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Vietnamese property tycoon sentenced to death in $27B fraud case

270 points by spxneo 3y ago

Rinzler89 3y ago
I kept trying to figure out what does someone's Local Area Network have to do with this story, but after skimming the article I realized that "My LAN" is the name of the accused. In my eastern EU country, following the fall of communism, a lot of fraudsters got wealthy over night by selling the state's(the people's) assets and pocketing the money themselves while the common people were wallowing in poverty worse than during communism. Similarly, they all deserve the death sentence too but most of them haven't even served jail time.
- cgeier 3y ago
  According to the article, she is called "Truong My Lan", perhaps the author's muscle memory or autocorrect was kicking in.
  - Rinzler89 3y ago
    No, it's just the silly HN parser that automatically changes the case of some words in titles based on an obscure internal rulebook dictionary and also removes other words that sound click-baity. I'm still baffled HN hasn't opensourced their stack.
    - olddustytrail 3y ago
      It's Lisp. I suspect there is no copy of the source code, they've just kept adding to the running program. Just kidding but that does sound like a fun art project to see how complex you could get...
  - mintplant 3y ago
    Hacker News auto-"fixes" some keywords in story titles, it could be that.
- deleted 3y ago
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- deleted 3y ago
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- philsnow 3y ago
  Not sure (because I don't know Vietnamese names very well but I thought Truong would be her surname) but some communities write the surname / family name in allcaps for cultural disambiguation, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Personal_name#Eastern_name_order https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Personal_name#Eastern_name_ord...
  - chrisfinazzo 3y ago
    This is the part of the conversation where I'll point out that Eastern name order is - in a sense - incorrect, because The Guardian is a UK publication. I know why they do it, because Romanization[1] and transliteration[2] exist, but it still looks odd. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Romanization https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Romanization [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transliteration https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transliteration
    - philsnow 3y ago
      Every organization that publishes (or at least has a style guide) has to make a decision about whether to put names in their "native" order or to standardize to their audience's expected order. I can see an argument for either way: Standardize on audience expected order: we're a UK publication, we're going to write the way names are in the UK Standardize on native order: we want to respect the cultures of the people in our publications
      - digestivetires 3y ago
        There is always possibiltiy to add little asterisk and disambugate with small text if you choose the second. (Respecting one side and educating the other)
      - chrisfinazzo 3y ago
        You can address native order by publishing in multiple languages. The NYT has editions for Canada and "International" (both of which presumably use British spelling along with local expressions as appropriate), Spanish, as well as a version of the site entirely in Chinese. To me, this seems like an easier -- read: less confusing -- way to address a diverse audience than ad-hoc changes to name order or other style conventions. Some might say that's exclusionary of certain groups, but localization exists to solve exactly that kind of problem, and doing both isn't nearly as hard as it used to be.
andsoitis 3y ago
Death penalty for corruption? That seems barbaric. Then I read there are a few countries that impose capital punishment for non-violent crimes: China, Indonesia (some acts of corruption which "damage national economy or finances"), Morocco, Thailand (bribery), Vietnam (bribery). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capital_punishment_for_non-violent_offenses https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capital_punishment_for_non-vio...
- shp0ngle 3y ago
  On one hand it's Vietnam where everyone bribes everyone. (Literally. Stealing country funds is a fact of life.) On the other hand it's 21 billion. Still rough.
  - Saigonautica 3y ago
    Some people here do pay bribes. I do not. Neither do most people around my age that I know. I immigrated here 12 years ago. I have a company license, a driving license, proper residency, and so on. I got every last piece of it by filling out forms, and waiting a normal amount of time. I speak Vietnamese like a small child and have no Vietnamese heritage. Perhaps some people will report something different, and perhaps they are also correct. However, this is my story.
