It is the most impressive trial that has ever been held in Vietnam, fitting one of the biggest banks frauds the world has ever witnessed.
A 67-year-old property developer is accused of looting one of Vietnam’s largest businesses over the course of 11 years behind the lovely yellow portico of the colonial-era court in Ho Chi Minh City.
The quantities involved are dizzying. Trueong My Lan is accused of obtaining$ 44 billion ( £35 billion ) in loans from the Saigon Commercial Bank. Prosecutors say$ 27bn may never be recovered.
The frequently mysterious socialist authorities have covered this situation in great detail for the media, which is unusual. They say they have summoned 2, 700 citizens to speak. There are 10 condition prosecutors and around 200 doctors involved.
The information is contained in 104 boxes, each weighing six tons in total. Truong My Lan, who denies the allegations, is on trial with 88 accused. She and 13 people face a probable death sentence.
” There has never been a present test like this, I think, in the communist era”, says David Brown, a retired US State Department official with lengthy experience in Vietnam. ” There has truly been nothing on this level.”
The trial marks the Communist Party Secretary-General Nguyen Phu Trong’s most spectacular book so far in the” Blazing Furnaces” anti-corruption plan.
Nguyen Phu Trong, a liberal thinker steeped in Communist theory, believes that public outcry over wild problem poses an existential risk to the Communist Party’s stranglehold on energy. He launched the campaign in earnest in 2016 after outmanoeuvring the then-business prime minister to keep the party’s best position.
Two leaders and two deputy prime ministers were ordered to retire during the campaign, and lots of officials were placed in jail or discipline. Now one of the government’s richest women may join their ranks.
Truong My Lan was born in Ho Chi Minh City, originally Saigon, to a Sino-Vietnamese home. It has long been the industrial engine of the Taiwanese economy, dating properly up to its days as the anti- socialist capital of South Vietnam, with a big, ethnic Chinese community.
She began selling makeup on the side of the market stall with her family before moving into the 1980s as a market stall seller. She then began purchasing land and property after the Communist Party ushered in a period of economic reform, known as the Doi Moi. By the 1990s, she owned a huge collection of hotels and restaurants.
Vietnam’s fast-growing manufacturing industry is best known outside of the country, but most powerful Vietnamese made their money by developing and investing in real estate. As an alternative source string to China, most powerful Vietnamese made their money developing and speculating in real estate.
All property is actually state- owned. It frequently depends on having close ties with state officials for exposure. Corruption escalated as the business grew, and became widespread.
By 2011, Truong My Lan was well-known in Ho Chi Minh City and able to arrange the consolidation of three smaller, cash-strapped lenders into Saigon Commercial Bank, a new company.
Every person is prohibited from holding more than 5 % of the stock in any institution under Asian rules. However, according to prosecutors, Truong My Lan truly owned more than 90 % of Saigon Commercial through lots of shell corporations and proxy who worked for her.
They accuse her of using that authority to appoint her own employees as directors and finally ordering them to review lots of money to the community of shell corporations she controlled.
The sums taken out are astounding. Her loans made up 93 % of all the bank’s lending.
According to prosecutors, over a period of three years from February 2019, she ordered her driver to withdraw 108 trillion Vietnamese dong, more than$ 4bn ( £2.3bn ) in cash from the bank, and store it in her basement.
That little money, even if all of it was in Vietnam’s largest religion coins, did weigh two kilograms.
She is even accused of paying off her debts freely to prevent scrutiny of her money. Previous central bank chief inspector who accepted a$ 5 million pay is one of the people facing charges alongside her.
Truong My Lan, whose weary, unmade-up appearance in court has been in stark contrast to the attractive publicity images people have seen of her in the past, has received common anger over corruption from the size of officially sanctioned attention about the situation.
However, questions are also being raised as to why she was able to continue working on the alleged fraud for so long.
Le Hong Hiep, the director of the Vietnam Studies Programme at the ISEAS- Yusof Ishak Institute in Singapore, says,” I am puzzled.
” Because it was n’t a secret. Truong My Lan and her Van Thinh Phat group were well known in the market to finance the massive acquisition of real estate in the most exclusive locations by using SCB as their own piggy bank.
It was obvious that she had to obtain the funds somewhere. But then it is such a common practice. This is not just a bank that is used like this. Therefore, it’s possible that the government has lost sight of the situation because there are so many comparable cases on the market.
According to David Brown, powerful individuals who have dominated Ho Chi Minh City’s politics and business for decades protected her. And he notices a bigger factor in play as this trial is being conducted: a bid to reaffirm the authority of the Communist Party over the south’s free-wheeling business culture.
Nguyen Phu Trong and his party allies are attempting to retake control of Saigon, or at least prevent it from fading away.
” Up until 2016 the party in Hanoi pretty much let this Sino-Vietnamese mafia rule the place. They would make the appropriate noises, as local communist leaders are supposed to, but they were also milking the city for a sizable portion of the money that was being made there.
Nguyen Phu Trong, party chief at 79 years old, is in shaky health, and he will almost certainly have to retire at the next Communist Party Congress in 2026, when new leaders will be elected.
He has been one of the party’s longest-serving and most consequential secretary-generals, restoring the party’s conservative wing’s leadership to a level unmatched since the reforms of the 1980s. He clearly does n’t want to take the chance of allowing too much openness to erode the party’s standing in politics.
But he is trapped in a contradiction. Under his leadership, the party has set an ambitious goal that will have a technology and knowledge-based economy by 2045, and to become a rich country status by 2045. This is what is propelling the ever-increasing partnership between the US and China.
However, Vietnam’s faster growth almost always results in more corruption. If you combat corruption too much, you run the risk of suffocating a lot of economic activity. There are already complaints that bureaucracy has slowed down as officials avoid making decisions that could lead to corruption.
” That’s the paradox”, says Le Hong Hiep. Their growth strategy has relied on dishonest practices for so long. The grease that kept the machinery running was caused by corruption. If they stop the grease, things may not work any more”.
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17 January 2023
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