# 181 Scott Neeson World Housing Scam update. More questions...

Dear Scott

Your ‘gifting’ of a home to a poor family in the provinces looks great on paper (in your paid-for Facebook advertisement) but the questions remain:

(1) Has CCF actually given the $1000 house to the family or is the family renting it from CCF?

(2) How many such $1000 houses has CCF given to families in the provinces? Just one? Five? One hundred?

(3) Did whoever sponsored this one house pay CCF $5000 for the privilege?

(4) How much did you pay Facebook for this sponsored advertisement? A good deal more than $5000 I suspect.

Now, call me cynical, but this advertisement for yourself (you can’t keep yourself out of photos, can you?) seems to me to be a crude attempt to deflect attention away from the key question:

Who owns the land upon which all the houses in Steung Meanchey have been erected?

My suspicion (and please do feel free to correct me if I am wrong) is that you have given a $1000 house to a family and have given God knows how many tens of thousands of dollars to Zuckerberg to get an ad for yourself up on Facebook.

A reality check:

I bought this house  (below) and the land around it for a family in Prey Veng for $3,000. Mum, dad and some of their children were working in Phnom Penh rubbish dump.

The house is humble but can be repaired. The amount of land is small but sufficient to grow some fruit trees, vegetables and run chickens. For the family it is a step up from working in the dump.

I gave the family another $1000 to help with repairs, to buy fruit trees and to put in a well.

That’s $4000 all up – the same amount of money that CCF claims to spend on just one child in residential care who is attending a CCF school.

$4000 to help one child in a family (the CCF model) whilst mum and dad continue to work in the rubbish dump

or

$4000 to get an entire family out of the dump and into a home that they own?

If I was a scamster, wanting to raise a lot of money, I could have a photo taken of myself with the family in front of their new house, pay Facebook to publish it and present myself to the world as someone buying houses for poor families. I could then sit back and watch the money flow into my bank account. It would be an easy scam to pull off (sponsors and donors don’t ask too many questions) and I am sure that the amount I raised would be greater than the amount I paid to Facebook for the advertisement.

Yes, there will be some (perhaps many) who look at your sponsored story and send CCF money – without bothering to ask the kinds of questions I am asking you; without bothering to ask how many such houses CCF has supplied to poor provincial families. They will either be unaware of, or forget about, the hundreds of houses being constructed in Steung Meanchey; will not bother to ask who owns the land, and hence the houses.

Come on Scott, who owns the land in Steung Meanchey? Is it you? Your in-country manager?  Who is the happy recipient of 100s of thousands of dollars of free housing?

You can keep putting photos of happy families up online (paid for out of funds that should be going to help poor families) for as long as you like but these land ownership questions will not  go away.

# 180 The FCO, having been caught out lying, refuses to communicate with Mr Fletcher any more!

Phillip Hammond

Foreign Secretary

Parliamentary House of Commons

London

SW1A                                                                                                

3rd Jan 2016

Dear Mr Hammond

re The mysterious disappearance and reappearance of Mr David Fletcher’s passport whilst in the possession of the Foreign & Commonwealth Office.

On 9^th Dec 2015, on my blog, I quoted from a letter sent to Mr Fletcher by Sir Simon Mc Donald, Permanent Under-Secretary of State, Foreign & Commonwealth Office regarding Mr Fletcher’s passport.

“I am sorry that I am unable to explain what happened to your passport between June 2010 and July 2012, but I welcome the PHSO’s conclusion that, in forwarding your passport to HMPO for cancellation, the FCO acted reasonably and in line with our guidance.”

As I wrote in my blog at the time:

“It is not very reassuring to know, in this ‘Age of Terror’ that Britain’s FCO can simply lose track of a passport in its possession for a period of two years and have no idea how it left the Thai Embassy, where it went and how it was that it came to mysteriously reappear in the Thai Embassy!”  Who was using it and for what purpose? Or had it simply fallen down the back of a couch!?”

Sir Simon was playing fast and loose with the truth; as had several other spin doctors within the FCO this past year – all offering a succession of equally implausible explanations at to what had happened to Mr Fletcher’s passport.

The FCO’s response to having it pointed out that Sir Simon was being parsimonious with the truth is to be found in a letter sent to Mr Fletcher by Ellie Lusty, Joint Head of Consular Assistance Department:

Dear Mr Fletcher

You have been sending repetitive emails from this email address over a number of weeks to consular staff at the British Embassy in Phnom Penh and other public correspondence addresses at the FCO. These concern your complaint about the cancellation of your passport and the apology from Sir Simon MacDonald, Permanent Under-Secretary at the FCO. Your complaint has been fully investigated by the Parliamentary and Heath Services Ombudsman (PHSO), who found that it was reasonable for the FCO to have cancelled your passport and return it to HMPO to be destroyed. You also write repeatedly about NGO corruption and the legalities of your case; and have published this correspondence on in an online blog.

