A Ho Chi Minh City court on 11 April 2024 sentenced Trương Mỹ Lan, chair of the property developer Van Thinh Phat, to death, Vietnam’s first commercial death sentence in living memory, after finding her guilty of embezzlement, bribery and bank-secrecy violations in a scheme that prosecutors valued at roughly 304 trillion đồng (≈ US$ 12.5 billion in misappropriated funds, with total exposure of the Saigon Commercial Bank put at around US$ 44 billion).
The verdict has reverberated through Vietnam’s political class because the prosecution targeted not only Lan and her family but also several senior officials from the State Bank of Vietnam (SBV) accused of accepting bribes to suppress earlier inspections that would have exposed the scheme.
How the scheme worked
According to court findings, Lan effectively controlled Saigon Commercial Bank (SCB) from 2012 onwards through nominees, even though Vietnamese banking law caps any individual’s shareholding at 5%. She then directed SCB to make thousands of loans to shell companies linked to Van Thinh Phat, using them to fund property acquisitions, refinance earlier loans, and repay personal debts.
By the time the SBV finally intervened in October 2022, SCB was technically insolvent. The central bank placed it under “special control” and the government injected an estimated US$ 24 billion in emergency liquidity to prevent a wider banking panic, making the SCB rescue one of the largest in Asian banking history.
Officials in the dock alongside her
Of particular significance for Vietnam’s long-running anti-corruption “blazing furnace” campaign was the conviction of Đỗ Thị Nhàn, former head of the SBV’s banking inspection department, who received a life sentence for accepting US$ 5.2 million in bribes from Lan to file favourable inspection reports. Several other regulators received lengthy prison terms.
The convictions of SBV officials are unusual: until recently, Vietnam’s anti-corruption drive had concentrated on the Communist Party and energy-sector officials, with the technocratic banking apparatus largely shielded.
Death sentence and restitution
Under Vietnamese law, a death sentence in an economic case can be commuted to life imprisonment if the convicted person repays at least three-quarters of the misappropriated funds. Lan’s defence team has indicated she will attempt to do so, by selling more than 1,000 properties tied to Van Thinh Phat.
A second-stage trial in late 2024 added bond-fraud convictions to the original verdict, bringing further life sentences for several family members and associates and confirming the scale of the case as the largest financial fraud in Vietnamese history.
