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Last modified on Monday 31 August 2015 05.42 BST

Australia’s $55m plan to resettle refugees from Nauru to Cambodia appears finished, with just four refugees moved to the south-east Asian country at a cost of more than $13m per refugee.

Four refugees – an Iranian couple, Iranian man and a Rohingyan man from Burma – were transferred from Nauru to the Cambodian capital Phnom Penh in June.

Since then, they’ve lived in relative luxury in an Australian-funded villa, and will remain there indefinitely.

However, Cambodia expects it will take no more from Australia’s resettlement plan.

“We don’t have any plans to import more refugees from Nauru to Cambodia,” interior ministry spokesman Khieu Sopheak told the Cambodia Daily. “I think the less we receive the better.”

But Australia’s foreign minister Julie Bishop denied the deal was collapsing. “That is not correct. You’re relying on an alleged statement of one official,” she told reporters in Sydney.

Bishop said she had had a positive meeting with her Cambodian counterpart earlier this month and said the southeast Asian country was keen to harness the skills of foreign workers to boost its gross domestic product.

Tony Abbott said Cambodia had been helped by the international community when it was “in trouble some years ago” – a reference to the Khmer Rouge period – but that it was now keen to assist in managing refugee flows...

A year after Scott Morrison trumpeted the arrangement with a champagne toast, ministers were left flat-footed by Cambodia’s reportedly abandoning the plan

Senior Australian officials yesterday defended the controversial refugee resettlement deal with Phnom Penh amid a media frenzy sparked by reports that the Kingdom had “no plans” to take in more refugees from the Pacific island of Nauru.

... Meanwhile, Ian Rintoul, an Australian political activist and spokesman for the Refugee Action Coalition, said that despite officials offering incentives and even sometimes coercing refugees to relocate to Cambodia from Nauru, the program appears to be at a standstill.

“The Cambodian efforts have just stalled. I haven’t heard of anyone on Nauru being approached,” he said yesterday.

Rintoul also dismissed Dutton’s statements, adding that the Cambodian government has every reason to provide a mirage-like scenario for the deal given the A$40 million ($28.5 million) in aid Australia pledged on top of covering the costs...

PHNOM PENH (Khmer Times) – Australian immigration officials have identified four more refugees for potential transfer from Nauru to Cambodia, the Interior Ministry said yesterday, reviving a controversial deal that stalled last month.

Ministry spokesman Khieu Sopheak said Cambodian immigration officials would visit the remote and desolate Pacific island in the next month to interview the refugees.

“They are going to visit to verify that they really do want to come,” Mr. Sopheak said. It is not known how long it will take to revive the relocations, but it will be more than a few weeks.

Just like the first group of refugees who arrived in June, Mr. Sopheak said three of the volunteers are Iranian, and one is a Rohingya, a persecuted Muslim minority group from Myanmar...

... “We have been informed that there are four volunteers to come to Cambodia, and we are gong to send officers to meet them directly on Nauru,” Sopheak said...
The visit was seen by some refugee advocates as an exercise in damage control, and came after Sopheak was quoted in local media as saying Cambodia had “no plans” to welcome any more refugees from Nauru.

Sopheak was quoted this week as saying nearly 200 Christian Montagnard asylum seekers who slipped into Cambodia from Vietnam would have to return of their own volition or risk being forcibly deported...

The second batch of refugees are expected to be put up in the same gated villa in southern Phnom Penh where the first four volunteer refugees – also three Iranians and a Rohingya man – have been sequestered since their arrival in June.
“I think [they will be] in the same house, because it’s so big,” Sopheak said...