Vietnam court rejects real estate tycoon Truong My Lan's death sentence appeal

HO CHI MINH: A Vietnamese court rejected the appeal of real estate tycoon Truong My Lan on Tuesday but kept the door open for her death sentence to be commuted if she pays back three quarters of the fraud amount, state media VN Express reported.

The 67-year-old chair of the real estate company Van Thinh Phat was charged in April with fraud amounting to $12.5 billion, nearly 3% of Vietnam’s 2022 GDP, in the country’s largest financial fraud case ever.

Lan illegally controlled Saigon Joint Stock Commercial Bank between 2012 and 2022 and allowed 2,500 loans that resulted in losses of $27 billion to the bank, VnExpress said.

The court said Tuesday that Lan’s violations made bad impact on banking activities, caused public disorders and depleted people’s trust, the media quoted the court’s statement.

Lan and her family established the Van Thing Phat company in 1992 after Vietnam shed its state-run economy in favor of a more market-oriented approach that was open to foreigners.

Van Thinh Phat would grow to become one of Vietnam’s richest real estate firms, with projects including luxury residential buildings, offices, hotels and shopping centers. This made her a key player in the country’s financial industry. She orchestrated the 2011 merger of the beleaguered SCB bank with two other lenders in coordination with Vietnam’s central bank.

The court found that she used this approach to tap SCB for cash. She indirectly owned more than 90% of the bank — a charge she denied — and approved thousands of loans to “ghost companies,” according to government documents. These loans then found their way back to her, state media VnExpress reported, citing the court’s findings.

She then bribed officials to cover her tracks, it added.

Lan was sentenced another life sentence in October in her second trial. The trials were broken into two parts due to the number of allegations against her.

During this trial, she was accused of raising $1.2 billion from nearly 36,000 investors by issuing bonds illegally through four companies, the state media reported.

She was also found guilty of siphoning off $18 billion obtained through fraud and for using companies controlled by her to illegally transfer more than $4.5 billion in and out of Vietnam between 2012 and 2022.

Vietnam has handed down more than 2,000 death sentences in the past decade and executed more than 400 prisoners. It is a possible sentence for 14 different crimes but is generally only applied in cases of murder and drug trafficking

Read the latest news here