Cambodian Prime Minister Hun Sen accused the World Bank on Thursday of hiring corrupt foreign consultants, mirroring recent corruption allegations made against his government.

Hun Sen also urged the bank to publish full details of its investigations into alleged government fraud in several aid contracts which led to the suspension earlier this month of $7.6 million in funding for three development projects.

The bank has demanded repayment of the money.

"It is now four weeks old and still no full report has been provided to us, so where is the transparency?" Hun Sen said at a hospital construction ceremony attended by foreign diplomats in the northwest province of Banteay Meanchey.

"Foreign consultants who signed to approve the projects must be brought to account. If Cambodian officials are corrupt then foreign consultants are even more corrupt because they are the decision makers," he said in remarks monitored in Phnom Penh.

World Bank officials in Phnom Penh were not immediately available for comment.

These sorts of allegations are sadly nothing new and alarmingly has been shown to be in fact the modus operandi of many such NGOS. An excellent book released in 2005 "Confessions of an Economic Hit Man" by John Perkins shed light on this shadowy area. Perkins, in telling the real-life story about his extraordinary dealings as an EHM, claims to have exposed the "world of international intrigue and corruption that is turning the American republic into a global empire despised by increasing numbers of people around the planet."

As an Economic Hit Man or EHM his job was to "convince Third World countries to accept enormous loans for infrastructure development—loans that were much larger than needed—and to guarantee that the development projects were contracted to U.S. corporations like Halliburton and Bechtel". Once these countries were saddled with huge debts, the U.S. government and the international aid agencies allied with it were able to control these economies and to ensure that "oil and other resources were channeled to serve the interests of building a global empire".

In his EHM capacity, John Perkins traveled all over the world—to Africa, Asia, Europe, Latin America, and the Middle East—and was "either a direct participant in or witness to some of the most dramatic events in modern history, including the Saudi Arabian Money-laundering Affair, the fall of the Shah of Iran, the assassination of Panama’s President Omar Torrijos, the subsequent invasion of Panama, and events leading up to the 2003 invasion of Iraq".

John Perkins also served as one of these highly paid consultants to some of the largest multinational corporations on the planet, whose pockets he had previously helped to line—taking on this role "partly in response to a series of not-so-veiled threats and lucrative payoffs". Perkins revelations were described by Harvard professor and Pulitzer prize-winning author—John E. Mack as, “A bombshell. One of those rare instances in which someone deeply entrenched in our governmental/ corporate imperialist structure has come forward to reveal in unequivocal terms its inner workings.

The case of Cambodia, as one of the world's poorest countries, relies heavily on foreign aid. Donors have often criticized the Hun Sen government for failing to tackle chronic corruption.

"We must take responsibility for our mistakes _ if we were truly wrong," Hun Sen said during a recent trip to the northwestern province of Banteay Meanchey. "But we also appeal to the World Bank to punish its own officials ... who signed (approval) for those projects."

The three suspended projects cover land management and administration; provincial and rural infrastructure; and provincial and suburban water supply and sanitation. They are worth about US$71.8 million (euro57 million) in World Bank financing, according to a June 6 statement by the bank.

The World Bank said it has "sufficient evidence to substantiate allegations of fraud and corruption" and that the projects that cannot be resumed unless the government "deals head-on with corruption."

It has also demanded that the government pay it back any amount of money already disbursed under contracts "misprocured because of corruption."

Prime Minister Hun Sen claimed that the bank's allegations could be part of a wider political conspiracy to tarnish his government's credibility ahead of local and national elections in 2007 and 2008.