Truong My Lan: Vietnamese billionaire property tycoon sentenced to death after $12.5bn fraud

A Vietnamese billion property tycoon has been sentenced to death for her part in one of the country’s biggest ever fraud trials.

Truong My Lan, 67, was sentenced in Ho Chi Min City on Thursday, April 11. It comes after she was found guilty of counts of embezzlement, bribery and violations of banking rules after being accused of fraud amounting to $12.5 billion, which equalled almost 3% of the country’s GDP in 2022.

Lan, who is chair of the Van Thinh Phat luxury property company, was found guilty alongside a number of accomplices of illegally controlling the Saigon Joint Stock Commercial Bank (SCB) for a decade starting in 2012. This allowed them to siphon funds though thousands of ghost companies, as well as allowing them to bride government officials. She was found to have appropriated large sums of money by arranging unlawful loans to shell companies between 2018 and 2022, when the state bailed the SCB out after a run on its deposits. A total of 84 people were convicted in connection with the fraud case, with those receiving punishments ranging from probation to life imprisonment. Lan is one of the first women to be sentenced to death in Vietnam in relation to a white collar crime.

Thanh Nien newspaper cited the prosecutors as saying before her sentencing: "Lan didn't plead guilty and didn't show remorse. The consequences are extremely serious and irreparable, and therefore, there must be a strict punishment for Truong My Lan and remove her from society."

The scandal has led to multiple businessmen and politicians being under pressure to step down after an anti-corruption campaign led by the ruling Communist Party. Former Vietnamese president Vo Van Thuong resigned from his post in march after his former subordinates were implicated in a fraud case. The party’s leader Nguyen Phu Trong vows to voters that he would stamp out corruption in the country.