
The court ordered Lane, 67, to pay almost all of the damages.
Ho Chi Minh City:
A top Vietnamese property tycoon was sentenced to death Thursday in one of the biggest corruption cases in history, estimated at $27 billion.
A panel of three hand-picked judges and two judges rejected all defense arguments of major developer Van Thanh Phat’s chair Truong My Lin, who was found guilty of stealing cash from Saigon Commercial Bank (SCB) over a decade. .
“The defendant’s actions … destroyed the people’s confidence in the leadership of the (Communist) Party and the state,” read the verdict at the trial in the southern business center of Ho Chi Minh City.
After a five-week trial, 85 others were also convicted on charges ranging from bribery and abuse of power to embezzlement and banking law violations. Four were sentenced to life imprisonment, while the others received sentences ranging from 20 years to three years suspended.
Lin’s husband, Hong Kong billionaire Eric Chu Nap Kee, was sentenced to nine years in prison.
Lane embezzled $12.5 billion, but prosecutors said Thursday that the total losses caused by the scandal are now $27 billion — equivalent to six percent of the country’s 2023 GDP.
The court ordered Lane, 67, to pay almost all of the damages.
The death penalty is an unusually harsh punishment in such a case, even though the country is a world-leading executioner, according to Amnesty International.
Lin and the others were arrested as part of a national corruption crackdown that has netted several officials and members of Vietnam’s business elite in recent years.
She appeared in court last week in final remarks to say she had suicidal thoughts.
“In my despair, I thought of death,” he said, according to state media.
“I am very angry that I was stupid enough to enter this very tough business environment — the banking sector — about which I know very little.”
protest
After Lin’s arrest in October 2022, hundreds of people began protesting in the capital Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh City, a relatively rare event in the one-party communist state.
Police have identified nearly 42,000 victims of the scam, which has shocked the Southeast Asian nation.
Among them is Nga, a 67-year-old resident of Hanoi who told AFP on Thursday that she had hoped for a life sentence for Lin so that he could fully see the suffering his actions had caused ordinary people. It happened.
“A lot of people worked hard to deposit money in the bank, but now he’s got a death sentence and that’s it,” said Nga, using a pseudonym to protect his identity.
“She can’t see people’s suffering.”
Nga has so far failed to recover the $120,000 invested with SCB.
Lane was accused of arranging fake loan applications to siphon off money from SCB, in which she owned 90 percent of the shares.
Police say the victims of the scam are all SCB bondholders who cannot get their money back and have not received interest or principal payments since Lane’s arrest.
Prosecutors said they seized more than 1,000 of his properties during the trial.
Officials also said the $5.2 million loan was allegedly given by Len and some SCB bankers to state authorities to cover up the bank’s violations and poor financial condition, the worst ever recorded in Vietnam. It was a big bribe.
Du Thi Ninh, the former head of the State Bank of Vietnam’s inspection team, was sentenced to life in prison for accepting bribes. He said during the trial that SCB’s former CEO had given him millions of dollars in Styrofoam boxes.
More than 4,400 people have been indicted in more than 1,700 corruption cases since 2021 during Vietnam’s corruption crackdown.
A top Vietnamese luxury property tycoon – Du Anh Dung, head of the Tan Hoang Minh Group – was sentenced to eight years in prison last month after being found guilty of defrauding thousands of investors in a $355 million bond scam.
(Other than the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)
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