“In my desperation, I thought of death,” Truong My Lan told the court in her final remarks, a week before the verdict. On Thursday, April 11, 2024, the court gave her the death penalty.
Lan, 67, chairs the property developer Van Thinh Phat. A court in Ho Chi Minh City found her guilty of embezzlement, bribery and violating banking rules in a fraud worth 304 trillion dong, or $12.46 billion. It is the biggest financial fraud on record in Vietnam. Her lawyers have 15 days to appeal.
How the money moved
Here is the plain version. Lan owned 90% of Saigon Joint Stock Commercial Bank, known as SCB, and prosecutors say she treated it like her own wallet. Between 2012 and 2022 she illegally controlled the bank and used thousands of ghost companies and bribes to government officials to pull money out. Think of a bank vault with a private back door. Fake loan applications were the key.
The sum was about 3 percent of Vietnam’s gross domestic product in 2022, according to Al Jazeera. Prosecutors cited total damages of €27 billion, which DW reported as 6% of the country’s 2023 GDP. Police say they have found around 42,000 victims, bondholders at SCB who cannot withdraw their savings and have had no interest payments since Lan was arrested in October 2022. Authorities seized more than 1,000 properties tied to her, some of them unfinished skyscrapers.
What the court said
Lan denied the charges and blamed her subordinates. “I am so angry that I was stupid enough to get involved in this very fierce business environment, the banking sector, which I have little knowledge of,” she said, according to state media.
The court was not moved. State outlet VnExpress reported that judges described an orchestrated and sophisticated criminal enterprise whose damage could not realistically be repaid. The verdict said her actions pushed SCB into special control and “eroded people’s trust in the leadership of the Party and state.”
Her husband, Hong Kong investor Eric Chu Nap-Kee, was among 86 people on trial, as was her niece Truong Hue Van, who was chief executive of Van Thinh Phat. Thanh Nien newspaper reported that 84 defendants received sentences ranging from three years of probation to life in prison.
Why the sentence stands out
Lan’s arrest came out of the “Blazing Furnace” anticorruption campaign, which began in 2016 and sped up from 2022. Al Jazeera noted that a pair of presidents and a pair of prime ministers have stepped down in recent years, and hundreds of officials have been disciplined or jailed. By DW’s count, graft cases numbering more than 1,700 since 2021 have led to indictments of more than 4,400 people, yet a death sentence is unusually severe.
Michael Tatarski, a journalist based in Vietnam, told DW that Vietnam has the death penalty but does not use it widely. “It’s clear that [Vietnamese authorities] wanted to make an example of her,” he said. He told Al Jazeera that some critics see a political tinge to such cases, but that “there is also clearly enormous amounts of corruption and fraud that does need to be cleaned up.”
Sources
- Vietnam tycoon sentenced to death in $12 billion fraud case (Deutsche Welle)
- Vietnam tycoon Truong My Lan sentenced to death in $12.5bn fraud case (Al Jazeera)