Your frequent and repeated emails on this issue are disruptive and prevent consular officials from carrying out their duties. We can help you no further in this regard, so embassy staff in Cambodia and Thailand, and staff at the FCO in London will not respond to further email correspondence from you or your representative.

So, the FCO, having been caught out telling yet another set of lies about the whereabouts and fate of Mr Fletcher’s passport, decides that the best course of action is to cease to have any communication with Mr Fletcher at all.

Can the public in the UK have any confidence that pronouncements issuing from Sir Simon’s mouth and pen, and from other senior bureaucrats within the FCO are factually accurate?

It has been often suggested, by FCO spin doctors trying to give Mr Fletcher the brush-off, that the FCO does not and cannot interfere with judicial processes within Cambodia. There are two points that need to be made in relation to this assertion:

(1)  Neither Mr Fletcher nor myself (as his legally appointed ‘representative’) has ever asked the FCO to do anything other than request that Mr Fletcher be provided with a fair trial.

(2)  In 2010 the FCO most definitely ‘interfered’ with judicial processes within Cambodia (and Thailand) by co-operating in the pursuit and jailing of Mr Fletcher (in Thailand) on the basis of scuttlebutt spread by Scott Neeson and others, knowing full well (through CEOP) that no credible evidence had been uncovered implicating Mr Fletcher in the rape of Yang Dany.

And, since Sept 2010 the FCO (through CEOP) has known that Yang Dany remained a virgin after two ‘brutal’ hour long rapes! And, for the past year you have known, from Yang Dany’s own mouth (before she was spirited away to China; possibly trafficked) that both she and her mother insist that she was not raped.

It was because Mr Fletcher’s passport contained evidence that he was not in Cambodia at the time the alleged rapes occurred, because the FCO had been complicit in his arrest and illegal jailing in Thailand, that his passport had to ‘disappear’. And, when evidence of this began to emerge the FCO has had to think up different explanations to account for this ‘disappearance’.

Mr Hammond, both yourself and Sir Simon have demonstrated your total lack of concern for the welfare of a British citizen who has been denied a fair trial. Rather than deal with the incompetence manifested within the FCO and sack those responsible, you will allow one of your own citizens to die in jail without even requesting of your counterpart in Cambodia that Mr Fletvher be allowed, at the very least, a fair trial.

You are a disgrace, Mr Hammond. And so is Sir Simon and others further down the bureaucratic who have played their role in the denial of natural justice to Mr Fletcher.

My response to Sir Simon’s letter can be found at:

http://cambodia440.blogspot.com.au/2015/12/173-what-happened-to-mr-fletchers.html

best wishes

James Ricketson

# 179 Scott Neeson's Poverty Porn

NO WORDS ARE NEEDED!

Some words are definitely needed, Scott. Words of explanation. Answers to questions.

Why do you refer to CCF as a not-for-profit NGO when you are making huge profits from your World Housing scam?

According to World Housing’s own figures, you are making at least $2,500 profit per house. Close to $1 million in profits once you have constructed 360 houses. Considerably more if the true cost of manufacturing the houses is used - $1,000 per unit.

And all the while adding value to the land that is owned by...?

Who is it owned by? Why do you refuse to divulge this information to any journalist? Why should it remain a secret?

A new year's resolution for you:

STOP MANHANDLING OTHER PEOPLE'S CHILDREN!

These are other people’s children, Scott, even though you like to maintain the illusion that there is no mum, dad or family to take care of them. Only you and CCF. A lie!

All these kids have mums and dads. They just happen to be desperately poor and so are easily taken advantage of. 

These photo opportunities, of which there are dozens of you online, are poverty porn. And throwing a few shots of grannies up on your Facebook page does not legitimise your photographic exploitation of these children.

CCF is not a not-for-profit organization. You are making a huge profit on your World Housing houses alone.

Imagine, in a country like Australia or the United States, or any country in which the institutionalization  of children is seen as damaging (a well-known fact), someone such as yourself plastering his Facebook page with photos of himself and other people’s children? It would be considered weird, at the very least. Inappropriate.

In Cambodia, however, anyone who wants to exploit the poverty that is endemic in the country can do so – whether it is to make a quick buck (World Housing), to bolster their ego or to win souls for Jesus Christ.

Stop it, Scott. Just stop it. Stop directing your energies to the removal children from their families and communities; presenting yourself to the world as their saviour. 

It is the families that need your help. It is the communities in which the families live that need your help and the help of other NGOs. Removing individual members of the family, the ones most easily sold to generous sponsors and donors (cute kids) doe snot help the families and ultimately causes the children harm.

Send the 700 kids in CCF institutional care home, Scott. Help these kids by all means. And you do have the means. But help them where they belong - in their families and communities.

I trust that 2016 will be a happy one for the kids who will be reunited with their families.