Contemporaneous reports on May 15 said Cambodian authorities were investigating sugar in Kampot suspected of being repackaged with altered origin labels. Reports placed the issue in the context of a boycott of Thai products, while motives attributed to traders remained suspicions.
Citing a May 15 notice from the Commerce Ministry’s CCF directorate, the reports said a joint investigation with Kampot’s Unified Command Committee found sugar originally in bags bearing Thai writing had been transferred into bags bearing Vietnamese writing, allegedly concealing its source.
The notice concerned “KBS REFINED SUGAR” and “TRR GROUP REFINED SUGAR”, and sugar in Vietnamese-labelled bags shown in its annex. Reports said authorities were tracing the products’ origin; they did not provide an established finding of collusion between traders.
According to the contemporaneous full reproduction of the notice, the relevant importers, sellers and distributors must not import, sell, distribute, supply or repackage the listed products, and must cooperate with CCF in tracing production, import and distribution sources, laboratory sampling and product-safety requirements.
The measures concerned origin-labelling investigations and product-safety oversight. The original report gave no laboratory results, so it did not establish that harmful substances had been detected in the sugar.
The notice advised consumers to avoid the listed products and report suspicious goods to the Commerce Ministry’s CCF directorate. It gave the ministry’s public hotline as 1266.
Sugar packaging shown in the CCF notice annex, reproduced by CEN.
