Real estate tycoon sentenced to death in Vietnam's largest fraud case
Newsy
Truong My Lan is a high-profile businesswoman who chaired a sprawling company that developed luxury apartments, hotels, offices and shopping malls.
A Vietnamese real estate tycoon was sentenced to death Thursday in the country's biggest ever financial fraud case, a shocking development in an intensifying anti-corruption drive in the Southeast Asian nation.
Truong My Lan, a high-profile businesswoman who chaired a sprawling company that developed luxury apartments, hotels, offices and shopping malls, was arrested in 2022. The 67-year-old was formally charged with fraud amounting to $12.5 billion — nearly 3% of the country’s 2022 GDP.
Death sentences are not uncommon in Vietnam, but it is a rare sentence in financial crime cases and for someone this well known.
Lan was born in 1956 and started out helping sell cosmetics with her mother, a Chinese businesswoman, in Ho Chi Minh city's oldest market, according to state media outlet Tien Phong.
She and her family established the Van Thinh Phat company in 1992, when Vietnam shed its state-run economy in favor of a more market-oriented one that was open to foreigners. Over the years VTP grew to become one of Vietnam's richest real estate firms.
