Vietnam’s Biggest Graft Case Spreads Abroad

Government in hunt for Truong My Lan’s overseas assets

By: Toh Han Shih

The Vietnamese government has begun looking abroad, particularly in Hong Kong and other jurisdictions, for assets linked to the country’s biggest graft scandal involving Truong My Lan, the chief culprit, and her Hong Kong husband, Eric Chu Nap-kee. The 67-year-old businesswoman and her accomplices are accused of siphoning 304 trillion dong (US$12.5 billion) from Saigon Commercial Bank (SCB), although prosecutors allege the total financial loss caused by Truong and her accomplices could reach US$27 billion, on par with some of the world’s biggest fraud cases.

On April 11, a Vietnamese court sentenced Truong to death for embezzlement, bribery, and violating banking rules. On the same day, Eric Chu was sentenced to nine years, while Truong’s niece, Truong Hue Van, was sentenced to 17 years for helping Truong in a scheme that caused ₫677 trillion of losses to SCB. Truong was the chairman of the Vietnamese property conglomerate Van Thinh Phat (VTP), while her niece was its chief executive officer. More than 80 other defendants have been sentenced in the trial, an outgrowth of the “fiery furnace” campaign to cleanse the Vietnamese Communist Party of corrupt dealings that was launched in 2016 by Nguyen Phu Trong, the Vietnamese Communist Party’s General Secretary. As an indication of the gravity with which authorities viewed the case, Truong’s death sentence is one of the very few in Vietnam ever pronounced on a woman for a white-collar crime…