“The actions of the accused have undermined people’s trust [Komunistiskās] party and state leadership,” the ruling said in a lawsuit in southern Vietnam’s business center of Ho Chi Minh City.
After the five-week trial, a total of 85 other people were also convicted on charges ranging from bribery and abuse of power to misappropriation and banking law violations. In total, four defendants were sentenced to life imprisonment, while the others received prison sentences ranging from 20 to three years suspended, the AFP news agency reported.
For the 67-year-old woman and the chairman of the real estate company “Van Thinh Phat”.
Trona Mai Lana was accused of defrauding US$12.5 billion (€10.7 billion), or a sum totaling almost 3% of the country’s gross domestic product (GDP) in 2022.
Between 2012 and 2022, Lana illegally controlled the Saigon Joint-Stock Commercial Bank (SCB) and authorized the issuance of 2,500 loans that cost the bank $27 billion (€25 billion), state media VnExpress reported. The court required Lana to compensate the damages caused to the bank – 26.9 million US dollars.
Despite mitigating circumstances, namely that this was the first offense of the businesswoman and that Lana had also donated to various charity activities, the court explained the harsh sentence with the seriousness of the case, stating that the businesswoman engaged in an organized and sophisticated criminal business, which caused serious consequences without the possibility of recovering the defrauded money , “VnExpress” reported.
“Her actions not only violate the property management rights of individuals and organizations, but also bring SCB into a state of special control, undermining people’s trust in the leadership of the party and the state,” the court recognized in the verdict.
Her niece, Trona Hue Van, who is the executive director of Van Thinh Phat, was sentenced to 17 years in prison for helping her aunt, while Lana’s husband was sentenced to nine years in prison, the AP news agency reported.
Lana began her career by helping her mother, a Chinese businesswoman, sell cosmetics at a market in Ho Chi Minh City, Tien Phong newspaper reported.
In 1992, the businesswoman and her family founded Van Thinh Phat after Vietnam abandoned its state-led economy in favor of a more market-oriented approach open to foreigners. Over time, the company led by Lana became one of the richest real estate companies in Vietnam, owning various luxury residential buildings, offices, hotels and also shopping centers.
His success in the real estate industry made him a major player in the country’s financial industry. In 2011, she orchestrated the merger of the troubled SCB bank with two other lenders in coordination with Vietnam’s central bank.
The court found that she used this approach to obtain SCB’s money. According to government documents, she indirectly owned more than 90% of the bank’s stock and approved thousands of loans to “shell companies.” These loans then returned to her, reports the state media “VnExpress”. The entrepreneur denied these accusations. It was also discovered that the businesswoman bribed officials to cover her tracks.
Former Vietnamese central bank official Do Thi Nyang was also sentenced to life in prison on Thursday for accepting bribes worth a total of $5.2 million (€4.87 million).
Immediately after Lana’s arrest in October 2022, hundreds of people began to hold protests in the capital Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh City, a relatively rare phenomenon in the one-party communist country.
At least 42 thousand Vietnamese have suffered from Lan’s corrupt activities.
Among them is Nga, a 67-year-old resident of Hanoi, who told AFP on Thursday that she hoped for a life sentence for Lanai so she could live to see the pain her actions had caused ordinary people.
“A lot of people worked hard to put money in the bank, but now she has received the death sentence and that’s the end of it,” Nga said. “She doesn’t see human suffering.”
Nga has so far been unable to recover the $120,000 (€112,000) she invested in SCB.
Police say the victims of the fraud are all SCB bondholders who cannot withdraw their money and have not received either interest or principal payments since Lana’s arrest.
Lan’s arrest in October 2022 was one of the most high-profile in Vietnam’s ongoing anti-corruption campaign, which has intensified since 2022.
The so-called “flaming furnace” campaign has affected the highest echelons of Vietnamese politics. Vietnam’s former president, Vo Van Thuong, resigned in March after being accused of unspecified corruption-related wrongdoing.
However, Lana’s trial is said to have shocked the nation. Analysts said the scale of the fraud raises questions about whether other banks or companies have acted similarly, dampening Vietnam’s economic outlook and making foreign investors jittery at a time when Vietnam is trying to position itself as an ideal breeding ground for companies seeking to shift their supply chains from Chinese.
In November, the General Secretary of the Communist Party of Vietnam, Nguyen Phu Trong, said that the fight against corruption “will continue in the long term”.
2024-04-12 08:23:19
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