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.

Through its five weeks,

so everyone in Vietnam knows a lot about it,

not that's quite unusual there.

They've wanted the public

to know about this case.

It is extraordinary the amounts of money are absolutely sterling.

We're talking about a significant junk of Vietnam's GDP

that this woman was able to siphon off

over 11 years of through these secretly channeled loans

that went through a whole bunch of front companies

and proxies to her own companies.

The prosecutors believe that

of that 44 billion perhaps 27 billion dollars

may never be recovered.

That is a staggering loss

and will be very very tough for the State Bank

to make up in terms of saving the bank.

Really the authorities have sort of blamed Truong My Lan

and have talked about the way

in which she was bribing officials

and the kind of sophistication of this network

and really it is part of an ongoing anti-corruption campaign

that's been going for several years

led by the communist authorities

whose 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 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 Truong My Lan 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 damages

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 they can get her to do.

This is something

the other 80 defendants in court today

have largely done.

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

Truong My Lan 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, 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 too.