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They couldn’t even wait for the show trials to finish on time. A Vietnamese court has sentenced one of the world’s richest women to death in a shocking early verdict after the largest fraud trial in the country’s history.
The lifestyle of Vietnam’s wealthy elite was exposed in a devastating trial in Ho Chi Minh City that convicted Truong My La Lan of extorting billions from Vietnam’s largest banks in a $27 billion scam. exposed.
The trial caused a sensation when 20 police-escorted prison vehicles, sirens blaring, carried Mr. Lan, 68, and his companions between the courthouse and the prison where they were being held.
The scale of the allegations was so staggering that the shenanigans of former South Vietnamese groups, who benefited from American aid until their fall to North Vietnam in 1975, seemed trivial.
Like many wealthy Chinese-Vietnamese people, Ms. Lan’s world revolved around wealth, in her case an empire with tentacles extending to Hong Kong and Singapore. She was accused of amassing her wealth by embezzling both cash and bank transfers through a shell company from a private bank that held a controlling stake in her. She was accused of embezzling more than $12 billion from Saigon Shares and Commercial Bank (SCB), of which she was chairman.
Prosecutors said they had seized more than 1,000 properties from her extraordinary empire.
Born in Saigon’s Chinese-majority Cholon district, where HCM is still widely known, Lan, a Chinese-Vietnamese, started her business career selling cosmetics at a market stall with her mother. . By the 1990s, she began buying real estate, including restaurants and hotels.
She, along with her husband, Hong Kong billionaire real estate executive Eric Chew Nap Kee, and 85 co-conspirators, along with lawyers and banking regulators from the communist-ruled capital of Hanoi, were arrested in a series of raids. was indicted on the charges. Lan and her husband, along with 70 other people, visited the former U.S. military base in Cu Chi, northwest of Ho Chi Minh City (the wartime headquarters of the U.S. Army’s 25th Division), and the nearby tunnels, which are now open to tourists. He was imprisoned in a maximum-security prison near the facility. Ten people are under house arrest and five are on the run and have been urged to surrender by radio. The sentences for all co-conspirators are not yet known.
In Saigon, the Supreme Court, a prominent relic of French colonial rule where the defendant was tried, came amid fears that Mr. Lan’s cronies would seek to destroy six tons of documents that prosecutors had collected as evidence. The courthouse is adorned with new firefighting equipment and safety equipment.
It was an incredibly complex ordeal that began with Ms. Lan’s arrest in 2022 while living in the penthouse of the luxury Sherwood condominium on Pasteur Street in central Ho Chi Minh City. At trial, the driver testified that he transferred millions of dollars in cash to and from her penthouse, which was just one of her homes.
The case focused on holding company Van Tinh Phat Ltd, of which Mr Lan is chairman, SCB, of which Mr Lan is chairman, and shell companies in Hong Kong and Singapore. Large sums of cash moved in and out of banks to fund her transactions.
Bribes to banking regulators in Hanoi were masterminded by the Chinese mafia in Ho Chi Minh City’s historic Cho Long district, where the legendary Ho Chi Minh established a regime that expelled the French and then the Americans and their henchmen. It was enough to fuel the scam for years.
“Compared to this era, ours was a peanut,” said Carl Robinson, an Australian journalist who returned to Ho Chi Minh City for years after covering the war for the Associated Press. It is widely believed that the country is built on corruption.”
But bringing Ran and his friends together wasn’t easy. Members of Vietnam’s Chinese community are “notoriously secretive and not exaggerating their wealth,” Robinson told The Daily Beast. “Everything is done orally and is never recorded on paper.”
Mr. Lunn “had a big ‘umbrella’ that protected the whole plan, and now he’s lost that,” Robinson surmised. “This story is about real estate development and stock market manipulation and sucking in investors who lost everything.” “Aside from a yacht and a flashy car or two, this is really all financial speculation. ”, which means “a never-ending pyramid scheme where people borrow pigs’ heads to make money”.
These connections to China were extremely important to Lan, whose wealthy Cho Long family had close ties to district representative Le Thanh Hai. He joined the Viet Cong during the war and was promoted to Communist Party Secretary of Ho Chi Minh City, effectively mayor.
Until 2015, the High are believed to have provided Ran with the protection they needed to build their empire. Lang lived a life of luxury, traveling between Saigon, Hanoi, Hong Kong and Singapore, weaving a web so tangled that Carlo Pietro Ponzi would blush from beyond the grave. She is said to have had six cars and a yacht on the Saigon River.
“Two institutions with deep roots in Cholon, High Machine and Mr. Lan’s Vinh Thanh Phat empire, have cherished each other for more than 20 years,” said a former official who worked in Saigon during the turbulent 1960s. American diplomat David Brown says: he told The Daily Beast. “Once Hai’s machine was dismantled, many officials were induced to condemn the Saigon real estate that Mr. Lan had patiently accumulated.”
