A top Vietnamese property tycoon was sentenced to death on Thursday in one of the biggest corruption cases in history, with an estimated $27 billion in damages.
A panel of three handpicked jurors and two judges rejected all defense arguments by Truong My Lan, chair of major developer Van Thinh Phat, who was found guilty of swindling the Saigon Commercial Bank (SCB) for over a decade.
“The defendant’s actions... eroded people’s trust in the leadership of the (Communist) Party and the state,” read the verdict at the trial in the southern business hub of Ho Chi Minh City.
Lan denied the charges and blamed her subordinates.
After a five-week trial in Ho Chi Minh City, 85 others also face verdicts and sentencing on charges ranging from bribery and abuse of power to appropriation and violations of banking laws.
Lan embezzled $12.5 billion, but prosecutors said Thursday the total damages caused by the scam now amounted to $27 billion — a figure equivalent to six percent of the country’s 2023 GDP.
The death sentence is an unusually severe punishment in such a case.
She and the others were arrested as part of a national corruption crackdown that had swept up numerous officials and members of Vietnam’s business elite in recent years.
Lan appeared to say in final remarks to the court last week that she had thoughts of suicide.
“In my desperation, I thought of death,” she said, according to state media.
“I am so angry that I was stupid enough to get involved in this very fierce business environment — the banking sector — which I have little knowledge of.”
Hundreds of people staged protests in the capital, Hanoi, and Ho Chi Minh City, a relatively rare occurrence in the one-party communist state, after Lan’s arrest in October 2022.
Police have identified around 42,000 victims of the scandal, which has shocked the Southeast Asian country.
Lan, who is married to a wealthy Hong Kong businessman on trial, was accused of setting up fake loan applications to withdraw money from SCB, in which she owned a 90-percent stake.
Police say the scam’s victims were all SCB bondholders who could not withdraw their money and had not received interest or principal payments since Lan’s arrest.
Prosecutors said they had seized more than 1,000 properties belonging to Lan during the trial.
Authorities added that the $5.2 million allegedly given by Lan and some SCB bankers to state officials to conceal the bank’s violations and poor financial situation was the largest-ever bribe recorded in Vietnam.