Cogito Ergo Non Serviam
Vietnamese Billionaire Sentenced to Death for Fraud
In many countries, the populace worship billionaires. They have their own material aspirations, and they seem to have an affinity for those who have allegedly made it. Not so in Vietnam. Truong My Lan, who is chairwoman of Van Thinh Phat, got the death sentence this week for her cheating. The court convicted her of embezzling about 3% of the national GDP. Even by the crookedness of western billionaires, this is a big sum. At the same time, she had a series of shell companies that allowed her to get away with much of her scheming. While extreme in the outcome, it does show that not every nation is in love with robber barons.
The BBC reported
Vietnamese law prohibits any individual from holding more than 5% of the shares in any bank. But prosecutors say that through hundreds of shell companies and people acting as her proxies, Truong My Lan actually owned more than 90% of Saigon Commercial.
They accused her of using that power to appoint her own people as managers, and then ordering them to approve hundreds of loans to the network of shell companies she controlled.
The amounts taken out are staggering. Her loans made up 93% of all the bank\'s lending.
She did not really deny that she committed the acts in question. Instead, she pled ignorance. The Guardian observed, "State media reported last week that Lan told the court she had joined the banking industry without sufficient experience and blamed a \'lack of understanding of legal matters\'." She can look to Sam Bankman-Fried who stole a couple billion in crytpo-investments for back up. The excuse that one does not know what one is doing is hardly grounds for acquittal.
The Beeb added:
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.
The habitually secretive communist authorities were uncharacteristically forthright about this case, going into minute detail for the media. They said 2,700 people were summoned to testify, while 10 state prosecutors and around 200 lawyers were involved.
This is rather significant. Communist parties do not like to air dirty linen in public unless there is an ulterior motive. The fact that the government was so open about the trial says that it is going to continue the crackdown and that it did so to encourage the other stinking rich to clean up their acts. It is an admission that the authorities have been caught napping. In this kind of regime, when a purge begins, there is no telling where it ends. Comrade Stalin had Comrade Trotsky murdered halfway around the world. The members of the Vietnamese elite may well turn on each other, and things could get very ugly.
In the end, the crime is one against the entire system. At the same time, she was not the only one doing it. One is prepared to suggest there are shady dealings going on there from top to bottom. The Party knows this and that is why she go the death penalty. Even if it is commuted, if the Party decides to let her live, the others in her position must be sweating.
© Copyright 2024 by The Kensington Review, Jeff Myhre, PhD, Editor. No part of this publication may be reproduced without written consent. Produced using Ubuntu Linux.
|
|
|
