It’s not every day that a public official (or more precisely, their proxies) spends hundreds of thousands of dollars to convince Washington that they should not be treated as a threat actor. According to recent reports, that is exactly what Cambodian Interior Minister and Deputy Prime Minister Sar Sokha did, hiring two U.S. law firms to prevent his designation under U.S. sanctions authorities.
But the story has an additional strange twist. Sokha’s concern stems from his inclusion in the HR 5490 sanctions list, which is part of bipartisan legislation introduced in September 2025 to target Southeast Asia’s fraudulent economy. Section 7 of the legislation asks the president to determine whether sanctions should be applied to a list of implicated elite figures. However, during the House Foreign Affairs Committee’s review in December, lawmakers rewrote Section 7, removing the list in bipartisan negotiations that also removed a $60 million package for anti-scam funding, among other changes to the original text.
This should not be construed as a justification for Sokha’s protests of innocence regarding his involvement in online fraud operations. To the contrary, many House members made clear in their comments that Congress will continue to seek ways to hold these actors accountable.
During the markup, Brian Mast (R-Fl.), chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, said that Cambodia and Myanmar “are both states that support human trafficking” and that “both countries are complicit in it.” Rep. Jefferson Shreve (R-In.), the bill’s original sponsor, said “deleting this list does not mean that the people on this list are model citizens.” Rep. Castro (D-) called it a “toxic convergence of cyber fraud, human trafficking and state corruption, and Warren Davidson (R-Oh.) added that cyber fraud syndicates have “nation-state sponsors” that the Committee considered “co-conspirators with the criminal syndicates.”
At the same time, the markup creates a particular table. Sokha is now paying big D.C. lawyers to force his way off a list that has already been crossed off. Of course, Sokha has every right to hire a lawyer, as does anyone facing sanctions. The question is what this sudden investment says about the concerns now circulating within the Cambodian ruling elite. There are two plausible explanations, but neither is particularly flattering.
The first is simple confusion. Sokha, his advisers or his legal team could react to the old version of the bill intended for the public. To be fair, Congress.gov isn’t exactly designed for easy navigation, and at the time of publication, the bill text online still retains the pre-markup language. Yet if a senior minister spent this kind of money because he mistook a ghost for a real threat, it would be a blatant mistake.
The second possibility is more cynical (and more likely): Sokha’s legal campaign might be designed less to change the bill than to shape the story surrounding it, potentially preparing to launch a narrative that his expensive legal defense somehow made sense to policymakers and got his name removed.
It would be good political sense when it comes to the PRC: not only surviving scrutiny, but muddling the facts, then declaring victory amid the confusion.
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Sokha has long occupied a useful place in the international presentation of the Cambodian regime. As interior minister, deputy prime minister and son of former long-serving interior minister Sar Kheng, he was often portrayed as one of the politest faces in government. The Ministry of the Interior, more broadly, has long presented itself to foreign voters as a responsible actor and a reformist interlocutor, even as the party-state dominated by the Hun family behaved like a thinly veiled criminal autocracy.
This branding has always deserved more attention than it has received.
As I wrote in October last year, Sokha remains surrounded by unanswered questions stemming from his past business proximity to figures now central to the U.S. and its allies’ scrutiny of Cambodia’s fraudulent economy. His previous ties with Jin Bei (Cambodia) Investment Co. Ltd. and with a corporate ring that included individuals later sanctioned or named in major US-UK actions against the Prince Group, which the US Treasury Department described as “a criminal empire built on forced labor and deception”, makes him a glaring exception. All other countries closest to this industrial orbit have faced international responsibilities. Sokha, so far, has not done so.
While Sokha says his bond with Chen Zhi was “simply a social relationship,” the bonds go far beyond Jin Bei and cocktails. For example, until the end of 2025, Prince Group was the main visible sponsor of Visakha Football Club (nominally owned by Sokha’s wife, a joint proxy formation for Cambodian oligarchs). The club’s stadium was even called “Prince Stadium”.
None of this alone resolves the question of his legal liability. This, however, makes it difficult to ignore the political aspect of his sudden advocacy in Washington.
For years, Cambodian officials insisted that the country’s scam crisis was a problem of foreign criminals and isolated enforcement gaps, or even part of a campaign by “extremist opposition groups” to undermine the government’s credibility. It has always been fiction. As I argued in congressional testimony last month, the scams constitute the visible end of a much deeper state-criminal architecture: one in which foreign criminal capital has merged with Cambodia’s long-standing authoritarian patronage structures, a framework also advanced in a peer-reviewed study released in late May.
Sokha’s legal battle suggests that international pressure is finally reaching a level in Cambodia’s power structure that domestic accountability mechanisms have never reached. Cambodia’s ruling elites have spent decades shielded from meaningful consequences, with the country’s courts, regulators, police, media and parliament all working towards regime survival and elite impunity. But current global surveillance is beginning to call this national protection racket into question.
This most recent maneuver fits this pattern. This is, on one level, slightly absurd: a senior Cambodian official is fighting windmills in Washington. But on another level, it’s worrying, since the likely story here will be that a high-ranking party-state official fought Washington and won.
Congress should not allow this to happen.
If passed, HR 5490 could still serve a purpose, even if it is stripped of its original names and funding earmarks. But accountability should not depend on a single list in a single bill. Congress can continue to insist that the federal government hold elites responsible for these crimes accountable. The Treasury, State, and Justice departments, as well as allied governments, should continue to examine evidence regarding the protection networks of Cambodia’s elite, including figures whose official positions and reformist image helped protect them from scrutiny.
Sar Sokha may be fighting a ghost. Or maybe he’s trying to use it as an alibi.
Regardless, as Cambodian elites begin paying Washington lawyers to fight imaginary sanctions lists, policymakers should accept the compliment and redouble their efforts.