A number of Malaysian companies which have invested in Cambodia have come under heavy fire by a key opposition leader.

Sam Rainsy, leader of Sam Rainsy Party, said that Malaysian companies such as Samling and Ariston "are not the best that Malaysians can offer to Cambodia".

"They are involved in land speculation, in logging, they destroy all our forests, they take land from our people and they are engaged in gambling," he told malaysiakini in an interview in Jakarta.

Samling, he said, is one of the biggest logging companies in Cambodia, while Malaysian tycoon Dr Chen Lip Keong, head of Ariston, has built a floating casino.

An estimated RM6 billion have been injected into this war-torn country, making Malaysia one of Cambodia's biggest investors. These investments are mostly in infrastructure, property and tourism projects.

"When you come to Cambodia, you can see the damage caused by Malaysian companies. They have established sweatshops to exploit the cheap labour, they treat the women workers very badly, they take all kinds of advantage from a poor country like Cambodia," he lamented.

He added that Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad was once close to former prime minister Prince Norodom Ranariddh, but the prince had proved to be so "incompetent" that he has now turned to Prime Minister Hun Sen.

Ranariddh was ousted as prime minister by his then junior co-premier and coalition partner in a bloody July 1997 coup. However, the two party leaders later agreed to form a new Hun Sen-led coalition government.

Rainsy said he was not surprised by Mahathir's eagerness to work with the Cambodian strongman.

"Mahathir has to protect Malaysian interests in Cambodia. For example, a few months ago he sent Primary Industries Minister Lim Keng Yaik to defend the interests of Samling," he said.

Last February, Lim visited Cambodia to lobby the government to reduce the timber royalty rates for Samling.

This followed a sharp increase in the timber royalty rate, from RM53 to RM205 per cubic metre, after a World Bank report warned the government that the country's forests would be commercially logged out by 2003.

Logging giant Samling protested against the hike by refusing to pay the RM16.3 million due on its timber stockpile.

Apparently, Lim's lobby trip has drawn the ire of a number of NGOs.

"It is astonishing that Malaysia feels it has the right to tell Cambodia how much it should sell its natural resources for," said Patrick Alley of Global Witness, an international environment and human rights NGO.

He added that the argument that Malaysia has low timber royalty rates won't wash with Cambodians.

"It ignores the fact that this factor, amongst others, has led to devastating forest destruction throughout Malaysia," said Alley.

Meanwhile, Rainsy also met with KeADILan leader Wan Azizah Wan Ismail in Jakarta last week where both of them attended an international conference on "democratic transitions in Asia".

Rainsy said he felt great sympathy for Wan Azizah's husband, jailed former deputy prime minister Anwar Ibrahim.

"I have been following Anwar's trial," he said.

"Like him, I was a former finance minister. I was also sacked from government, expelled from the party and slapped with fraudulent charges. So I have a lot sympathy for him."

Rainsy was a founding member of Funcinpec, a royalist party lead by Ranariddh, and was appointed Cambodia's finance minister in 1993.

After falling out with Ranariddh, he formed the Khmer Nation Party. But during his brief exile following the 1997 coup, Hun Sen helped a faction within the KNP to oust Rainsy from the party leadership.

Rainsy equated his predicament to Indonesia's Vice President Megawati Sukarnoputri who lost the leadership of her Nationalist Party in a party coup widely believed to be engineered by former president Suharto.

"I tried to bring the matter to court but it ended nowhere since the court is not independent," he said.

"So to ensure that no one could steal the party away from me, I decided to call it Sam Rainsy Party. And I will only change the name when Cambodia has a truly independent judiciary," he vowed.

Rainsy added that he went to Kuala Lumpur with two other members of parliament in 1995 to call a press conference "to denounce those Malaysian companies which exploit Cambodia's natural resources".

He said that soon after his press conference, then prime minister Ranariddh visited Malaysia to see Mahathir.

"At their meeting, Mahathir asked, 'How's Sam Rainsy?' Ranariddh answered, 'Sam Rainsy is okay'," said Rainsy.

"'Then Ranariddh asked back, 'How's Anwar?' Mahathir said, 'Anwar is fine. But at least, he does not go to Phnom Penh to make press conferences.'"