    - alephnerd 3y ago
      We're Westerners so we're insulated from low level corruption because we can report to the Tourist Police and our local Consulate or Embassy, who will complain to that Quan's MPS. The kind of low level corruption your mentioning impacts the working class or middle class (the kind living in a 1 bedroom apartment in D10 with a Honda motorbike) because they have no recourse. That said, the mid-upper level corruption is very significant. How else do you see retired generals and senior party apparatchiks with a $50/mo pension eating steaks at the Landmark 81 and living in a villa in Thao Dien. And this is why my SO makes it a principle to always speak in English so she doesn't get Vietnamese service.
      - 3y ago
shp0ngle 3y ago
Note that she got a death sentence for fraud. It's... rough. (In my opinion.)
- keybored 3y ago
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- spxneo 3y ago
  Statements like this ignore the victims: - 3% of vietnam's GDP - Roughly the equivalent of an entire city losing their livelihood to one person - The trauma and ruin people around the victims will feel - Orphaned children, suicides, intragenerational trauma that will last for many rebirths. It's the same cavalier attitude I see towards victims of SBF on this forum. "Its their fault", "they were asking for it". You have compassion for the perpetrator but not the victims who are dead and are going to end up dead. I only pray that you will not experience the pain of being manipulated and scammed. It's truly awful because I experienced it. I know some religions/SF bay cults try to justify it but at the end of the day its the lapse in responsibility and compassion, the same disregard for others but your own.
  - water-data-dude 3y ago
    I recognize that they’ve done a LOT of harm, but death is a harsh punishment under almost any circumstances. The death penalty seems like one of those ideological issues where people fall on one side or the other, and they pretty much stay on that side. My perspective is: if the point is to dissuade people from committing crimes like this, it seems like a lengthy prison sentence would achieve the same thing. The harm has already been done, and killing them doesn’t fix anything. Death is just so damn final.
    - bigcat12345678 3y ago
      You need to realize that non-zero people probably committed suicide becomes of lost money, right? The line of death being harsh punishment in any circumstance is simply not true. I.e., by contraditory, if it is true that "death is too harsh" is true, then it should reasonably deter "bad guys". Did that happen? No It did not happen in history, now; and it wont happen in any foreseeable further
sickofparadox 3y ago
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- retrac 3y ago
  Corruption purges in Leninist states are always political. In many cases, the officials and executives purged are, in fact, corrupt, and breaking domestic law. But the political element is really unavoidable. These serve as demonstrations of the state's power, and its legitimacy. Sort of a paradox there - if the state is so powerful and legitimate, how did such a massive scale of embezzlement go on for so long? Never mind that, let's watch the execution. One might even say, particularly at the highest level, that these matters are also political in constitutional republics, like the USA. How aggressively CEOs get prosecuted, does depend on the executive investigating and prosecuting offenders, and whether Congress wants to pass stricter laws. One interpretation, is that the American state, does not feel the need to demonstrate its authority in such a dramatic way.
  - ToucanLoucan 3y ago
    > Corruption purges in Leninist states are always political... How aggressively CEOs get prosecuted, does depend on the executive investigating and prosecuting offenders, and whether Congress wants to pass stricter laws Do you have a source for these ideas, or are they your own? I can't speak for everyone of course but for myself and any of the many people I've had in-depth conversations with, none of us generally wonder how embezzlement happened in the first place, regardless of length, instead we marvel at the utter lack of any consequences for the convicted individual. In this way the state's power is far, far more illegitimized by the fact that it's apparently fine with people stealing incredible sums of money either from itself or from it's citizens and seems content to levy meaningless fines on the perpetrator after the fact, if even that. (or, in my leftier and more conspiratorial groups, that the weakness of the state to prosecute financial crimes is a direct result of the system being designed by rich people to facilitate the activities of other rich people, but I digress) The only ones in recent memory I can recall are Sam Bankman-Fried, which is still ongoing, and Elizabeth Holmes, both of whom seemed to have committed the proper crime of stealing from other rich people, whereas the ones who steal from the working/middle class are left largely untouched. A coincidence I'm sure. Where Government funds land in terms of "is this rich people's money or poor people's money" is up to the reader of the comment to determine, that one's prosecution rate does seem to trend more political, as tons of incredibly wealthy people are milking the government cow for absolutely mind-bending amounts of money and delivering basically nothing. > One interpretation, is that the American state, does not feel the need to demonstrate its authority in such a dramatic way. Maybe it should feel that need, since the lion's share of it's population on either side of the political spectrum thinks of the government as largely a joke. But they've also dis-empowered us to such a degree that our opinion on them largely doesn't matter anyway, so, on it goes.
