Tycoon Truong My Lan’s death sentence upheld in Vietnam’s biggest fraud case
HANOI, Vietnam — Death penalty for real estate tycoon Truong Mon Lan was confirmed Tuesday in Vietnam’s largest fraud case, the scale of which had sparked concerns about the country’s economy.
She was convicted in April of embezzlement and corruption for a fraud amounting to $12.5 billion, or nearly 3% of Vietnam’s 2022 GDP. As president of the real estate company Van Thinh Phat , Lan illegally controlled Saigon Joint Stock Commercial Bank between 2012 and 2022 and authorized 2,500 loans that cost the bank $27 billion in losses.
The Ho Chi Minh court rejected her appeal against the conviction, while adding that her death sentence could be commuted to life if she repaid three-quarters of the losses, or about $11 billion, state media reported.
Her lawyers argued that she had repaid the money, but the court disagreed because there were legal problems with some of the seized properties and the prosecuting agencies were unable to assess their value, reported VN Express.
Lan’s lawyers also noted several mitigating circumstances: she admitted her guilt, showed remorse and repaid part of the amount.
“I feel pained because of the waste of national resources,” she said last week, state media reported.
But the court said its violations had a negative impact on the banking sector, caused public order disturbances and eroded public trust, VN Express said.
Under Vietnamese law, death sentences are not immediately carried out and there is a protracted legal process, said Nguyen Khac Giang, a visiting scholar at the Vietnam Studies Program at ISEAS-Yusof Ishak Institute in Singapore. He added that Lan would seek another review of the case or a presidential pardon to reduce his sentence.
“Moreover, if she repays at least three-quarters of the embezzled funds, the court could consider commuting her sentence to life imprisonment,” he added.
His arrest was among the most publicized in a anti-corruption campaign in Vietnam this intensified after 2022. The Blazing Furnace campaign reached the highest echelons of Vietnamese politics. But the scale of his fraud shocked the country, with analysts wondering if other banks or companies had made the same mistake.
This has darkened Vietnam’s economic outlook and has made foreign investors nervous at a time when Vietnam is trying to position itself as a hotbed for companies moving their supply chains away from China.
Lan, 67, and his family established the Van Thing Phat company in 1992 after Vietnam abandoned its state-run economy in favor of a more market-oriented approach open to foreigners. The company has become one of Vietnam’s richest real estate companies, with luxury residential buildings, offices, hotels and shopping malls.
This has made it a key player in the country’s financial sector. She orchestrated the 2011 merger of the troubled SCB Bank with two other lenders, in coordination with Vietnam’s central bank. The court said she used this to obtain money from SCB and that, according to government documents, she owned more than 90% of the bank while approving thousands of loans to “shadow companies.”
These loans, according to state media, came to her and she bribed officials to cover their tracks.
The scale of the crime led to the case being split into two trials and Lan was sentenced to another life sentence in October. In that trial, she was accused of raising $1.2 billion from nearly 36,000 investors by illegally issuing bonds through four companies, state media reported.
She was also found guilty of siphoning off $18 billion obtained through fraud and using companies she controlled to illegally transfer more than $4.5 billion to and from Vietnam between 2012 and 2022 .
Vietnam has handed down more than 2,000 death sentences over the past decade and executed more than 400 prisoners. This is a possible sentence for 14 different crimes, but is typically applied to murder and drug trafficking cases.
