This is an extraordinary trial that has been taking place in Vietnam for a month. In a blue shirt, Truong My Lan appeared on the morning of Tuesday, December 3, in the front row of the courtroom, where the judges of a Ho Chi Minh City court upheld her death sentence on appeal.
Aged 68, she was the former manager of a real estate giant who orchestrated Vietnam’s biggest financial scandal, amounting to $27 billion. Vietnamese law, however, provides for a less severe sentence, life imprisonment, if she repays three-quarters of this sum.
An extraordinary affair
The judges found that there was no “no reason” to reduce the sentence pronounced at first instance against the former leader, considered to be the mastermind of this scam of historic proportions. The businesswoman stole billions of dollars over a decade via a fraudulent bond arrangement transiting through Saigon Commercial Bank (SCB), more than 90% owned by her group, Van Thinh Phat, specializing in real estate. .
This corruption affair brought to light practices known to everyone since Vietnam’s economic expansion over the last ten years. It shocked public opinion that the communist regime allowed to demonstrate freely in the streets of the largest city in the south of the country. Tens of thousands of people who had invested their savings with Saigon Commercial Bank (SCB) lost everything.
National anti-corruption campaign
The trial against this leader illustrates both the carelessness of the banking sector, during a period of rapid and unprecedented enrichment in the country, and the anti-corruption campaign, nicknamed “burning inferno”, led vigorously by the authorities. Arrests of dozens of high-profile leaders have shaken the government and business communities amid internal Communist Party feuds for power, experts say.
Vietnamese law allows those sentenced to death to escape execution if three quarters of ill-gotten assets are returned, or in the event of cooperation considered sufficient with the authorities. To avoid the death penalty, Truong My Lan, whose Hong Kong husband was sentenced to seven years in prison for violating banking rules, suggested liquidating SCB and selling its assets to partially repay his debt.
A thousand convicts on death row
Truong My Lan notably owns shares in large-scale real estate projects – skyscrapers, shopping centers, ports, housing estates – in Ho Chi Minh City, the economic capital of the south of the country. She handed over more than 600 family properties to justice, said her team of lawyers, who believe that the returned property – their value has not been made public – should allow her to benefit from the judges’ leniency.
In Vietnam, the death penalty is applied for crimes considered the most serious, particularly related to drug trafficking. Statistics on the number of executions and convictions are classified as a state secret. But according to Amnesty International, there are nearly a thousand convicts on death row and around ten are executed each year by injection.
