It’s been described as one of the greatest bank 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 court’s been giving enormous amounts of detail about this case through its five weeks.

So everyone in Vietnam knows a lot about it. That’s 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 staggering. We’re talking about a significant chunk of Vietnam’s GDP that this woman was able to siphon off over eleven years 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 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 Chung Milan 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 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 Vietnam. How was she able to do that for eleven 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 eleven 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 Chong 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 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 at the state bank who was bribed $5 million, 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 strong 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. So this woman was basically being sentenced to death. To death for a $44 billion fraud. Let me ask y’all a question.

Right. My question is this. Do you think that thieves here in the United States actually deserve a stronger sentence and a stronger penalty than what they get today? Because it’s almost like you just get a slap on a wrist here. Here you get a slap on a wrist. And in other places, if you. If you still. Because we could just go in and, and take whatever we want, whenever we want to do it and all of that other stuff.

Right? But in other places, if you, if you do some of the stuff that you do, you get a much harsher, severe penalty than what you get inside here in the United States of America. Let me share my screen with y’all really quickly. It says that behind the stately yellow portico and colonial era courthouse, 67 year old vietnamese property developer was sentenced to death on Thursday for looting one of the country’s largest banks over a period of eleven years.

Hey, all of our bankers, they just said that the banks was too big to fail. They reprinted some money, and then all of them got off and nobody went to jail. Everybody that caused the housing crisis, that was just it. That was it. All of our bankers went on to live successful lives. They paid themselves. There was one guy that got a little bit of a sentence as a result of the housing crisis that sent everything plunging into nothing, and then they just all got off.

That’s why people feel compelled to just walk inside of the stores and steal. I’m wondering what constitutes a stronger sentence here in the United States, because you can go and slap somebody and you’ll be out the door. Rare verdict. She is one of the few women, and she is a woman in Vietnam, to be sentenced to death for a white collar crime. The decision is a reflection of a dizzying scale of fraud.

Convicted of taking out a $44 billion in loans from the Saigon commercial bank, the verdict requires her to return 27 billion some prosecutors say will 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. A habitually secretive communities. Authorities were uncharacteristically forthright about this case. Going into minute detail for the media, they said 2700 people were summoned to testify, while ten state prosecutors and around 200 lawyers were involved.

The evidence was in 104 boxes weighing a total of six tons. 85 others were tried. All the defendants were found guilty for received life in jail. The rest were given prison terms, raided for 20 years to three years, suspended. Her husband and niece received. Her husband and niece received jail terms of nine and seven years, respectively. Nine and seven years for her husband and her niece, they sentence and everybody, anybody that’s close to her, anybody that’s next to her, they all getting sentences.

Oh, now she want to admit that I’m right. Ah, see, you need to let that, uh, anesthesia run off, Rita. She started as a market stall vendor, selling cosmetics with her mother, but began buying land and property after the communist party ushered in a period of economic reform, uh, known as Doy Moy in 1986, by the 1990s, she owned a large portfolio of hotels and restaurants. So, wait a minute, you just automatically came up.

Although Vietnam is best known outside the country for its fast growing manufacturing sector, as an alternative supply chain of China, most wealthy Vietnamese made their money developing and speculating on a property. All land is officially state owned. Getting access to it often relies on personal relationships with state officials. Corruption escalated as the economy grew and became endemic. By 2011, she as a well known business figure, and she was allowed to arrange the merger of three smaller cash strapped banks into a larger entity called Saigon Commercial bank.

Wow. 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 proxies, she 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 that she controlled.

Her loans made up 93% of all the bank’s lending over a period of three years. From February 2019, she ordered her driver to withdraw about $4 billion in cash from the bank and store it in her basement, weighing two tons. She’s also accused of bribing generously to ensure her loans were never scrutinized. A former chief inspector at the central bank was given a life sentence for accepting a $5 million.

Bro, they giving out life sentences for a $5 million bribe. I know dudes that was on the Internet. Hush puppy was out here getting millions of dollars over here in PPP loans. A former chief inspector at the central bank was given a life. Life sentence for accepting a $5 million bribe. Jesus. That’s crazy, bro. Anyways, I guess women are really the real masterminds out here in these streets.

Y’all saying that she was the fall guy? How y’all know that she was the fall guy? How do we know this? How do we know this? Yo, she is. They probably is gonna make a movie about her one day, but anyways, vietnamese billionaire sentenced to death. Death. They don’t have no restrictions on what they can do over there to you. Be happy you over here in the United States of America.

Yo, you can come over here, commit fraud, probably get away with it, live regularly, maybe go to jail for a white collar crime for a little bit, get out of jail, and then get rich as a result of it doing speaking engagements. Boy, we live in a privileged society. .

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