Billionaire sentenced to death for £35,000,000,000 fraud
Real estate tycoon who rose to power from a street market vendor was sentenced to death after she was accused of defrauding £35billion in Vietnam.
Billionaire Truong My Lan, 67, faced a court in Ho Chi Minh City where she was found guilty of being behind the country’s largest ever financial fraud case.
The crime was so huge it accounted for nearly three per cent of the country’s GDP in 2022.
Lan, who was chair of a real estate company called Van Thinh Phat (VTP), allowed 2,500 in loans leading to massive losses for Saigon Joint Stock Commercial Bank over a 10 year period
The bank lost an estimated £22 billion as a result – that’s the equivalent of the UK’s yearly spending on defence.
She denied the charges but ended up being asked to compensate the bank by £21.5 million. Asking for leniancy, it was pointed out that the crime (spanning from 2012 to 2022) was her first ever offence and she helped charities
However, the court found that she orchestrated a sophisticated criminal enterprise that had serious and wide-reaching consequences.
A court judgement found that her actions ‘not only violate the property management rights of individuals and organisations but also push SCB (Saigon Joint Stock Commercial Bank) into a state of special control; eroding people’s trust in the leadership of the party and state.’
Who is the businesswoman Truong My Lan?
Lan comes from a Sino-Vietnamese family in Ho Chi Minh City.
Her career began as a market stall vendor peddling cosmetics with her mum.
She began investing in property and land during a push for reform by the Community Party known as Doi Moi in 1986, the outlet says.
Fast forward to the 1990s when she owned a large portfolio of prime real estate, including hotels and restaurants.
The 2011 merger of a beleaguered SCB bank involved two other lenders.
The banks have since become one of Vietnam’s largest commercial banks by assets.
In 2011, Lan was a well-known business figure in Ho Chi Minh City, enabling her to arrange the merger of three smaller banks into larger Saigon Commercial Bank, BBC News says.
Vietnamese law bans any individual from holding more than 5% of the shares in any bank.
But she may have owned more than 90% of Saigon Commercial through hundreds of shell companies and people acting as her proxies, BBC reports citing prosecutors.
It is believed her loans made up 93% of all the bank’s lending.
She used her power to appoint her own people as bank managers before ordering them to approve hundreds of loans to several shell companies she controlled, prosecutors said.
Prosecutors said she ordered her driver to withdraw more than $4,000,000,000 (£2.3bn) in cash from the bank and hide it in her basement, the broadcaster reports.
The amount of cash, even in Vietnam’s largest denomination banknotes would weigh 4,000 lb – as much as an empty shipping container.
She allegedly showered officials with bribes to make sure her loans were not scrutinised.
One of people sentenced for accepting a bribe was the former central bank official Do Thi Nhan.
She was sentenced to life in prison on today for accepting $5,200,000 (£4.1m) in bribes.
Earlier pictures of Lan show her polished look, but in court today she appeared fatigued and wearing plain clothes.
Lan’s arrest in October 2022 was among the most high-profile in an ongoing anti-corruption push in Vietnam that has intensified since 2022.
The so-called Blazing Furnace campaign has touched even the highest echelons of Vietnamese politics.
Former president Vo Van Thuong resigned in March after being implicated in the campaign
Reaction to Vietnam’s biggest-ever fraud
The scale of Lan’s trial has shocked the nation, with VTP among Vietnam’s richest real estate firms.
Its projects include luxury residential buildings, offices, hotels and shopping centres.
Le Hong Hiep from the Vietnam Studies Programme at the Yusof Ishak Institute in Singapore said he was ‘puzzled’ by the case.
He told BBC News: ‘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.’
He claimed SCB is ‘not the only bank that is used like this.’
He added: ‘So perhaps the government lost sight because there are so many similar cases in the market.’
A retired US state department diplomat David Brown told the BBC: ‘There has never been a show trial like this, I think, in the communist era.
‘There has certainly been nothing on this scale.’
He believes she was protected by powerful figures at the top of business and politics in Ho Chi Minh City for years, the broadcaster reports.
Brown said he sees the trial as an attempt by the Communist Party to reassert its power over the business culture of the south.
Analysts warned that the scale of the scam raised questions about whether other banks or businesses had similarly erred, AP reports.
This dampens Vietnam’s economic outlook, making foreign investors jittery at a time when the country had been trying to position itself as the ideal home for businesses trying to find an alternative for their supply chains in China, it says.
Vietnam’s property sector has been hit particularly hard.
An estimated 1,300 property firms withdrew from the market in 2023 and developers have been offering discounts and gold as gifts to attract buyers.
Despite rent for shop houses (buildings serving as both a residence and a commercial business) falling by a third in Ho Chi Minh City, many in the city centre remain empty, according to state media Thanh Nien.
Communist Party General Secretary Nguyen Phu Trong, Vietnam’s leading politician, said in November that the anti-corruption fight would ‘continue for the long-term.’
But the 79-year-old chief is said to be in shaky health and expected to retire at the next party congress in two years after new leaders are selected, BBC reports.
Source MSN.COM
