Ho Chi Minh City — A major Vietnamese real estate tycoon was sentenced to death Thursday in one of the biggest corruption cases in history, with damages estimated at $27 billion. A hand-picked panel of three jurors and two judges rejected all defense arguments of Truong My Lan, chairman of major real estate developer Van Thinh Phat, who was convicted of swindling money from Saigon Commercial Bank (SCB) for a decade.
“The actions of the accused… eroded the people’s confidence in the leadership of the (Communist) Party and the state,” reads the verdict handed down during the trial which took place in Ho Chi Minh City, commercial center of the south.
Lan denied the accusations and blamed his subordinates.
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After a five-week trial, 85 other people also face conviction on charges ranging from corruption and abuse of power to appropriation and banking law violations.
Lan embezzled $12.5 billion, but prosecutors said Thursday that total damage from the scam now stands at $27 billion, a figure equivalent to 6% of the country’s GDP in 2023. This figure even eclipses the amount spent by the founder of cryptocurrency exchange FTX. Sam Bankman-Fried was recently convicted of defrauding its customers, estimated at around $10 billion.
However, the death penalty constitutes a particularly severe punishment in such a case.
Lan and the others were arrested as part of a nationwide anti-corruption campaign that has swept aside many officials and members of Vietnam’s business elite in recent years.
The Vietnamese real estate mogul appeared to say in her final court remarks last week that she was having suicidal thoughts.
“In my despair, I thought about death,” she said, according to state media. “I am so angry that I was stupid enough to get involved in this very cutthroat business environment – the banking industry – that I know little about.”
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Hundreds of people began protesting in the capital Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh City, a relatively rare phenomenon in the one-party communist state, after Lan’s arrest in October 2022.
Police have identified around 42,000 victims of the scandal which shocked the Southeast Asian country.
Lan, married to a wealthy Hong Kong businessman who was also on trial, was accused of setting up false loan applications to withdraw money from SCB, in which she had a 90% stake.
Police say the victims of the scam are all SCB bondholders who cannot withdraw their money and have not received interest or principal repayments since Lan’s arrest.
Prosecutors said during the trial that they seized more than 1,000 properties owned by Lan.
Authorities also said the $5.2 million allegedly paid by Lan and some SCB bankers to state officials to cover up the bank’s violations and poor financial condition constituted the bribe. the most important wine ever recorded in Vietnam.
The woman to whom the bribe was offered – Do Thi Nhan, the former head of the inspection team at the State Bank of Vietnam – testified during the trial that the money had been given to her delivered in polystyrene boxes by former SCB CEO Vo Tan Van.
After realizing they contained money, Nhan refused the boxes but Van refused to take them back, state media reported.
More than 4,400 people have been charged during Vietnam’s corruption crackdown, in more than 1,700 corruption cases, since 2021.
A Vietnamese luxury real estate tycoon – Do Anh Dung, head of the Tan Hoang Minh Group – was sentenced to eight years in prison last month after being found guilty of defrauding thousands of investors in a ‘a $355 million bond scam.
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