A Vietnamese court on Thursday sentenced the president of a real estate company to death in a fraud case totaling 40 billion euros, the country's biggest ever financial scandal.
The actions of Truong My Lan - chairwoman of real estate giant Van Thinh Phat (VTP) and accused of defrauding funds from Saigon Commercial Bank (SCB) for a decade - "corrupted people's trust in the leadership of the [Communist] Party and the state," said the jury, according to local media, during the trial held in Ho Chi Minh City (south).
The verdict requires the tycoon to return 27,000 of the 44 million dollars, a sum that prosecutors believe may never be recovered, reports the BBC. Some believe that the death penalty is the court's way of trying to encourage her to return some of the missing billions.
85 defendants were tried alongside Lan, who denies the charges. 13 of them could be sentenced to death.
Lan's arrest in October 2022 was one of the most notorious in an ongoing anti-corruption campaign in Vietnam, which has intensified since 2022. The so-called "Burning Oven" operation has reached the highest echelons of Vietnamese politics.
Vietnamese President Vo Van Thuong resigned in March after being implicated in the anti-corruption investigations.
VTP was among the richest real estate companies in Vietnam, with projects including luxury residential buildings, offices, hotels and shopping malls.
According to some analysts, the scale of the fraud raises questions about other banks or companies that could have made similar mistakes, damaging Vietnam's economic prospects and making foreign investors nervous when the country was trying to position itself as the ideal location for companies looking to boost their business outside of China's supply chains.
The real estate sector in Vietnam has been particularly hard hit in this whole process: around 1,300 real estate companies withdrew from the market in 2023, developers have been offering discounts and gold as gifts to attract buyers, and although store rents have fallen by a third in Ho Chi City, many premises in the city center are still empty, according to local media.
In November, Communist Party General Secretary Nguyen Phu Trong, Vietnam's leading politician, said that the anti-corruption fight would "continue in the long term".
