One of Vietnam’s richest entrepreneurs was sentenced to death for withdrawing $12.5 billion from her bank.

A court in Vietnam sentenced businesswoman Truong My Lan to death. According to the prosecution, she misappropriated more than $12 billion through fraudulent schemes – an amount approximately equal to 3% of the annual GDP of a country with a population of 100 million.

67-year-old Truong My Lan is one of Vietnam’s most famous entrepreneurs. She started her career as a cosmetics seller in the central market of Ho Chi Minh City. When the authorities of communist Vietnam launched market reforms in the late 1980s, she began dealing in land and real estate – as noted by the BBC, this is how many of the richest people in Vietnam made their fortune in those years. In 2012, Truong My Lan gained control of the Saigon Commercial Bank. It was created by merging three banks that were facing bankruptcy, and soon became the largest private lender in Vietnam by assets.

Vietnamese law does not allow one person to own more than 5% of the shares of any bank, but Truong My Lan, using hundreds of shell companies and proxies, effectively controlled more than 90% of the Saigon Commercial Bank. She placed her people in key positions, after which they approved multimillion-dollar loans to companies that she owned – according to investigators, these loans accounted for 93% of all loans issued by the bank.

Truong My Lan cashed out a significant portion of this money. Thus, between 2019 and her arrest in 2022, the businesswoman’s personal driver, on her instructions, withdrew money worth about four billion dollars from her accounts and transported them to her basement.

Truong My Lan paid bribes en masse to keep her businesses from being audited. The most senior officials received the money. One of the defendants in the case was the chief inspector of the Central Bank of Vietnam, to whom she paid five million dollars.

The trial of Truong My Lan became one of the largest in the history of Vietnam. 2,700 people were called to testify, 10 prosecutors and about 200 lawyers participated in the case. The case materials fit into 104 boxes weighing six tons. The authorities made the trial open and demonstrative – it was covered as widely as possible in state-controlled media, and representatives of the prosecution regularly gave detailed comments to journalists.

In total, more than 80 defendants were involved in the case, including officials, well-known businessmen and financiers in the country. Those involved in the case included Truong Mi Lan’s husband, Hong Kong investor Eric Chu, and her niece. They received nine and 17 years in prison respectively.

Truong My Lan did not admit guilt but expressed remorse, saying in her final plea that she did not understand the banking business well and did not have sufficient “understanding of legal issues.” Her lawyers said they would appeal.

The prosecutor’s office estimated the total damage from the actions of Truong My Lan at approximately 22 billion dollars – this amount was ordered to be paid as a fine. As the BBC notes, there is speculation that the death sentence is a way to put pressure on the convicted woman to help recover the stolen money in exchange for a potential reduced sentence on appeal. Reuters also emphasizesthat although the death penalty is often used in Vietnam, it is imposed for violent rather than economic crimes.

Since 2016, Vietnam has been conducting an anti-corruption campaign called “Burning Furnaces.” Its initiator was the Secretary General of the Communist Party Nguyen Phu Trong. The campaign was launched as part of a plan to become a developed country with an innovative economy by 2045.

During the campaign, hundreds of officials received prison sentences or disciplinary sanctions, and the country’s two presidents and two deputy prime ministers were forced to resign. The Truong My Lan case is the largest in this campaign. In the same time, as the Hong Kong edition of the South China Morning Post writesits results could undermine the confidence of international investors, since the trial clearly showed that in Vietnam it is possible to carry out illegal activities in key sectors of the economy for years without attracting the attention of the authorities.