A prominent Vietnamese property developer and former state bank official is facing the death penalty after being accused of stealing $12.5 billion from Saigon Commercial Bank (SCB).
Truong My Lan, chair of the major developer Van Thinh Phat, was arrested in October 2022 in a high-profile corruption crackdown by Vietnam’s authorities. The 85 other defendants in the case, including two former ministers and several former SCB executives, also face heavy charges of fraud and corruption.
Prosecutors say that Lan, who is married to a wealthy Hong Kong businessman also on trial, set up fake loan applications to withdraw money from SCB, of which she owned a 90% stake. She allegedly received the cash over a decade between 2012 and 2022, and the money was equivalent to around three per cent of Vietnam’s GDP in 2022.
Police have identified more than 42,000 victims of the alleged scam, who are all SCB bondholders. They say that the people who were caught up in the scam are all SCB bondholders who cannot withdraw their money and have not received interest or principal payments since Lan’s arrest. The value of Lan’s alleged asset appropriation is equivalent to around three per cent of Vietnam’s GDP in 2022.
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During the trial, prosecutors said that they had seized more than 1,000 properties belonging to Lan. Lan, who appeared to say in final remarks to the court last week that she had thoughts of suicide, said in her indictment that she was “so angry” that she got involved in the “very fierce business environment” of the banking sector, which she said she had “little knowledge of.”
Hundreds of people began to stage protests in the capital Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh City, a relatively rare occurrence in the one-party communist state, after Lan’s arrest. The protests were the largest demonstration of its kind in Vietnam in recent years.
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