First saw this from the BBC yesterday, with a follow-up on Rawstory today. It seems Truong My Lan, who founded the real estate development company Vạn Thịnh Phát Group, and then gained illegal control of the Saigon Commercial Bank (SCB) through a covert merger she arranged back in 2011, managed to embezzle the gob-smacking total of $12.5 BILLION from that bank over the course of a decade before finally falling afoul of Vietnam’s latest anti-corruption campaign in 2022.
Even worse, the prosecutors claimed the total damages from her long-term scam actually came to the even more mind-blowing sum of $27 Billion — equivalent to about 6% of Vietnam’s entire GDP in 2023! And while the court ordered her to repay almost the entire damages sum as compensation, that might be a bit hard to arrange since it also sentenced the 67-year-old billionaire to death at the same time. OTOH, prosecutors do know where she kept a tidy chunk of all that loot:
The BCC reported that "according to prosecutors, over a period of three years from February 2019, she ordered her driver to withdraw 108 trillion Vietnamese dong, more than $4 billion in cash from the bank, and store it in her basement. That much cash, even if all of it was in Vietnam's largest denomination banknotes, would weigh two tonnes."
WTF would anyone need that much cash cluttering up their basement? This puts Disney’s Scrooge McDuck to shame, and makes Breaking Bad's Walter White look like a piker by comparison! There is of course a political backstory to this whole sordid mess that the BBC report goes into in some depth:
The trial is the most dramatic chapter so far in the "Blazing Furnaces" anti-corruption campaign led by the Communist Party Secretary-General Nguyen Phu Trong.
A conservative ideologue steeped in Marxist theory, Nguyen Phu Trong believes that popular anger over untamed corruption poses an existential threat to the Communist Party's monopoly on power. He began the campaign in earnest in 2016 after out-manoeuvring the then pro-business prime minister to retain the top job in the party.
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Truong My Lan comes from a Sino-Vietnamese family in Ho Chi Minh City, formerly Saigon. It has long been the commercial engine of the Vietnamese economy, dating well back to its days as the anti-communist capital of South Vietnam, with a large, ethnic Chinese community.
She started as a market stall vendor, selling cosmetics with her mother, but began buying land and property after the Communist Party ushered in a period of economic reform, known as Doi Moi, in 1986. By the 1990s, she owned a large portfolio of hotels and restaurants.
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By 2011, Truong My Lan was a well-known business figure in Ho Chi Minh City, and she was allowed to arrange the merger of three smaller, cash-strapped banks into a larger entity: Saigon Commercial Bank.
Vietnamese law prohibits any individual from holding more than 5% of the shares in any bank. But prosecutors say that through hundreds of shell companies and people acting as her proxies, Truong My Lan actually owned more than 90% of Saigon Commercial.
They accuse her of using that power to appoint her own people as managers, and then ordering them to approve hundreds of loans to the network of shell companies she controlled.
The amounts taken out are staggering. Her loans made up 93% of all the bank's lending.
This is truly a level of corruption that DJT and Jared could only dream of!
The mass of officially-sanctioned publicity about the case has channelled public anger over corruption against Truong My Lan, whose haggard, unmade-up appearance in court has been in stark contrast to the glamorous publicity photos people have seen of her in the past.
But questions are also being asked about why she was able to keep on with the alleged fraud for so long.
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David Brown believes she was protected by powerful figures who have dominated business and politics in Ho Chi Minh City for decades. And he sees a bigger factor in play in the way this trial is being run: a bid to reassert the authority of the Communist Party over the free-wheeling business culture of the south.
"What Nguyen Phu Trong and his allies in the party are trying to do is to regain control of Saigon, or at least stop it from slipping away.
"Up until 2016 the party in Hanoi pretty much let this Sino-Vietnamese mafia run the place. They would make all the right noises that local communist leaders are supposed to make, but at the same time they were milking the city for a substantial cut of the money that was being made down there."
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Under his leadership the party has set an ambitious goal of reaching rich country status by 2045, with a technology and knowledge-based economy. This is what is driving the ever-closer partnership with the United States.
Yet faster growth in Vietnam almost inevitably means more corruption. Fight corruption too much, and you risk extinguishing a lot of economic activity. Already there are complaints that bureaucracy has slowed down, as officials shy away from decisions which might implicate them in a corruption case.
"That's the paradox," says Le Hong Hiep. "Their growth model has been reliant on corrupt practices for so long. Corruption has been the grease that that kept the machinery working. If they stop the grease, things may not work any more."