Truong My Lan found guilty of embezzling from Saigon Commercial Bank in case that was part of wider crackdown
A prominent property tycoon has been sentenced to death for her role in Vietnam’s biggest-ever fraud case.
Truong
My Lan, the chair of the developer Van Thinh Phat, was found guilty of
embezzlement, bribery and violations of banking rules on Thursday, in a
case that has shocked the country. A total of $12.5bn (£10bn) was
embezzled, the equivalent of almost 3% of Vietnamese gross domestic
product, but prosecutors said on Thursday the total damages caused by
the scam now amounted to $27bn.
“The
defendant’s actions … eroded people’s trust in the leadership of the
[Communist] party and state,” read the verdict at the trial in Ho Chi
Minh City.
Lan was found guilty of swindling
money from Saigon Commercial Bank (SCB) over a decade. She had been on
tried alongside 85 others, including former central bankers and
government officials, as well as previous SCB executives.
The
trial is part of a national corruption crackdown led by the secretary
general of the Communist party of Vietnam, Nguyễn Phú Trọng. The
campaign, which is also known as “Blazing Furnace” and has increased in
recent years, has led to the indictment of thousands of people, as well
as the resignation of two presidents and two deputy prime ministers.
Lan,
who was arrested in October 2022, had denied the charges. A relative
told Reuters before the verdict that she would appeal. The death
sentence is an unusually severe punishment for a corruption case.
State
media reported last week that Lan told the court she had joined the
banking industry without sufficient experience and blamed a “lack of
understanding of legal matters”. She said she had “thought of death” in
desperation, and asked the court for leniency for her husband, a Hong
Kong businessman, and niece who were on trial as accomplices.
The
verdicts announced on Thursday followed a five-week trial that has been
covered in great detail in Vietnam’s tightly controlled state media.
Documents
related to the trial, kept in 105 boxes, weighed 6 tonnes, according to
VN Express, which reported the authorities had installed security
cameras and fire safety equipment to protect the evidence ahead of the
hearings. More than 1,000 properties belonging to Lan have been seized,
and nearly 2,700 individuals were summoned for the trial, which included
200 lawyers.
Dr Nguyen Khac Giang, a visiting
fellow at the Vietnam studies programme at the Iseas-Yusof Ishak
Institute, said the case was unprecedented, and a milestone in Vietnam’s
anti-corruption crackdown. It was, he said, “the biggest case against a
private business, with the biggest number of defendants, the biggest
number of evidence and of course, the biggest number of money involved”.
Although
Lan did not directly hold executive power at SCB, she owned 91.5% of
the bank’s shares through third parties and shell companies.
She
was accused of setting up fake loan applications to withdraw money from
the bank over a period of 11 years, from 2012 to 2022. The loans
accounted for 93% of the total credit the bank has issued, according to
state media.
To cover up the fraud, Lan and
other SCB bankers were accused of giving state officials $5.2m, the
largest bribe recorded in Vietnam. The money was handed over in
Styrofoam boxes, Do Thi Nhan, a former chief banking inspector at the
State Bank of Vietnam, said during the trial. Nhan said that after
realising the boxes contained money, she refused the boxes but that Lan
declined to take them back, state media reported.
Since
2021, thousands of people have been indicted for corruption in the
country, in what analysts have described as the most comprehensive
anti-corruption effort in the history of the Communist party of Vietnam.
Last month, the Vietnamese government announced the resignation of its second president in as many years, Vo Van Thuong,
over alleged “violations and flaws” that had “negatively affected
public perception, as well as the reputation of the party and the
state”. He had been in power for just over a year after his predecessor,
Nguyen Xuan Phuc, was forced out because of corruption scandals involving officials under his control.
Evaluating
public sentiment in Vietnam, a one-party state, is challenging.
However, social media comments suggested many were shocked by the scale
of the scandal, said Giang. While some welcomed the state crackdown,
others questions how corruption on such a huge scale could go unchecked
for so long.
“[The case] might indirectly
signal that the state hasn’t really been doing well in terms of managing
the system in terms of the increasingly complex market economy and also
the state is incapable of controlling their own public officials,” said
Giang.
(Article by Rebecca Ratcliffe in Bangkok and agencies republished from theguardian.com)
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Author: Planet Today
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