Famous Vietnamese real estate tycoon Truong My Lan was sentenced to death of Thursday after a Vietnamese court accused her of being the mastermind of one of the biggest corruption cases in history, where estimated $27 billion was embezzled.
Truong My Lan who headed major developer Van Thinh Phat, was found guilty of embezzling cash from Saigon Commercial Bank (SCB) over the course of a decade. Along with her, 85 others along with her husband, niece and several SCB executives were also sentenced by a court in Ho Chi Minh City.
Lan was initially accused of embezzling $12.5 billion, but prosecutors told the court that the scam is worth $27 billion – which is equal to six percent of the country’s GDP.
She is accused of bribery, violating banking regulations and embezzlement.
She used fake loan applications to withdraw money from SCB in which she owned a 90 percent stake, stealing $12.5 billion between 2012 and 2022.
She also ordered SCB officials to transfer the money to shell companies and then moved the money around or withdrew as cash in a bid to cover her tracks, Vietnamese state-run media said.
Between February 2019 and September 2022, her driver transported the equivalent of more than $4.4 billion in cash from SCB’s headquarters in Ho Chi Minh City to her nearby home and Van Thinh Phat’s head office.
Van Thinh Phat, the company owned by Lan and more than 1,000 businesses in the “Van Thinh Phat” ecosystem, including a group of “ghost companies” and a network of interests were involved in the embezzlement that has shocked the east Asian nation.
At least 40,000 people are victims of the scam and all of them are bondholders of SCB. Lan and her associates also bribed former employees at the State Bank of Vietnam — the central bank – with millions of dollars to hide SCB’s wrongdoings and poor financial performance.
Vietnam – A Prolific Executioner
The East Asian nation has emerged as one of the world’s most prolific executioners, according to a report by the Daily Mail which pointed out that 429 people had been executed between 2013 and 2016.
This shows the Vietnamese communist government is not only secretive about its state-sanctioned executions but also uses it extensively to punish wrongdoers.
Vietnam ranks behind China and Iran in its use of state executions and it barbarically executes wrongdoers. The report said that those on death row are not told when they will be executed and therefore kept in a state of constant suspense.
They are dragged out of their cells in the wee hours of early morning, strapped to a gurney, and injected with a lethal dose of drugs after their last meal.
Vietnam allowed cameras inside the court which captured Lan’s nervous demeanour. While some co-accused bowed their heads, Lan appeared visibly anxious and fidgety before the verdict was announced and as prosecutors presented 104 boxes weighing a total of six tonnes worth of evidence.
Lan and the others were arrested as part of the country’s “blazing furnace” graft crackdown that has swept up numerous corrupt officials and members of the country’s business elite.
The sweep has been driven by powerful Communist Party General Secretary Nguyen Phu Trong, and more than 4,400 people have been indicted across more than 1,700 graft cases since 2021.
(with inputs from AFP)
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