so did his political capital.
On February 16, 2014, Chen Zhi was naturalized as a Cambodian citizen. Naturalization in Cambodia is a path welcomed by wealthy foreigners, requiring an investment or donation to the government of $250,000. However, even if foreign nationals can afford this fee, few can achieve the meteoric personal development like Chen Zhi. Three years after naturalization, a royal decree appointed him as an advisor to the Ministry of Interior, although this job did not provide remuneration, it granted Chen Zhi a status equivalent to that of a Deputy Secretary of State.
A few weeks after taking up this position, Chen Zhi partnered with Sar Sokha in March 2017. At that time, Sar Sokha's father was the Minister of Interior, wielding great power, and in August of that year, Sar Sokha succeeded his father's position.
Chen Zhi's partnership with Sar Sokha was Jinbei (Cambodia) Investment Co. Ltd, which dissolved in 2021, but according to Cambodian business records, this was the first of five companies established by Chen Zhi and other senior executives of the Prince Group under the name "Jinbei." Today, the aforementioned five companies collectively form the Jinbei Group, which claims on its website to have invested $300 million in the Cambodian tourism industry.
Although the Prince Group and the Jinbei Group are independent entities, the connections between these companies are so close that Chinese authorities in court documents refer to Jinbei as a "subsidiary" of the Prince Group, but the Prince Group denies such claims.
The flagship project of the Jinbei Group is a seven-story hotel and casino occupying 16,500 square meters, located in Sihanoukville and opened in 2017. This casino, known in Chinese as Jinbei or Golden Shell, has 43 gambling tables and two VIP rooms. It is one of the more than 100 casinos that opened in Sihanoukville before 2019, during the city's boom period, when the city was touted as the new Macau.
Victor Chong, the marketing manager of Jinbei, attributed the prosperity of Sihanoukville to the Cambodian government's "pro-business" stance in an interview with Macau Business Daily in 2019. He stated that the Cambodian authorities would issue a casino license to anyone willing to pay an annual license fee of $40,000.
Online and Behind the Scenes
Although the law may not necessarily be enforced, gambling is illegal for Cambodian citizens. In the casinos of Sihanoukville, most of the customers and owners are Chinese citizens.
In the mid to late 2010s, a large number of Chinese gangs joined the ranks of gamblers, hoping to make quick money through usury and extortion. Bodies began washing up on the beaches; illegal prostitution was rampant; the number of internet crime gangs based in the city exploded, mainly targeting Chinese citizens; and unabashed gang-style shootings began to prevail in the streets and restaurants, creating an atmosphere of impunity. Although some Cambodians were also inadvertently injured in the aforementioned incidents, the victims were always Chinese.
This situation angered the Chinese authorities, but what made Beijing even more uneasy was the business model adopted by the casinos in Sihanoukville, most of which had online gambling websites targeting Chinese customers, clearly violating Chinese law. .
In 2019, possibly under pressure from Beijing, Prime Minister Hun Sen announced a crackdown on online gambling businesses, citing rising crime rates. This had an immediate impact on Sihanoukville, with more than 200,000 Chinese workers and entrepreneurs leaving the city, and thousands stranded due to lack of funds.
The COVID-19 pandemic, China's stringent travel restrictions, and domestic economic difficulties exacerbated the problem. Four years later, Sihanoukville's skyline is a mess. At night, the few remaining casinos' twinkling lights flicker through the steel frames of half-finished, abandoned skyscrapers.
But if there are losers in Sihanoukville, the Prince Group is not one of them. Last year (2023), when this station's reporters visited, Jinbei was still welcoming guests under huge neon lights shaped like a shell filled with red dice. The multi-story Prince Mall houses luxury stores, video game arcades, and the Prince Supermarket, which includes a lobster breeding pool. On the basement floor of the mall, the Prince Group's real estate division displays models of coastal and urban skyscraper apartments designed by architects.
Chen Zhi's $24 million luxury yacht Nonni II can also occasionally be seen docked at the port of Sihanoukville, equipped with a home theater and disco bar.
What keeps the Prince Group thriving while many competitors face difficulties? According to court documents, the answer is criminal activity—large-scale criminal activity.
High-Tech 'Money Mules'
According to court records queried by this station, Chinese law enforcement began investigating the Prince Group in 2020, focusing on whether at least one-third of the group's $2 billion investment came from illegal online gambling operations. In May 2020, the Beijing Public Security Bureau established the "5.27 Special Action Group," and according to a 2021 court judgment, the purpose of this team was "to investigate and handle cases involving the notorious transnational online gambling crime group in Cambodia, namely the 'Prince Group'."
Gabriel Tan, a spokesperson for the Prince Group, responded in an email that the special action group "has nothing to do with any activities of the Prince Holdings Group." He also added that the Prince Group appears in court documents because of an "impersonation" issue.
