Truckers say legal rigs being hampered by size crackdown
Profit surge for Lloyds after UK bailout
THE government’s strict enforcement efforts against oversized trucks is starting to ensnare legal trucks at checkpoints, further hampering the time-sensitive garment industry, according to the head of the country’s largest trucking federation.
“There are many checkpoints on the national roads, and legal trucks must face every checkpoint,” Sin Chanthy, president of Cambodia Freight Forwarders Association, said yesterday. “It affects our time frame for delivering goods to our clients.”
The crackdown began on February 10 following a speech by Prime Minister Hun Sen in which he threatened to sack any provincial governors who failed to eliminate oversized and overloaded trucks on their roads. In a speech yesterday, the premier reiterated his call to cut down trucks longer than 16 metres.
The Garment Manufacturers Association in Cambodia (GMAC) has previously contended that the majority of trucks serving their factories that violate the law are secondhand shipping vehicles from the US and EU and are not modified, but do exceed the 16metre limit imposed by Cambodian law.
Four days after Hun Sen’s original announcement, GMAC issued an open letter to the prime minister appealing for a delay in implementing the law, which it described as a “new threat” to Cambodia’s largest manufacturing industry. GMAC’s Deputy Secretary- General Kaing Monika said at the time that the crackdown would have negative effects on the industry, which manufactures the bulk of Cambodia’s exports, if it was not resolved within the week.
Officials from GMAC could not be reached yesterday. Chanthy said he had not heard of a resolution from the Ministry of Public Works and Transport (MPWT) since he met with Transportation Minister Sun Chanthol on February 14, and added that checkpoints around the country were delaying even legal trucks.
For example, four separate checkpoints were set up along the 21-kilometre stretch of National Road 6 from Prek Pnov Bridge to Prek Tamak Bridge yesterday, he said.
Since February 10, checkpoints to catch illegal trucks have been set up in “almost every district” in the country, according to Va Simsorya, a spokesman for the MPWT.
“This is our duty, to check all the vehicles following the premier’s order,” he said yesterday. “So we have to install the checkpoints in almost every district across the country, to control it efficiently.”
Simsorya declined to comment on Chanthy’s concern that legal vehicles were being delayed by the numerous checkpoints. He also declined to comment on Chanthy’s suggestion that vehicles stopped at a checkpoint and deemed legal should receive a stamp, allowing them to skip future checkpoints.
In the first nine days of the crackdown, the transport industry had checked 34,902 vehicles, reducing the length of 476 trucks at the checkpoint where they were stopped and impounding another 448 for later cutting, according to Simsorya. LLOYDS Banking Group yesterday said that its net profit soared 52 percent last year, when the UK lender returned fully to the private sector following a state bailout.
LBG, which was financially rescued by the UK government following the height of the financial crisis a decade ago, said profit after tax jumped to £3.04 billion ($4.26 billion, € 3.45 billion) in 2017 from £2 billion a year earlier.
“2017 has been a landmark year in which the group has made significant strategic progress and returned to full private ownership,” LBG Chief Executive Antonio HortaOsorio said in the earnings release.
Underlining the bank’s growing recovery in a “resilient” British economy despite Brexit, LBG added that it planned to return up to £1 billion to investors in a share buyback.
It also said it would press ahead with its digitalisation strategy.
“I am delighted to announce today our strategy for the next three years which will transform the group for success in a digital world,” HortaOsorio said.
LBG plans to invest more than £3 billion in strategy initiatives, in part to “further digitise the group”, the bank said.
It added that it would “deploy new technology to drive additional operational efficiencies that will make banking simple and easier for customers whilst reducing operating costs”.
On the UK economy, LBG said it had “proven resilient”, adding that the bank’s projections “assume this performance continues” against a backdrop of the Bank of England steadily increasing its main interest rate from 0.5 percent to 1.25 percent by the end of 2020.
LBG also said that it took an additional hit of £600 million in the fourth quarter to compensate customers over missold insurance.
That brings the total to more than £19 billion – far in excess of any other British bank caught up in the long-running scandal.
Lloyds meanwhile returned to full private ownership in May after the government had steadily offloaded its stake by returning about £21 billion to the taxpayer.
The British government bailed out Lloyds following the 2008 world financial crisis at a cost of about £20 billion, handing the state a 43 percent stake in the bank.