Foreign firm accountant gets death sentence in $9.6 mln corruption case

A Dong Thap province court on Friday handed a death sentence to Nguyen Trung Thanh, chief accountant of Filipino-invested Pilmico Vietnam, on corruption charges.

Thanh was found to have corrupted assets, gambled, and forged seals and company documents. The court forced the defendant, 42, to compensate Pilmico Vietnam VND228 billion ($9.6 million), of which over VND13 billion has been paid.

The court also gave Nguyen Tan Tai, 39, and Tran Van Quang, 37, two other defendants, jail terms of three years and five years, respectively, on charges of gambling.

According to the files, Thanh, as the firm’s chief accountant in 2017-2020, forged seals and documents to appropriate money from Pilmico Vietnam, in order to gamble with Tai and Quang.

Thanh said he gambled VND143 billion ($5.99 million), paid a debt of VND80 billion to Quang, and used the rest for personal purposes.

In April 2020, the parent company asked Pilmico Vietnam to send it the subsidiary's profits, but Thanh could not do so. Thanh then admitted his violations and the company took legal action against him.

The court also asked Thanh to hand over illicit gambling profits of VND3.4 billion ($142,500) to the state budget. Tai and Quang were requested to hand over gambling profits of over VND82 billion.

Pilmico Vietnam Company Limited, under the Philippines’ Pilmico International Pte. LTD, operates a factory in the Mekong Delta province of Dong Thap with an annual output of 300,000 tons of fish feed.