FALCON POWERS – The trial of a Vietnamese billionaire is considered one of the most sensational ever, fitting for one of the largest banking fraud schemes the world has ever seen.
Behind the grand yellow facade of the colonial-era courthouse in Ho Chi Minh City, the 67-year-old Vietnamese property developer Truong Mai Lan was sentenced on Thursday to death for embezzling from one of the country’s largest banks over 11 years.
The sentence itself is rare, as she is one of the very few women in Vietnam to be condemned to death for committing a white-collar crime.
The scale of the fraud is staggering. Truong Mai Lan was convicted of taking out $44 billion in loans from Saigon Commercial Bank. She was ordered to pay back $27 billion, an amount prosecutors say may never be recovered. Some believe the death penalty is the court’s attempt to encourage her to return some of the missing billions.
Vietnam’s communist authorities, known for their secrecy, were unusually forthcoming about the case, revealing detailed information when speaking to the media. They said 2,700 people were summoned to testify, with 10 prosecutors and around 200 lawyers involved. The physical evidence amounted to six tons spread across 104 boxes.
Truong was tried alongside 85 other defendants, all of whom denied the charges against them.
“In my view, the communist era has not seen a trial like this. Certainly not on this scale and scope,” said David Brown, a retired US State Department official with long experience in Vietnam.
The trial is the most dramatic chapter so far in the “blazing furnaces” anti-corruption campaign led by the Communist Party’s General Secretary Nguyen Phu Trong.
Trong, a conservative Marxist theorist, believes public outrage over rampant graft poses an existential threat to the party’s monopoly on power. He launched his crackdown in earnest in 2016 after outmaneuvering the then-prime minister, who was seen as business-friendly, in party elections.
