Female billionaire sentenced to death for looting $44bn from Vietnam bank

A Vietnamese billionaire, Truong My Lan, has been sentenced to death for looting one of Vietnam’s largest banks for 11 years.

Truong My Lan, 67, was sentenced to death on Thursday, April 11, at the stately yellow portico of the colonial-era courthouse in Ho Chi Minh City.

The 67-year-old Vietnamese property developer is one of the very few women in Vietnam to be sentenced to death for a white-collar crime. 

Truong My Lan was convicted of taking out $44 billion (£35 billion) in loans from the Saigon Commercial Bank. The verdict requires her to return $27 billion, a sum prosecutors said may never be retrieved. 

Some believe the death penalty is the court’s way of trying to encourage her to return some of the missing billions. 

About 2,700 people were summoned to testify during the trial, while 10 state prosecutors and around 200 lawyers were involved. The evidence was in 104 boxes weighing a total of six tonnes, while 85 defendants were tried with Truong My Lan, who denied the charges.

“There has never been a show trial like this, I think, in the communist era,” said David Brown, a retired US State Department official with long experience in Vietnam. “There has certainly been nothing on this scale.”

The trial was the most dramatic chapter so far in the “Blazing Furnaces” anti-corruption campaign led by the Communist Party Secretary-General, Nguyen Phu Trong.