According to an official announcement, in March 2020, Mr. Hai was suspended from a powerful position in the party on charges of “violating the principles of democratic centralism and the working rules of party departments, and making unjust decisions under the jurisdiction of party departments.” Things were going well until he was stripped of his status. Standing Committee. “
In fact, Comrade Hai seems to have been engaged in a number of miraculous activities. The rats started coming out of the woodwork and accusing Ran until he was thrown out.
The political element of the case was emphasized by the court, as the judgment emphasized that “the defendant’s actions… have undermined public confidence in the leadership of the (Communist) Party and the state.”
Another element of the story is the connections between Singapore and Hong Kong, including a shady property purchase orchestrated by Lan’s husband Eric. Rich old Eric looked rather sad in court and solemnly vowed to sell all his assets in China’s high-end financial center to repay his losses in Vietnam.
Prosecutors appear to have ignored his request so far. “This is much more than tax evasion,” said one veteran Saigon watchdog. “This is moving money from banks to companies with thousands of investors for real estate investments from Saigon to Da Lat.” [the beautiful French-built resort in the central highlands] From Hanoi to Hong Kong and Singapore. This is also a plan in which many “innocent” investors will be harmed. ”
One of Mr. Lan’s flashiest real estate purchases is the towering Capital Place building in downtown Hanoi, a stone’s throw from the country’s latter-day leader. She estimates its value at about $1 billion, which would cover nearly 10 percent of the money she’s accused of stealing, but her daughter said she could get the most out of giving it up. He testified that the amount was $360 million.
Mr. Lan did own a $400 million luxury office tower in Singapore, but he sold it a year ago at a discount of $300 million to one of his holding companies, Vivaland. In 2020, Viva bought a 21-story building on Robinson Street, a major thoroughfare in the city-state’s center, for $376 million. The incident is an embarrassment for Singapore, which prides itself on having a clean government despite being embroiled in real estate fraud and corruption involving at least one top minister.
The niece, who is a member of one of Saigon’s wealthiest families and married to a popular singer, seems determined to hold her aunt, whom she has called “Mama” since she was a child, entirely responsible for the empire’s sins. VN Express, a website that reports on what authorities want the world to know, said prosecutors said Vann “admitted to the crime, showed remorse, provided honest information, and fully cooperated with investigators.” It was reported that the decision was made.
Van Tinh Phat, the CEO of her aunt’s company, would have otherwise been on trial for life for embezzling $456 million from a bank. To save her own neck, she told her court that “she purchased SCB shares but only followed the instructions of her aunt and sent a proxy on her behalf to the bank’s general meeting.” ” he said.
According to VN Express, Lan was “the actual owner of Saigon Commercial Bank, and the other members of the board were merely her pawns.” “She signed every document put in front of her without question out of respect for her family relationships.”
According to her niece’s testimony, all Lan had to do to exit SCB was “instruct his subordinates to formulate a business plan to set up a shell company and borrow from SCB.” According to her, her aunt can do whatever she wants with her booty.
A devastated Lan and her husband Eric, who are fighting for their lives, have decided to sell nearly all of their assets, not just in Vietnam but across China, including Hong Kong, to repay their investors. promised to the court. All Lan wanted for herself was her $28 million historic villa, built in 1925 at the height of the French colonial era, on a leafy Saigon Boulevard. , she said.
After purchasing the mansion in 2015, Lan hired Italian and British restorers to faithfully renovate it for $20 million. At first glance, it appears that the restoration is almost complete. Originally scheduled to open in 2022 as a high-end restaurant and residence, this beautiful building, surrounded by high fences, is now strictly closed. There was a sign on the door stating that the house had been seized for non-payment of “water bills.”
Now she will never see it again.
“I want my daughter to be able to keep the villa so that she can maintain and preserve it as a relic of Vietnam,” she begged, but her daughter did not want that.
Ms Lunn claimed that such generosity was why she donated millions of dollars to staff “for their contributions to SCB”. The stock belonged to a friend of mine,” was her dishonest explanation. “They went overseas and bought stocks.” [and then gave them away].
No one seems to know where the hell it went, and it’s very likely that much of that money will never be recovered. The bank’s former deputy chief executive officer, Tran Thi My Dung, said Ms Lan transferred the funds online and the cash was delivered to her office “for her personal expenses”. I testified, but I didn’t know about it. Police don’t know where the cash ended up.
Brown is a former diplomat and knows quite a bit about the origins of his wealth. He told the Daily Beast that Lan and other millionaires had lost property that had been “confiscated long ago from RVN moguls,” including the property of members and friends of the former Republic of Vietnam, who were backed by the United States. He said he had taken control of the Finally, in late 2022, the Vietnam Communist Party general secretary and her friends in the Politburo decided it was time to bring her down as part of her fight against corruption, presumably because they were not getting anything in return. he demanded.
“That’s the backstory,” Brown said. The resulting show trial was staged as a warning to the legions of villains. “MS. Ran will be hanged by the 13th Party Congress next January,” Brown predicted.
In response, a Vietnamese friend in Saigon proudly exclaimed, “By lethal injection, we were no longer hanged!” Although, A Vietnamese woman who defected to the United States before the fall of the former Saigon regime lamented to the Daily Beast, “I’m worried that I’ll be shot.”
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