A Ho Chi Minh City court on Thursday abruptly handed down the death sentence to real estate tycoon Truong My Lan, one of the world’s richest women, for her role in a $12.5 billion fraud case.
The verdict and sentence were handed down surprisingly early in the trial, making it the biggest courtroom spectacle in Vietnam’s history.
Mr. Ran (67 years old) billionaire born in china She rose from humble beginnings as a cosmetics seller to build a real estate empire after Vietnam’s economic reforms in the 1980s. She founded Van Tinh Fat Co. in 1992, the same year she married Hong Kong investor Eric Chu. She married Nap Kee and quickly built up a vast portfolio of hotels, restaurants and shopping malls. . To this day, the company owns most of Ho Chi Minh City’s luxury properties – at least it did until the courts seized more than 1,000 properties. Real estate owned by Lan.
All land in Vietnam is technically owned by the communist regime, so even when the economy was “liberalized” through “market reforms,” success in real estate required close contact with a group of government officials. A strong relationship was necessary. Almost all of the millionaires of Vietnam’s first wave of market reforms were people like Lan, who persuaded Communist Party officials to allow them to buy and sell real estate.
Ms. Lan became so respected and influential that Vietnam’s Communist Party gave her the role of overseeing a major bank merger in 2011. According to prosecutors, she proceeded By using the revamped Saigon Cooperative Commercial Bank (SCB) as her personal piggy bank and by setting up a “ghost company” and using it to secure fraudulent loans for her and her cronies, They tried to steal billions of dollars.
Lan and her 85 co-defendants were charged with defrauding SCB of $12.5 billion, but prosecutors said their activities caused more than $27 billion in damage to the bank and Vietnam’s financial system. This is equivalent to approximately 7% of Vietnam’s gross domestic product (GDP). ).
On April 11, 2024, Vietnamese real estate tycoon Truong My Lan (C) looks on in a courtroom in Ho Chi Minh City. (STR/AFP, Getty Images)
Vietnamese law prohibits individuals from owning more than 5% of a particular bank, but Lan allegedly circumvented that restriction by building a vast network of shell companies and proxy shareholders. has been done. Prosecutors said that by the time she finished looting SCB, she controlled more than 91.5 percent of SCB stock and 93 percent of her loans were made to her “ghost companies.”
Perhaps even more damaging were the accusations that Ms. Lan and her co-conspirators paid huge bribes to Vietnamese officials to protect the embezzlement scheme. This brought the case to the attention of Blazing Furnace, a large-scale anti-corruption purge. launched In 2016, by Vietnam’s authoritarian ruler, Communist Party General Secretary Nguyen Phu Trong.
Blazing Furnace has already collected several prominent political figures, including most recently President Bo Van Thuong, who was removed from office in March. Do Thi Niang, a former central bank official, said: declared On Thursday, Mr. Lan was sentenced to life in prison for accepting $5.2 million in bribes in an embezzlement conspiracy.
Ran’s trial amazing sight, hundreds of boxes containing tons of evidence were brought into a courtroom packed with hundreds of lawyers. Approximately 2,700 names were on the witness list for the trial. One of those witnesses was Mr. Lang’s driver, who testified that he personally moved more than $4 billion in cash into Ms. Lang’s basement over a three-year period.
Vietnamese media broadcast daily footage of a flotilla of armored vehicles rushing Ms Lan to the courtroom, with a platoon of security guards standing by to escort her inside the courtroom. Trials in Vietnam are usually held in secret, but the Communist government made this trial as public as possible.
“I don’t think there’s ever been a show trial like this in the communist era. There’s certainly never been anything like this on this scale,” said David Brown, a former U.S. State Department official. lost in thought on the BBC on Thursday.
Ms. Lan shed her image as a glamorous feminist success story and appeared in court looking gaunt and disheveled in an attempt to gain publicity. She claimed that all the crimes she was accused of committing were simply mistakes caused by a “lack of understanding of legal matters.” Her lawyer pointed to her long history of philanthropy and previously clean legal record, and she asked for leniency.
Instead, the court convicted Lan with astonishing speed and handed her a death sentence, which is unusual for a Vietnamese woman, especially a first-time offender. The public watched her trial with rapt attention and grew angry at her, but one of the reasons she was sentenced to death so quickly was due to the anxiety of Communist Party officials, whom the public felt equally angry. It might have been. they.
How could Vietnam’s social media handle such a massive scam without anyone in the overbearing collectivist government noticing, even considering that Lan allegedly paid off some regulators? Questions abound as to whether a high-profile woman could have carried out a bribery scheme that lasted 10 years. Like other communist regimes, Vietnam was crowded with aggressive government officials, and even Truong My Lan could not afford to bribe them all.
Media members take photos and videos of court proceedings with Van Tinh Phat Holdings Chairman Truong My Lan shown on a television screen at the Ho Chi Minh City People’s Court on Tuesday, March 5, in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam. . , 2024. (Maika Elan/Bloomberg via Getty)
“I am perplexed because it was no secret that Truong My Lan and her Van Tinh Phat Group used SCB as their own piggy bank to fund bulk purchases of real estate in prime locations. “It was well known in the market that they were using the technology,” said Le Hong Hiep, director of Vietnam research at Yusof Ishak. a Singaporean institute told the BBC.
“It was clear that she had to get the money from somewhere. But it is a very common practice. SCB is not the only bank used in this way. There are too many similar incidents in the market. “Maybe the government has lost sight because there are so many people,” Hiep said, but it would probably be very dangerous to say this view out loud in Ho Chi Minh City or Hanoi now.
Mr Brown said Ms Lunn must have been protected by far more powerful Communist Party officials than the people allegedly listed on her payslip, and that her ouster would decimate the partisans who exploited her. agreed that it could be seen as part of a purge by Chong.
“Until 2016, the party in Hanoi had pretty much left the scene to this Chinese and Vietnamese mafia. They would make the right noises that the local communist leaders should make, but at the same time they would take a lot of the money that could be made there. “They were milking the city for their share,” he said.
The key will be for the ailing Mr. Trong and his allies, perhaps in their final two years in power, to regain control of Vietnam’s economy without disrupting or forcing out foreign investors. They can look to China as an alarming example, as China’s communist rulers are now panicking over the loss of overseas business after years of repression and blockade.
