Real estate billionaire Truong My Lan was sentenced today (11 April) to death by a court in Ho Chi Minh city in southern Vietnam in the country’s largest financial fraud case ever, local website Thanh Nien said.
Chair of the real estate company Van Thinh Phat Group, she was formally charged with fraud amounting to $12.5bn which represented nearly 3% of the country’s 2022 GDP.
Lan and her accomplices were charged with illegally controlling the Saigon Joint Stock Commercial Bank (SCB) between 2012 and 2022 to siphon off funds through thousands of ghost companies and by paying bribes to government officials.
From early 2018 to 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, reports said.
According to a report by the BBC, some believe the death penalty is the court’s way of trying to encourage her to return some of the missing billions.
This was a first-time offense and Lan participated in charity activities — the court attributed its harsh sentence to the seriousness of the case, saying Lan was at the helm of an orchestrated and sophisticated criminal enterprise that had serious consequences with no possibility of the money being recovered, VnExpress said.
Thanh Nien website said 84 defendants in the case received sentences ranging from probation for three years to life imprisonment. These include Lan’s husband, Eric Chu, a businessman from Hong Kong, who was sentenced to nine years in jail, and her niece who got 17 years.
