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.
