Vietnamese property tycoon Truong My Lan, who was sentenced to death this year in the country’s biggest corruption case, has gone on trial on additional fraud charges, state media reported.
Lan, the chair of real estate company Van Thinh Phat, appeared in court in Ho Chi Minh City on Thursday, facing new charges of obtaining property by fraud, money laundering and illegal cross-border money transfers in a trial expected to last a month.
According to a police statement released before the trial, Lan allegedly raised 30 trillion dong ($1.2bn) from nearly 36,000 investors by issuing bonds illegally through four companies.
She also stands accused of laundering 445 trillion dong ($18.1bn) and illegally transferring $4.5bn into and out of the country.
The 67-year-old received the death penalty in April, convicted of orchestrating Vietnam’s biggest-ever financial fraud case, amounting to $12.5bn – nearly three percent of the country’s 2022 gross domestic product (GDP) – and for illegally controlling the Saigon Commercial Bank (SCB), allowing loans that resulted in losses of $27bn.
Her arrest and conviction constituted one of the highest profile cases in the country’s so-called “Blazing Furnace” anticorruption drive, which has intensified since 2022, netting a number of business executives, government officials and members of the police and armed forces.
Lan and 33 of her alleged accomplices were brought to the court early on Thursday in a convoy of police vans, as more than a dozen fraud victims waited outside demanding to be let in to the hearing.
About 36,000 people have been identified as victims of the SCB fraud, which shocked the communist nation and prompted rare protests from those who lost their money.
Hoang Ngoc Diep said she lost 1.7 billion dong ($69,000), money saved through “blood, sweat and tears”, after investing in an SCB bond in 2022.
“I had a mental breakdown and fell into a depression” after realising what had happened, the 47-year-old told the AFP news agency before the trial, explaining that her family had depended on the interest to take care of her mentally ill sister and to send her children to school.
Lan and her family established the Van Thinh Phat company in 1992 after Vietnam shifted from a state-run economy to a more market-oriented approach that was open to foreign investors.
She started out helping her mother, a Chinese entrepreneur, sell cosmetics in Ho Chi Minh City’s oldest market, according to state media outlet Tien Phong.
