Vietnamese billionaire sentenced to death for $44bn fraud | BBC News

Hello, I'm Regina Vaid and welcome to this hour.

In the past few minutes,

a court in Vietnam has sentenced a wealthy proper developer to death

for defrauding a bank of billions of dollars.

67-year-old Truong My Lan was found guilty

of embezzlement bribing State officials

and violating Bank lending regulations

after she used her hidden ownership of the Saigon Commercial Bank

to channel $44 billion of loans to her own companies.

It's been described

as one of the greatest Brank frauds in history.

Well, for more on this, we can go straight to Bangkok

and join our Southeast Asia

correspondent Jonathan Head.

First of all, Jonathan, if you could just tell us

a little bit more about what the court said today

and the background to this case.

Well the the Court's been giving enormous amounts of detail

about this case.

case uh through its five weeks um so

everyone in Vietnam knows a lot about it

not that's quite unusual there um

they've wanted the public to know about

this case um it is extraordinary the

amounts of money are absolutely stering

we're talking about a significant chunk

of Vietnam's GDP that this woman was

able to siphon off over 11 years of

through these um secretly channeled

loans that went through a whole bunch of

front companies and proxies to her own

companies um the prosecutors believe

that of that 44 billion perhaps 27

billion may never be recovered um that

is a staggering loss and will be very

very tough for the State Bank uh to to

to make up in terms of saving the bank

um really the authorities have sort of

blamed Chong Milan and and and have

talked about the way in which she was

bribing officials and the kind of

sophistication of this this network and

really it it is part of an ongoing

anti-corruption campaign that's been

going for several years led by the

communist authorities who say they're

determined to stamp it out but of course

it does raise a lot of questions which

is how was it that this woman she's very

high-profile she's one of the biggest

property owners in in Vietnam how was

she able to do that for 11 years and of

course officially the authorities say

well she was paying off this person and

that and hiding this and that but it is

extraordinary that it went on for 11

years without being stopped and I think

those questions still hang over whether

the Vietnamese authorities are capable

of reigning in this kind of Fraud and

Jonathan you say that this was a trial

that was followed by so many people in

Vietnam and trong Milan is a well known

property developer in the country but

now she faces the death

penalty that itself is extraordinary

normally the death penalty is not

usually handed down on women but I think

this case was so exceptional in terms of

its scale and the Damage it's done to

Vietnam's finances they probably felt

they needed to make an example of her

they may also be trying to encourage her

to give as much money back as as they

can get her to do this is something the

other um 80 defendants in court today

have largely done they they're all more

minor of course but these are all the

people accused of conspiring with her

including for example a Chief Inspector

of the State Bank who was bribed 5

million dollar according to prosecutors

in order to look the other way they've

all pleaded guilty and offered to bring

back as much money as they can I think

the state believes that TR Milan must

have far more assets that she can return

to the state to try and make up this

massive hole in this bank's finances

okay Jonathan head uh in Bangkok

watching that huge trial in Vietnam and

that verdict for thank you very much and

Jonathan's written an analysis piece on

the BBC News website with more

background to