Shopping mall developer moves into Cambodia

An American property mogul whose Cambodian-born wife survived the killing fields of the Khmer Rouge is looking to raise up to $600 million on London's AIM market to build shopping centres and flats in Vietnam and Cambodia.

JSM Indochina is the brainchild of Craig Jones, a 41 year-old from Santa Monica, whose Californian-based JSM firm already sits on $1.5 billion worth of US shopping malls. Now Mr Jones has turned to the AIM market to pull in investors to back his plans to bring US-style malls from Pnom Penh to Ho Chi Min City and Hanoi.

JSM is already planning for Pnom Penh a 325,000 square feet mall where it has signed a pre-let to Parkson, the Malaysian department store, to become its anchor tenant taking about two thirds of the space. Land permits are also in place to add onto the site a 600 place car-park and 100 serviced appartments.

The Pnom Penh project and a handful of other early stage assets worth an esimated $35 million will seed the JSM Indochina fund. The fund intends to partner with local Vietnamese and Cambodian developers for its building projects.

Mr Jones who said he was born "at the height of the American involvement in the the Vietnam war" said: "I am so proud of what I and my wife are doing for South East Asia.We are helping with jobs and the distribution of wealth. The distribution of goods in the country is not very good as there are not many high quality retail outlets. We will help all the people. Hypermarkets are for everybody."

Mr Jones' wife and family lived under the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia, the regime which was responsible for the death of an estimated one million of its own people under the brutal dictatorship of Pol Pot who assumed control once the Americans left. "They left Cambodia in 1982, ending up in California two years later. She lost her father and three sisters. We are really helping the country by building malls and replenishing the housing stock. This will be a multi-billion dollar company."

JSM has hired Lehman Brothers and Evolution Securities to raise new money for the Indochina fund. It is understood they already have commitments of about $300 million with 25 per cent of investors hailing from the US and UK.

Asked why he had chosen the AIM market to raise funds and not the US markets, Mr Jones said: "We have a global investor base and London is the centre of the global financial world. It would be wrong to use and American bourse."

The company told investors today in an intention to float prospectus it will "pursue a further pipeline of prospective investments in excess of $300 million over the next 12 months."

The new fund will be chaired by Mike Tanner, currently a non-executive director with Berkeley Group Holdings, London's largest housebuilder, and who spent 10 years until retirement in 2004 as managing director of George Wimpey's southern division.