Guilty of Illegally Laundering and Transferring Funds Overseas
Previously Sentenced to Death... Embezzlement Equivalent to 3% of Vietnam's GDP
A real estate tycoon sentenced to death in Vietnam for a massive financial fraud case has been additionally sentenced to life imprisonment.
According to recent reports from local media VN Express and AP News, the Ho Chi Minh City People's Court sentenced Truong My Lan (68), chairman of the real estate development company Van Tin Phat Holdings, to life imprisonment yesterday.
The court found Chairman Lan guilty of illegal money laundering and illegal overseas remittance charges. He is known to have illegally laundered funds worth 445 trillion VND (24.2 trillion KRW) and embezzled 4.5 billion USD (6.2 trillion KRW) overseas.
In this life sentence ruling, it was revealed that Lan, along with associates from Saigon Commercial Bank (SCB), illegally issued bonds through four companies, collecting 1.2 billion USD from approximately 36,000 investors.
Lan claimed, "I did not lead the bond issuance and had no intention to steal investors' money," but this was not accepted.
Besides Lan, 33 other defendants received prison sentences ranging from 2 to 23 years. This includes Lan's husband, Tru Nhat Ky, who was sentenced to 2 years for money laundering.
Nguyen Hieu, a school teacher whose lifetime savings of 36,000 USD were tied up in the illegal bonds issued by Lan, said, "The life sentence is fair," and added, "I hope the death sentence given in another trial will be reduced so that victims have a chance to be repaid."
Earlier in April, Lan was sentenced to death in a separate trial related to embezzlement. The court sentenced Lan to death for embezzling 304 trillion VND (16.5 trillion KRW) from SCB between 2012 and 2022 with accomplices. This amount exceeds 3% of Vietnam's GDP as of 2022.
Considering interest and other factors, the total damage amounts to approximately 677 trillion VND (about 37.1 trillion KRW).
Lan was found to effectively own 91.5% of SCB shares under the names of dozens of proxies and used over 1,000 paper companies she established to withdraw bank funds through false loan applications.
AP News reported that Vietnam has sentenced over 2,000 people to death and executed more than 400 in the past decade. Generally, the death penalty has been applied to murder and drug trafficking cases.
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