The Henan Provincial Local Court is one of several courts that have judged personnel related to the Prince Group, who were accused of engaging in money laundering and gambling activities. Some of the prosecuted employees were directly part of the Prince Group, while others worked for other companies under the Prince Group, including the Jinbei Group. A court judgment directly described Jinbei as a "subsidiary of the Prince Group in Cambodia" and stated that Jinbei "has developed a series of gambling software and placed it on Chinese online platforms."
Court documents also indicate that the Prince Group continued to operate online gambling, which Hun Sen banned starting in 2019.
Since Chinese citizens can only carry $50,000 out of the country each year, such capital controls hindered the Prince Group's operation of illegal online casinos. The Chinese court pointed out that the Prince Group's method of circumventing the aforementioned capital controls was to employ a large network of personnel to transport bank cards between China and Cambodia. The task force determined that a total of 458 people were suspected of transferring funds for the Prince Group in this way.
According to the court's judgment, one of the 'money mules' who helped transfer funds was 28-year-old Guo Caina. In March 2018, she was recruited by the Prince Group from her hometown of Luoyang to work in Cambodia, where she was told that her job was customer service and bookkeeping. Upon arriving in Cambodia, she handed over four Chinese bank cards under her name for 1,000 yuan each. A day later, she decided to resign and return to China, but when she requested the return of her bank cards, the company refused.
According to the court's judgment, by the end of April 2018, more than 140 million yuan in gambling funds had flowed through her bank accounts. Guo Caina admitted to the crime of conspiracy to operate a casino in court and was sentenced to probation and fined 30,000 yuan.
Cases similar to Guo Caina's are numerous, and after reviewing court judgments, this station found that 'money mules' like Guo Caina, who were convicted of handling gambling funds, are believed by Chinese authorities to be serving the Prince Group and Jinbei.
In July 2022, a statement released by the Wangcang County Court in Sichuan Province estimated that since 2016, the Prince Group had earned more than 5 billion yuan in illegal profits from gambling activities.
Although multiple attempts to contact Chen Zhi were unsuccessful, Tan, a spokesperson for the Prince Group, told this station's reporters, "Jinbei Group firmly denies any association with online gambling operations." He pointed out, "Chinese court documents mention the 'Cambodian Prince Group' because criminals have impersonated the Prince Group, and our company is aware of multiple instances of unauthorized entities and criminals abusing our group's name."
He also denied that the Prince Group used Chinese employees' bank cards to transfer online gambling funds, stating that these allegations "have nothing to do with the Prince Holdings Group and are completely baseless." This station was unable to contact Jinbei for comment.
Too Deeply Linked to Prisons?
The prosecution of the Prince Group for alleged 'money mules' and gambling is part of a broader crackdown on gambling launched by the Chinese government in 2018. Beijing views online casinos as a national security threat, with online gambling causing an annual capital outflow of 1 trillion yuan.
In January 2023, a court in Macau sentenced one of the most successful gambling tycoons, Zhou Zerong, to 18 years in prison for 162 crimes including organized crime, fraud, and assisting illegal online gambling.
Last August, Singaporean police conducted the country's largest money laundering investigation, arresting nine Chinese Cambodians. Prosecutors accused them of operating illegal gambling websites targeting Chinese citizens. Observers noted that this crackdown occurred a week after Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi's visit to Singapore, indicating that Beijing may have been the driving force behind the arrests, especially since one of the defendants had an outstanding arrest warrant in China.
For Beijing, the Prince Group may pose a more complex challenge. Chinese judicial authorities seem intent on pursuing the criminal gang activities of the Prince Group and its subsidiaries. However, Chen Zhi and the group's senior executives, many of whom are his uncles and cousins, have not appeared in Chinese court judgments at all. They are deeply entrenched in Cambodia's political network, and Cambodia is one of China's most reliable regional allies.
Furthermore, since 2020, Chen Zhi has served as Hun Sen's personal advisor, accompanying him on foreign engagements, such as trips to Cuba, and representing the Cambodian government in providing aid to neighboring Laos. At the same time, Chen Zhi is also a personal advisor to former National Assembly Speaker Heng Samrin and former Minister of Interior Sar Sokha. Shortly after Hun Manet became the new Prime Minister, Chen Zhi was also appointed as one of his 104 advisors, a position that gives him a status equivalent to that of a minister.
Therefore, any direct accusations against Chen Zhi would inevitably involve Cambodia's highest law enforcement officials and embarrass Cambodia's former and current Prime Ministers. For decades, Beijing has spent considerable diplomatic effort and billions of dollars to build the Hun dynasty into one of China's most enthusiastic friends.
Sok Eysan, a spokesperson for the Cambodian People's Party led by Hun Sen, said he could not comment on this and referred this station to Pen Bona, a spokesperson for the Cambodian government, for comments. However, after multiple inquiries, Pen still did not respond to the request for comment.
Sophal Ear, a Cambodian-American scholar, told this station in an interview that Chen Zhi is unlikely to be imprisoned in the short term.
"Clearly, some people are untouchable," Sophal said, "Does Chen Zhi want to engage in political affairs in China? No, he is just in it for the money. So it doesn't matter, Chen Zhi's subordinates will pay the price for him."
