A court in Ho Chi Minh City on Thursday handed down a life prison sentence to the ousted leader of a Vietnamese real estate giant, behind Vietnam’s biggest financial scandal, and already convicted to death in a first trial.
Two judges and three jurors convicted Truong My Lan of money laundering, fraud, and illegal cross-border money transfer, state media reported.
“The court determined that Truong My Lan was the mastermind of the operations, that she had committed the crime with sophisticated methods, on numerous occasions, causing particularly serious consequences,” detailed the VNExpress news site.
This verdict closes the second trial, which lasted a month, targeting the former boss of the Van Thinh Phat group, who had become the face of corruption and out-of-control liberalism, in the eyes of a population shocked by the magnitude of the sums. mentioned.
In a first case, judged in April, she was sentenced to death for having embezzled over a decade nearly 27 billion dollars (25 billion euros) via a bond arrangement transiting through the Saigon Commercial Bank (SCB), with the complicity of officials responsible for supervising the banking sector.
His maneuvers harmed tens of thousands of customers of SCB, more than 90% owned by Van Thinh Phat, some of whom expressed their indignation in a rare expression of collective anger authorized by the communist regime.
The manager has appealed this judgment, but no date has yet been set for the procedure.
In his second trial, Truong My Lan faced charges of money laundering, fraud, and illegal cross-border money transfer.
Thirty-three other defendants were also sentenced to between two and 23 years in prison. Among them, Lan’s husband, who received two years in prison for money laundering, and her niece, sentenced to five years in prison for fraudulent appropriation of property.
36,000 victims
The investigation identified approximately 36,000 victims in this new scam.
State media reported that Truong My Lan and his associates siphoned off nearly $18 billion in SCB funds between early 2018 and October 2022.
“When I learned that I had lost all my money that I had deposited in the SCB bank, it was as if I had lost my mind,” Nguyen Thi Huong, 33, told AFP. who left all his savings there, around $20,000, in 2022.
She developed insomnia, her health deteriorated due to stress, and she no longer had money to send her children to tutoring, causing them to fall behind their peers. she explained.
“I sat at my father’s grave and wished he would take me with him in death,” said Huong, who sells noodles online, expressing her “resentment and a loss of confidence in the party and the government.
Dozens of victims demonstrated in the capital Hanoi in September, demanding help from the authorities to recover their money.
Lan apologized to the victims in court, according to state media, and assured that she was “not a bad person.”
At the start of the trial, she also requested the return of two Hermès albino crocodile skin bags, worth several hundred thousand dollars, claiming that she wanted to give them to her children and grandchildren as a gift. memory. The court refused.
The trials against Truong My Lan are part of a vast anti-corruption campaign launched in recent years by the communist government, which has caught thousands of people in its net, including business figures and ministers.
Related News :