# 182 CCF board members turn a blind eye to World Housing scam

Dear Members of the Cambodian Children’s Fund Board

It is possible, I suppose (though improbable) that you remain unaware that CCF’s World Housing initiative is a scam.

If you are not aware that this is so, you should be. It is an integral part of your role as board  members to protect CCF’s generous sponsors and donors from being scammed.

If, for whatever reason, this scam has escaped your attention, there is no need to take my word for it. All that is required is for you to apply some very basic mathematics.

CCF asks sponsors and donors to put up $5,000 to buy one house for a poor Cambodian family.

The information I have from within CCF suggests that the cost of manufacture of one house is $1,000.

If this information is incorrect, the first question you need to ask Scott Neeson, is:

“How much do the pre-fabricated houses cost per unit?”

Since its inception, until recently. Scott Neeson has been telling the world that CCF is ‘gifting’ these houses to poor families. And this is certainly what sponsors and donors have been led to believe. When it was pointed out to him (in a very public manner) that he was renting these houses to poor families, not giving them, CCF eventually came clean and admitted that, yes, they were being rented. The families to whom the houses have been ‘gifted’ will never, can never, own them.

So, these 300 houses (to date), rented by poor families, have been erected on land owned by…?

Who owns the land? And why is this question important?

Whether you value the houses at $1,000 or $5,000 per unit, the owner of the land is in receipt of somewhere between $300,000 and $1.8 million of free houses.

Whatever the mysterious owner of the land paid for the land, its value increases with each and every house built on it.

My own feeling, having visited the new ‘communities’ is that CCF is in the process of building slums, but that is not relevant to the question in hand.

The next question you need to ask Scott Neeson is:

“Who owns the land? Who is the lucky recipient of all these free houses?”

The information I have received from within CCF is that the land is owned by Country Manager Kram Sok Channoern.

The inside information I get from CCF is usually correct, though it may not be in this case.

If any or all of what I write here is ‘news’ to you all, you should, in the interests of clarification (and, of course, transparency) ask Scott Neeson straight up:

“Is Kram Sok Channoeurn the owner of the land upon which between $300,000 and $1.8 million ‘gifted’ houses  have been erected to date?”

In the interests of transparency and accountability the answers to these questions should be provided to the generous sponsors and donors who, until very recently, believed that they were buying houses for poor families’ not for Kram Sok Channoeurn. Or whoever else might be the owner of the land.

Whilst you all, as board members, may not be legally responsible for what is clearly a scam, you are morally responsible. Your very presence on the board, in the knowledge that a scam is taking place, is tacit acknowledgment that you either support the scam or that your consciences are untroubled by it.

If you do not approve of such scams, if your consciences are troubled, you should resign from the board.

No doubt the Scott Neeson Trolls who believe that I do not have a right to ask these kinds of questions will, in their usual fashion, seek to shoot the messenger on this blog; make thinly veiled and not so thinly veiled threats. C’est la vie!

It is up to you, as board members, to decide whether to turn a blind eye, to bury your heads in the sand on the question of who is the beneficiary of the free housing.

However, when the full extent of CCF’s scams becomes known (and it will) you will not be able to plead ignorance.