Truong My Lan, the chair of the developer Van Thinh Phat, has been sentenced to death in Vietnam’s biggest-ever fraud case. She was found guilty of embezzlement, bribery, and violations of banking rules, which caused damages of $27bn. The case involved a total of $12.5bn being embezzled, or almost 3% of Vietnamese gross domestic product. Lan had swindled money from Saigon Commercial Bank (SCB) over a decade, according to the verdict. She had been tried alongside 85 others, including former central bankers and government officials, as well as previous SCB executives. The trial is part of a national corruption crackdown led by the secretary general of the Communist Party of Vietnam, Nguyễn Phú Trọng, which has led to the indictment of thousands of people, as well as the resignation of two presidents and two deputy prime ministers.
The verdicts have followed a five-week trial that has been covered in great detail in Vietnam’s tightly controlled state media. Documents related to the trial, kept in 105 boxes, weighed 6 tonnes, according to reports. More than 1,000 properties belonging to Lan have been seized, and nearly 2,700 individuals were summoned for the trial, which included 200 lawyers. The death sentence is an unusually severe punishment for a corruption case.
Dr Nguyen Khac Giang, a visiting fellow at the Vietnam studies programme at the Iseas-Yusof Ishak Institute, said the case was unprecedented and a milestone in Vietnam’s anti-corruption crackdown. It was, he said, “the biggest case against a private business, with the biggest number of defendants, the biggest number of evidence and of course, the biggest number of money involved”.
Although Lan did not directly hold executive power at SCB, she owned 91.5% of the bank’s shares through third parties and shell companies. She was accused of setting up fake loan applications to withdraw money from the bank over a period of 11 years, from 2012 to 2022. According to state media, the loans accounted for 93% of the total credit the bank issued.
Lan and other SCB bankers gave state officials $5.2m, the largest bribe recorded in Vietnam, to cover up the fraud. According to the trial, the money was handed over in Styrofoam boxes. Since 2021, thousands of people have been indicted for corruption in the country in what analysts have described as the most comprehensive anti-corruption effort in the Communist Party of Vietnam’s history.
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