This is big news. Another tycoon fraud bites the dust. What started as a simple slap on the wrist turned into a major scandal and takedown of a big mob boss. was taken down because authorities found her driver's diary where he documented his daily money deliveries.
BBC News reported that officials collected 104 boxes of evidence weighing a total of 6 tonnes. Woah! 😳 (emphasis mine)
WION published April 11, 2024: Vietnam: Real estate tycoon sentenced to death. Real estate mogul Truong My Lan received the death penalty on Thursday from a Vietnamese court for her involvement in the largest financial fraud in the nation's history, a 304-trillion-dong ($12.5-billion) scheme. Watch to know more.
Firstpost published March 5, 2024: Trial Begins in Vietnam's Unprecedented $12 Billion Real Estate Scandal. Vantage with Palki Sharma.
Vietnam has begun a trial in a $12 billion real estate scandal. Real estate mogul Truong My Lan is accused of embezzling the money from the Saigon Joint Stock Commercial Bank. She is said to have controlled 90% of the bank through a network of 27 associates. The bank loaned $43 billion dollars to Lan over the course of a decade. The extent of graft came to light after investigators found the diary of Lan's personal driver.
DW News published April 11, 2024: How did billionaire Truong My Lan steal 3% of Vietnam's 2022 GDP? Property tycoon Truong My Lan has been sentenced to death in Vietnam's biggest ever financial fraud case.
Truong My Lan was one of 85 people on trial for embezzling $12.5 billion. The death sentence is seen as unusually severe. Lan's arrest last year was part of an anti-corruption drive that has engulfed the top levels of Vietnamese politics.
00:27 Professor Tuong Vu, Director of US-Vietnam Research Center Oregon.
BBC News
written by Jonathan Head & Thu Bui, In Bangkok
Thursday April 11, 2024
It was the most spectacular trial ever held in Vietnam, befitting one of the greatest bank frauds the world has ever seen.
Behind the stately yellow portico of the colonial-era courthouse in Ho Chi Minh City, a 67-year-old Vietnamese property developer was sentenced to death on Thursday for looting one of the country's largest banks over a period of 11 years.
It's a rare verdict - she is one of very few women in Vietnam to be sentenced to death for a white collar crime.
The decision is a reflection of the dizzying scale of the fraud. Truong My Lan was convicted of taking out $44bn (£35bn) in loans from the Saigon Commercial Bank. The verdict requires her to return $27bn, a sum prosecutors said may never be recovered. Some believe the death penalty is the court's way of trying to encourage her to return some of the missing billions.
The habitually secretive communist authorities were uncharacteristically forthright about this case, going into minute detail for the media. They said 2,700 people were summoned to testify, while 10 state prosecutors and around 200 lawyers were involved.
The evidence was in 104 boxes weighing a total of six tonnes. Eighty-five others were tried with Truong My Lan, who denied the charges and can appeal.
All of the defendants were found guilty. Four received life in jail. The rest were given prison terms ranging from 20 years to three years suspended. Truong My Lan's husband and niece received jail terms of nine and 17 years respectively.
"There has never been a show trial like this, I think, in the communist era," says David Brown, a retired US state department official with long experience in Vietnam. "There has certainly been nothing on this scale."
The trial was the most dramatic chapter so far in the "Blazing Furnaces" anti-corruption campaign led by the Communist Party Secretary-General, Nguyen Phu Trong.
A conservative ideologue steeped in Marxist theory, Nguyen Phu Trong believes that popular anger over untamed corruption poses an existential threat to the Communist Party's monopoly on power. He began the campaign in earnest in 2016 after out-manoeuvring the then pro-business prime minister to retain the top job in the party.
The campaign has seen two presidents and two deputy prime ministers forced to resign, and hundreds of officials disciplined or jailed. Now one of the country's richest women has joined their ranks.
Truong My Lan comes from a Sino-Vietnamese family in Ho Chi Minh City, formerly Saigon. It has long been the commercial engine of the Vietnamese economy, dating well back to its days as the anti-communist capital of South Vietnam, with a large, ethnic Chinese community.
She started as a market stall vendor, selling cosmetics with her mother, but began buying land and property after the Communist Party ushered in a period of economic reform, known as Doi Moi, in 1986. By the 1990s, she owned a large portfolio of hotels and restaurants.
Although Vietnam is best known outside the country for its fast-growing manufacturing sector, as an alternative supply chain to China, most wealthy Vietnamese made their money developing and speculating in property.
All land is officially state-owned. Getting access to it often relies on personal relationships with state officials. Corruption escalated as the economy grew, and became endemic.
By 2011, Truong My Lan was a well-known business figure in Ho Chi Minh City, and she was allowed to arrange the merger of three smaller, cash-strapped banks into a larger entity: Saigon Commercial Bank.
Vietnamese law prohibits any individual from holding more than 5% of the shares in any bank. But prosecutors say that through hundreds of shell companies and people acting as her proxies, Truong My Lan actually owned more than 90% of Saigon Commercial.
