Vietnamese property tycoon Truong My Lan (C) looks on at a court in Ho Chi Minh City on November 4, 2024 (Picture: AFP)
A property tycoon in Vietnam is facing having to come up with more than £7 billion in a race to save her life.
Truong My Lan, the chair of real estate developer Van Thinh Phat Holdings Group, is the mastermind behind what is the biggest financial fraud case on record.
The 67-year-old was found guilty of embezzlement, bribery and violations of banking rules following a month-long trial in April.
She had secretly controlled Saigon Commercial Bank, the country’s fifth biggest lender, taking out loans and cash over more than 10 years through a web of shell companies.
This amounts to a total of £34.5 billion – with £21 billion misappropriated and the rest believed to have been embezzled.
If Lan is able to return at leastthree-quarters of the money she embezzled, it is possible that her sentence could be changed to life imprisonment.
Lan, second left, lost her appeal against the conviction (Picture: AP)
A prosecutor was quoted as saying by state-run newspaper VietnamNet that the effect her crimes have had on the country is ‘unprecedented’.
They said: ‘The consequences Lan caused are unprecedented in the history of litigation and the amount of money embezzled is unprecedentedly large and unrecoverable.
‘Her actions have affected many aspects of society, the financial market, the economy.’
The court upheld the tycoon’s death sentence after rejecting her appeal against the conviction.
This means Lan has become one of the very few women in Vietnam to be sentenced to death for a white collar crime.
State media cited her lawyer as saying she had mitigating circumstances, including ‘having admitted guilt, showing remorse and paying back part of the amount of money embezzled’.
But prosecutors stressed that was all insufficient to overturn their verdict.
The tycoon still has the right to request a review under Vietnam’s cassation or retrial procedures.
Her arrest in 2022 sparked a run on one of the country’s largest private banks by deposits, Saigon Joint Stock Commercial Bank (SCB), which was at the centre of the fraud and largely owned by Lan through her proxies.
Apart from the death sentence, she was handed a life sentence at a separate trial in October after being found guilty of obtaining property by fraud, money laundering and illegal cross-border money transfers.
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