Heartbreak Hotel.
Posted: Sat Nov 02, 2019 1:03 pm
The French colonial villa on Street 178 in 2014. Photo: Hemis/Alamy
August 2019
By Rupert Winchester
One morning, ambling down Street 178 — long and shaded with tamarind trees, stretching east to the Tonle Sap river, past the National Museum and the Foreign Correspondents’ Club — I passed a wonderful canary-yellow villa, clearly old, clearly much loved. Behind its high but not impassable fence, tuk-tuk drivers snoozed on the badly mown lawns, their plastic bags of soft drink hanging from the trees.
...... Most of the records disappeared into the maw of the Khmer Rouge regime after 1975. But the consensus is that the mansion was originally built as a royal villa between 1900 and 1910. Anecdotal evidence has the villa being constructed in 1905 as a residence for lesser royals,...
It was owned by an unnamed government official after that. During the UNTAC period (1992-93) it was the renowned Cafe No Problem, which was popular with UN staff. There was apparently a splendid wooden bar in the main room that served generous vodka tonics by candlelight and had huge pillows where you could sit on the floor at low tables.
.... A few months later, I was in a foreign property dealer’s office when a listing caught my eye. It was the same villa, which they were offering for sale for a staggering US$14 million.Having spent some time studying Phnom Penh’s property values, I knew that couldn’t be right. Despite its beauty and rarity, the villa was worth no more than about US$500,000. A bit of digging uncovered the truth — the building was being sold as a potential site for a new high-rise development.....
I sniffed a story, one that involved rapacious developers knocking down Phnom Penh’s colonial heritage in search of a fast buck. ... They told me about greedy developers who would knock down buildings on public holidays so no one could do anything until it was too late. They told me about how profit was king,
“Hello, Monsieur Chenevier … I wanted to ask you about the villa on Street 178. Can you tell me what you’re planning to do with it? Are you going to knock it down?”
“I strongly deny it. Why would we want to knock down our own building? If you say we will, I will sue you.” Then a click, as he hung up.
I was told, off the record, that the judge had accepted US$100,000 to swing the verdict Chenevier’s way, but the evidence at trial was so threadbare he was awarded a mere US$25,000.
Soon, a Hyatt Regency will occupy the site of the canary-yellow villa, now just a footnote to a story about how journalism can be suppressed by people with money.
full https://mekongreview.com/heartbreak-hotel/
