A court in Ho Chi Minh City rushed on Thursday to sentence real estate tycoon Truong My Lan, one of the richest women in the world, to death for her part in a $12.5 billion fraud case.
Lan and her 85 co-defendants were accused of swindling $12.5 billion from the SCB, but prosecutors said their activities caused over $27 billion in damage to the bank and Vietnam’s financial system, which is equivalent to about seven percent of Vietnam’s Gross Domestic Product . Perhaps even more damaging were the charges that Lan and her co-conspirators paid huge bribes to Vietnamese officials to protect their embezzlement scheme. This brought the case to the attention of “Blazing Furnace,” the massive anti-corruption purgeBlazing Furnace has already collected some high-profile political scalps, most recently including President Vo Van Thuong, who was removed from office in March.
Lan tried to play the public relations game, abandoning her image as a glamorous feminist success story to appear in court looking haggard and unkempt. She claimed all of her alleged crimes were merely mistakes made due to her “lack of understanding of legal matters.” Her lawyers pointed to her long history of charitable activities, and her previously clean legal record, to ask for leniency.
“I am puzzled, because it wasn’t a secret. It was well known in the market that Truong My Lan and her Van Thinh Phat group were using SCB as their own piggy bank to fund the mass acquisition of real estate in the most prime locations,” Vietnam studies director Le Hong Hiep of the Yusof Ishak Institute in Singapore told the BBC.
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