Businesses forced to return $399 mln to freshly convicted Vietnamese tycoon Truong My Lan

Quoc Cuong Gia Lai Corporation and other businesses have been ordered to return VND10 trillion ($399.4 million) and over 1,000 taels of gold to the disgraced tycoon Truong My Lan and get back projects they had sold to her and Van Thinh Phat Group's member companies.

The Ho Chi Minh City People's Court announced the order in its verdict issued Thursday regarding the first phase of the case that occurred at Van Thinh Phat Group and private lender Saigon Commercial Bank (SCB).

On the same day, Lan was sentenced to death in one of the most notorious criminal cases in Vietnamese history.

The court ordered real estate developer Quoc Cuong Gia Lai Corporation, with Nguyen Thi Nhu Loan as chairwoman, to refund VND2,882 billion ($115.1 million) it received from Lan to regain land use rights certificates previously held by Sunny Island, a subsidiary of Van Thinh Phat Group.

Regarding the unfinished transfer and cooperation agreements between Lan or Van Thinh Phat's member companies and partners, the court requested the parties to return to each other what they had exchanged to ensure the fulfillment of Truong My Lan's compensation obligations.

Specifically, Hong Phat Real Estate Investment JSC will have to pay back more than VND2,300 billion ($91.9 million); Phu An Co., Ltd and Phan Thi Phuong Thao, chairwoman of Khang Thong Group, VND145.2 billion ($5.8 million) and 1,000 taels of SJC gold; Housing Development And Trading Company Limited (HDTC), VND400 billion ($16 million); T&H Ha Long JSC and Au Lac JSC, over VND6,000 billion ($239.6 million).

According to the verdict, in addition to the death penalty for property embezzlement, Lan, 68, received 20 years in prison for violating lending regulations, and a further 20 years for bribery. She is obliged to pay more than VND670,000 billion (nearly $27 billion) in compensation to SCB.

The court also ruled that the rights of SCB customers regarding the conversion of savings deposits into bonds will be considered in the second phase of the case, when Lan and her accomplices are tried for fraudulent asset appropriation and money laundering.

Priority will be given to using the assets recovered in Lan's case to repay bond buyers (in the second phase), said the jury.

During her 10 years of controlling SCB, Lan directed her accomplices to disburse over 2,500 loans to the Van Thinh Phat ecosystem. By October 2022, Lan and the ecosystem still had nearly 1,300 outstanding loans worth VND677,000 billion ($27.09 billion) in principal and interest.

The Van Thinh Phat ecosystem has more than 1,000 businesses including subsidiaries and member companies in Vietnam and abroad, which were divided into many layers.