A 67-year-old Vietnamese billionaire, Truong My Lan, has been sentenced to death for looting one of Vietnam’s largest banks for 11 years.
It was the most spectacular trial ever held in Vietnam, befitting one of the greatest bank frauds the world has ever seen.
The property developer is one of the very few women in Vietnam to be sentenced to death for a white-collar crime.
The decision is a reflection of the dizzying scale of the fraud. Truong My Lan was convicted of taking out $44bn (£35bn) in loans from the Saigon Commercial Bank.
The verdict requires her to return $27bn, a sum prosecutors said may never be recovered. Some believe the death penalty is the court’s way of trying to encourage her to return some of the missing billions.
The habitually secretive communist authorities were uncharacteristically forthright about this case, going into minute detail for the media. They said 2,700 people were summoned to testify, while 10 state prosecutors and around 200 lawyers were involved.
The evidence was in 104 boxes weighing a total of six tonnes. Eighty-five defendants were tried with Truong My Lan, who denied the charges.
The trial was the most dramatic chapter so far in the ‘blazing furnaces’ anti-corruption campaign led by the Communist Party Secretary-General, Nguyen Phu Trong.
A conservative ideologue steeped in Marxist theory, Nguyen Phu Trong believes that popular anger over untamed corruption poses an existential threat to the Communist Party’s monopoly on power. He began the campaign in earnest in 2016 after out-manoeuvring the then pro-business prime minister to retain the top job in the party.
The campaign has seen two presidents and two deputy prime ministers forced to resign, and hundreds of officials disciplined or jailed. Now one of the country’s richest women has joined their ranks.
Vietnamese law prohibits any individual from holding more than 5% of the shares in any bank. But prosecutors say that through hundreds of shell companies and people acting as her proxies, Truong My Lan owned more than 90% of Saigon Commercial Bank.
According to prosecutors, over three years from February 2019, she ordered her driver to withdraw 108 trillion Vietnamese dong, more than $4bn (£2.3bn) in cash from the bank, and store it in her basement.
That much cash, even if all of it was in Vietnam’s largest denomination banknotes, would weigh two tonnes.
