HANOI - A court in Vietnam on Thursday sentenced real estate tycoon Truong My Lan to death for her role in a $12.5-billion financial fraud case, the country’s biggest on record,
Lan, 67, the chairwoman of the real estate developer Van Thinh Phat Holdings Group, was found guilty of embezzlement, bribery and violations of banking rules at the end of a trial in Ho Chi Minh City, state media reports said.
The trial, which began on March 5 and ended earlier than planned, came as part of a campaign against graft that the leader of the ruling Communist Party, Nguyen Phu Trong, has pledged for years to stamp out, although with few tangible results.
The crackdown, dubbed “blazing furnace”, has resulted in hundreds of senior state officials and high-profile business executives prosecuted or forced to step down.
At one point in 2022, Vietnamese stocks suffered a $40-billion wipeout following a series of big corporate arrests, rattling investor confidence at a delicate moment for the fast-growing economy.
Lan’s lawyers were not immediately available for comment.
Lan and her accomplices were accused of siphoning off more than 304 trillion dong ($12.5 billion) from Saigon Joint Stock Commercial Bank (SCB), which she effectively controlled through dozens of proxies, according to investigators.
From early 2018 through October 2022, when the state bailed out SCB after a run on its deposits, Lan appropriated large sums by arranging unlawful loans to shell companies, investigators said.
The sum looted exceeded the market capitalisation of most Vietnamese banks. Her arrest, initially on bond fraud charges, led to panic among depositors of SCB, triggering a run on the bank. The events resulted in the State Bank of Vietnam taking control of the lender.
Lam will appeal the ruling, a family member told Reuters before it was issued.
According to the BBC, Lan started out as a market stall vendor, selling cosmetics with her mother, but began buying land and property after the Communist Party ushered in economic reforms in 1986. By the 1990s, she owned many hotels and restaurants.
In 2011, Lan was allowed to arrange the merger of three smaller, struggling banks into a larger entity that became Saigon Commercial Bank.
Lan’s company, also known as VTP, owns some of the most prestigious properties in Ho Chi Minh City, the country’s commercial hub. During the trial, Lan offered to hand in several of her family-owned assets to make up for the losses caused to the bank, according to VnExpress.