20 | FORBES ASIA OCTOBER 2018
faster than prahok, the country’s tradition-
al fermented ish. But Sear says he doesn’t
pay bribes to customs oicers to move cargo
or hide a shipment’s contents, and customs
oicials and observers agree that he’s clean.
He instills conidence in customers by com-
plying with the government’s Best Traders
Scheme, which promotes clean, prompt and
inexpensive transfers of cargo at the bor-
ders. He is an oknha, a title given to anyone
who’s donated at least $ 5 00,000 to the gov-
ernment for public projects. It gives him ac-
cess to Prime Minister Hun Sen, but he says
he advises on entrepreneurial matters rath-
er than lobby for particular policies. Cam-
bodian tycoons oten beneit from ties to the
prime minister and his family, but there’s no
evidence that Sear’s businesses have received
any special favors.
Sear didn’t become rich and success-
ful without having an eye for a deal. When
French antique dealer Beatrix Dayde
Latham let Cambodia and a home illed
with Ming Dynasty antiques, Sear bought it
and all the antiques for just $2.6 5 million on
the promise he’d preserve the lavish custom
construction. But he doesn’t stay in the mu-
seumlike villa because its southern-facing
construction violates the principles of feng
shui. He visits the property only to host and
impress ambassadors, or ish from its prime
location along the Mekong River.
Few tycoons grew up poorer or sufered
more adversity than Sear. Born into a Chi-
nese Khmer family in Phnom Penh, the
third of ive children, his family was forced
to abandon their home and their auto-me-
chanic business in 1975 under the Khmer
Rouge. hey ended up in the regime’s work
camps, where families were made to grow
rice. His mother’s role as a cook in the
camps allowed her to save morsels for her
family, wrapped and submerged in the water
tanks she carried at the end of the day.
Despite the cadres’ slaughter of ethnic-
Chinese citizens, everyone in Sear’s fami-
ly survived, but the hardships did not end
with the regime’s fall in 1 978. With a git for
learning languages, Sear furtively picked up
English from a Russian embassy worker,
which was illegal under the country’s then-
Vietnamese control. But the skill was high-
ly valued as the U.S. and UN began slip-
ping support into Cambodia, so in 1988 his
mother arranged his passage on a refugee
boat to Australia so he could ofer his servic-
es as a translator and seek aid.
he night before sailing, another ship,
carrying 300 refugees, sank not far from Si-
hanoukville. As Sear’s cramped ishing boat
set out, with his uncle steering, dozens of
bodies still bobbed in the waves, he remem-
bers. We e k s later his boat also sank, crash-
ing into a reef near Sumatra. Clinging to
a wood plank, he loated for three or four
hours until Indonesian authorities arrived,saving and then dumping the 171 surviv-
ing refugees in a ishing village in Kaliman-
tan. His six months there still haunt him,
but he recalls the small wonders he found
during the ordeal, among them the coconut
candies brought by missionaries from China
and the large, lucid eyes of the mermaid he
swears he saw. he refugees were eventual-
ly shuttled of to a UN camp in the Riau Is-
lands, and he translated for the UN for three
years before being ofered passage back to
his family in Phnom Penh.
At his riverside villa today, over bottles
of Acqua Panna imported from Italy by his
Auskhmer Import & Export, he looks back
on his refugee voyage and explains how to
survive on seawater: Mix one part tooth-
paste with two parts seawater and wait half
an hour for the salt to settle at the bottom.
his tonic will loosen the bowels, but ater a
leak in the supply of fresh water onboard, he
says, it was better than nothing.
Ater the country’s irst election under
the Tr ans it i onal Authority in Cambodia in
1 992, Sear leveraged his UN connections to
make deliveries for embassies and aid agen-
cies. He and his partners didn’t have a truck,
so they’d spend $200 of the $800 to $ 1 ,000
they charged to rent a vehicle. Sometimes
they had to dodge rocket-propelled grenade
ire and unexploded ordnance. When Cir-
cle Freight International pulled out of Cam-
bodia in 1 993, he says, it let him its remain-
ing assets—a table, two typewriters and an
empty balance sheet. But he was able to use
its connections to build his business. With
ration deliveries bringing him to the hai
border, he forged a friendship with the sec-
retary of the chairman of hailand’s CTI Lo-
gistics, who later led him to a future partner,
Kledchai Benjaathonsirikul of Kerry Express
(hailand).
Sear’s proits grew, but he didn’t trust the
local banks, so he parked his earnings in
land. He started buying land along Phnom
Penh’s Russian Federation Boulevard,
which connected the city with the airport,
because he saw developments springing up
between other Southeast Asian cities and
their airports. Land in a conlict zone was
cheap, going for as little as 10 cents a square
meter, so he bought a hectare or two each
month. “I thought that since the UN spent
$2 billion to make this country peaceful, it
won’t let Cambodia go back to that type ofFORBES ASIA
RITHY SEAR
Gold standard: a model showing what the finished Peak project will look like. ERIKA PINEROS FOR FORBES