A court in Ho Chi Minh City sentenced 67-year-old Vietnamese businesswoman Chiong Mi Lan to death for robbing one of the country's largest banks for 11 years.
The head of the large Van Thinh Phat company, Chiong Mi Lan, is one of the few women sentenced to death in Vietnam for financial crimes.
The scale of fraud can also be considered unprecedented. Chiong Mi Lan was found guilty of receiving $44 billion in loans from Saigon Commercial Bank.
At the same time, the court verdict obliges her to return 27 billion dollars, although the prosecution believes that this is hardly possible.
There is an opinion that the court imposed the death penalty on Chiong precisely in order to put pressure on her and force her to return at least part of the stolen money.
Chiong Mi Lan did not admit the fault and put it on her subordinates. One of her relatives told Reuters that she is going to appeal the verdict.
The Vietnamese mass media described the process in detail. According to their data, 2,700 people were summoned to testify, 10 state prosecutors and about 200 lawyers participated in the case.
Accusation materials were placed in 104 boxes with a total weight of 6 tons. Along with Chiong Mi Lan, 85 other people appeared in court.
All defendants were found guilty. Four received life imprisonment. The rest received sentences ranging from 20 years to three years of probation. Chiong Mi Lan's husband and niece received nine and 17 years in prison, respectively.
Cash in boxes
According to the indictment, Chiong Mi Lan, the wife of a wealthy Hong Kong businessman, used forged loan applications to withdraw money from SCB, in which she actually owned 90% of the shares.
Police say all SCB bondholders, who have been unable to withdraw their money and have received neither interest nor principal payments since Chiong's arrest, are victims of the scam. About 42,000 people were affected by the scam.
During the trial, prosecutors announced that they had seized more than a thousand real estate objects belonging to the businesswoman.
Authorities also said the $5.2 million in bribes paid by Lan and SCB employees to Vietnamese officials to cover up the bank's irregularities and poor financial condition was the largest in Vietnam's history.
Do Thi Nhan, the former head of the State Bank of Vietnam's inspection team who was offered a bribe, said during the trial that the cash in the boxes was given to her by SCB's former CEO, Vo Tan Van. Realizing that the boxes contained money, Do refused them, but Vo also refused to take them back.
The trial, which began on March 5 and ended ahead of schedule, was part of a campaign against graft that Vietnam's Communist Party General Secretary Nguyen Phu Chong has vowed to stamp out for years. However, there are still few tangible results.
In 2022, a series of arrests sent shares of Vietnam's major companies down $40 billion, undermining investor confidence at a difficult time for the fast-growing economy.
Who is Chiong Mi Lan
Chiong Mi Lan comes from a Chinese-Vietnamese family in Ho Chi Minh City. This city, home to a large ethnic Chinese community, has long been the engine of the Vietnamese economy since it was called Saigon and was the capital of South Vietnam.
Chiong started as a market trader, selling cosmetics with her mother, but after the Communist Party began economic reforms in 1986, she began buying land and real estate. Until the 1990s, she owned several hotels and restaurants.
Although Vietnam is mostly known for its rapidly growing manufacturing sector, most wealthy Vietnamese have made their fortunes in construction and real estate speculation.
All land in the country officially belongs to the state. Getting access to it often depends on personal relationships with officials. Along with the growth of the economy, corruption also grew.
By 2011, Chiong Mi Lan had become a well-known figure in Ho Chi Minh City and was allowed to arrange the merger of three small, cash-strapped banks into a larger structure, Saigon Commercial Bank.
Vietnamese law prohibits any private individual from owning more than 5% of the shares of any bank. But prosecutors allege that through hundreds of shell companies and proxies, Chiong Mi Lan effectively controlled more than 90% of SCB's shares.
Chiong was accused of abusing her power by appointing her own people as managers, approving hundreds of loans for a network of shell companies she controlled. In total, according to the indictment, Lan's loans accounted for 93% of all the bank's loans.
According to prosecutors, over a three-year period starting in February 2019, she ordered her driver to take 108 trillion dong (more than $4 billion) in cash out of the bank and store it in a basement. Even in the largest bills, the money had to weigh about two tons.
Fight against corruption
"I don't think there's ever been a show trial like this in the entire communist era," said David Brown, a retired US State Department official with extensive experience in Vietnam.
Nguyen Phu Chong believes that popular anger over rampant corruption is an existential threat to the Communist Party's monopoly on power. He began a serious anti-corruption campaign in 2016.
As a result of this campaign, which was called the "burning furnace", two presidents and two deputy prime ministers were forced to resign, and hundreds of officials were disciplined or imprisoned. Now one of the richest women in Vietnam has added to this list.
"I'm surprised," said Le Hong Hiep, director of the Vietnam Studies Program at the Yusof Ishak Institute in Singapore. own piggy bank for mass acquisition of real estate in the most prestigious places".
David Brown believes that she was covered up by influential figures who dominated the country's business and politics for decades. He sees the trial as an attempt to restore the party's control over the country's south, with its free-flowing business culture.
"Nguyen Phu Chong and his party allies are trying to take back control of Saigon, or at least keep it from slipping away," he says. words to be said to the local communist leaders, but at the same time milked the city, receiving a significant share of the money that was made there."
Nguyen Phu Chong is one of the most influential general secretaries of the Communist Party in recent years. He restored the authority of the conservative wing of the party to a level not seen since the reforms of the 1980s.
Under his leadership, the party set an ambitious goal - to achieve the status of a rich country with an economy based on technology and knowledge by 2045. This is what contributes to the country's ever-closer partnership with the United States.
But he is 79 years old, in poor health, and will probably have to resign at the next party congress in 2026.
Rapid economic growth in Vietnam inevitably means an increase in corruption. If the fight against corruption is too active, it will put many types of economic activity under attack.
"This is the paradox," says Le Hong Hip. "Vietnam's growth model has long depended on corruption. Corruption was the oil that kept the mechanism running. If you remove the oil, it can stop working."
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