Balanced News: Former Cambodian minister linked to company at heart of monkey-smuggling probe

Veng Sakhon, who until October this year was Cambodia’s agriculture minister, flew to Seoul in August to sign a memorandum of understanding with a biomedical firm targeted by U.S. authorities over the smuggling of long-tailed macaques. He was the guest of Orient Bio Inc., South Korea’s largest producer of animals for laboratory experiments. Twelve months earlier, a senior Orient Bio executive pleaded guilty to lying to special agents from the U.S. Fisheries and Wildlife Service investigating illicit exports of macaques from Cambodia to America.