Information reaching Kossyderrickent has it that Vietnamese female billionaire, Truong My Lan, stole $44B as she’s sentenced to life imprisonment.
Behind the stately yellow portico of the colonial-era courthouse in Ho Chi Minh City, a 67-year-old Vietnamese property developer was sentenced to death on Thursday for looting one of the country’s largest banks over a period of 11 years.
It’s a rare verdict – she is one of very few women in Vietnam to be sentenced to death for a white collar crime.
The decision is a reflection of the dizzying scale of the fraud. Truong My Lan was convicted of taking out $44bn (£35bn) in loans from the Saigon Commercial Bank. The verdict requires her to return $27bn, a sum prosecutors said may never be recovered. Some believe the death penalty is the court’s way of trying to encourage her to return some of the missing billions.
“There has never been a show trial like this, I think, in the communist era,” said David Brown, a retired US State Department official with long experience in Vietnam. “There has certainly been nothing on this scale.”
The trial was the most dramatic chapter so far in the “Blazing Furnaces” anti-corruption campaign led by the Communist Party Secretary-General, Nguyen Phu Trong.