They accused her of using that power to appoint her own people as managers, and then ordering them to approve hundreds of loans to the network of shell companies she controlled.
The amounts taken out are staggering. Her loans made up 93% of all the bank's lending.
According to prosecutors, over a period of three years from February 2019, she ordered her driver to withdraw 108 trillion Vietnamese dong, more than $4bn (£2.3bn) in cash from the bank, and store it in her basement.
That much cash, even if all of it was in Vietnam's largest denomination banknotes, would weigh two tonnes.
She was also accused of bribing generously to ensure her loans were never scrutinised. A former chief inspector at the central bank was given a life sentence for accepting a $5m bribe.
The mass of officially sanctioned publicity about the case channelled public anger over corruption against Truong My Lan, whose fatigued, unmade-up appearance in court was in stark contrast to the glamorous publicity photos people had seen of her in the past.
But questions are also being asked about why she was able to keep on with the alleged fraud for so long.
"I am puzzled," says Le Hong Hiep who runs the Vietnam Studies Programme at the ISEAS - Yusof Ishak Institute in Singapore.
"Because it wasn't a secret. It was well known in the market that Truong My Lan and her Van Thinh Phat group were using SCB as their own piggy bank to fund the mass acquisition of real estate in the most prime locations.
"It was obvious that she had to get the money from somewhere. But then it is such a common practice. SCB is not the only bank that is used like this. So perhaps the government lost sight because there are so many similar cases in the market."
David Brown believes she was protected by powerful figures who have dominated business and politics in Ho Chi Minh City for decades. And he sees a bigger factor in play in the way this trial is being run: a bid to reassert the authority of the Communist Party over the free-wheeling business culture of the south.
"What Nguyen Phu Trong and his allies in the party are trying to do is to regain control of Saigon, or at least stop it from slipping away.
"Up until 2016 the party in Hanoi pretty much let this Sino-Vietnamese mafia run the place. They would make all the right noises that local communist leaders are supposed to make, but at the same time they were milking the city for a substantial cut of the money that was being made down there."
At 79 years old, party chief Nguyen Phu Trong is in shaky health, and will almost certainly have to retire at the next Communist Party Congress in 2026, when new leaders will be chosen.
He has been one of the longest-serving and most consequential secretary-generals, restoring the authority of the party's conservative wing to a level not seen since the reforms of the 1980s. He clearly does not want to risk permitting enough openness to undermine the party's hold on political power.
But he is trapped in a contradiction. Under his leadership the party has set an ambitious goal of reaching rich country status by 2045, with a technology and knowledge-based economy. This is what is driving the ever-closer partnership with the United States.
Yet faster growth in Vietnam almost inevitably means more corruption. Fight corruption too much, and you risk extinguishing a lot of economic activity. Already there are complaints that bureaucracy has slowed down, as officials shy away from decisions which might implicate them in a corruption case.
"That's the paradox," says Le Hong Hiep. "Their growth model has been reliant on corrupt practices for so long. Corruption has been the grease that kept the machinery working. If they stop the grease, things may not work any more."
*****RELATED INFORMATION*****
Duong Global Business Consulting Group published December 8, 2023 VIETNAM: Vietnam’s Financial System about to COLLAPSE?! (GIANT FRAUD!)
Is Vietnam's Financial System about to COLLAPSE?! It well can be with a $44 BILLION FRAUD! In this video, Attorney Ken Duong takes you through the twists and turns of a financial debacle with the potential to eclipse Vietnam’s GDP as of late 2023, as he is dissecting a behemoth of a scandal that’s rattling Vietnam's Economy to its core. From the depths of Vietnam's Real Estate sector to the pinnacles of banking institutions, no stone is left unturned. Could this be Vietnam's own Bernie Madoff moment? We are also covering the arrests of the Van Thinh Phat Group and several government officials. From obtaining a Vietnam Passport to investing in Vietnam's Real Estate market, we will let you know whether you should still move and invest in Vietnam.
00:00 Timeline of Vietnam’s Financial System Fraud: $44 BILLION
03:31 Incomplete Real Estate in Vietnam
04:46 Not listed on Vietnam's Stock Market
05:16 One of The Big Bank in Vietnam GOT INVOLVED
05:39 Series of Arrests and Ghost Companies
07:40 The largest Fraud Scheme EXPLAINED
08:07 Manipulations & Tampering with Government Officials
09:21 Trying to destroy the evidence?
09:52 Consequences of Financial Collapse: Vietnam's GDP EVAPORATED
10:39 Similarities with Bernie Madoff's case
11:52 Attorney Ken Duong's opinion
13:51 The LARGEST BANKING FRAUD
14:19 What Should You Do? Still Invest in Vietnam?
14:36 Do Not Open a Business in Vietnam Out of Thin Air!
14:58 Vietnam Passport
15:19 Do Not Play chess game Blindfolded
15:46 Unvetted partner
16:05 Jungle of business in Vietnam
16:28 Vietnam's economy prediction
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