adamnemecek 3y ago
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- HarryHirsch 3y ago
  His backers are even luckier. In a functioning country there would be a public inquiry and adequate sentences handed out.
  - grecy 3y ago
    > In a functioning country The country functions just fine. For them.
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alephnerd 3y ago
I've travelled to Vietnam a lot over the past couple years for work and my SO's family, and there is a lot of rot in the VN economy that has finally caught up to it. Most of the growth could be attributed to Korean, Japanese, and Chinese conglomerates spending a LOT of money moving factories from China to VN in the 2014-22 period after China started trade wars with Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, and the US. While this lead to massive capital expenditures, the average Vietnamese person's life didn't change too drastically, as most of the investments were located in Hanoi (Chinese) or HCMC (Korean+Japanese) and only captured by the capital owning class. While there are more FMCGs and brands now, almost everything has a luxury tax on it or is imported from the US, Thailand, or South Korea, and even Temu quality clothes cost as much as they would in the US, and furthermore - rent is insanely high in HCMC and Hanoi, so 50-60% of your income is spent on rent alone. Furthermore, party apparatchiks decided to maximize the graft they could partake in by investing heavily in boondoggle hotel and apartment projects (similar to the Ghost cities you see in China and India). When the COVID pandemic happened, the gravy train ended. Vietnam followed a zero-covid policy that caused migrant workers to return to their hometowns, and there was a massive corruption scandal around COVID testing infrastructure and repatriating Vietnamese migrant workers from abroad. This was also around the time an internal conflict began brewing between the Northern VCP (supported by the VinGroup billionaire who is also from Vietnamese Military royalty), Southern VCP (supported by this billionaire), the Army (they own Vietnam's largest telco and most of the PSUs), and the Ministry of Public Security (they have the dirt on everybody and are the actual enforcers in Vietnam). Basically, the MPS backed the Northern faction and won this round, and the Army stayed out of this fight in order to keep making money. That said, all this upper level turmoil (under the guise of a corruption purge) dented investor confidence recently, along with some very prominent infrastructure collapses like the power outages and the internet slowdowns. For example, this past Tet people didn't spend as much on fireworks or red money compared to the 2023 Tet, real estate projects have started slowing down, and it's not uncommon to see abandoned construction projects once you leave HCMC or Hanoi. If you're part of the expat Bui Vien/D1/Thao Dien scene you wouldn't notice this kind of stuff (they're too busy huffing balloons/nitrous despite it being banned in VN leaving surgeons to physically restrain patients), but once you go to "real" Saigon (eg. D10, D8) let alone outside of HCMC/Hanoi/DaNang/DaLat these issues become very prominent. This is a fairly good overview of some of the changes I've (or moreso my SO) been noticing - https://asialink.unimelb.edu.au/insights/vietnam-the-purge https://asialink.unimelb.edu.au/insights/vietnam-the-purge
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somberi 3y ago
This entry from Wikipedia was impactful: "Lan's embezzlement of $12.5 billion equals about three percent of Vietnam's total GDP for 2022." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tr%C6%B0%C6%A1ng_M%E1%BB%B9_Lan https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tr%C6%B0%C6%A1ng_M%E1%BB%B9_La.... King Lear comes to mind: As flies to wanton boys are we to the gods; They kill us for their sport.
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speedylight 3y ago
Yeah Vietnam has a GDP of $408.8 Billion, a fraud of this magnitude is probably tantamount to treason.
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- onlyrealcuzzo 3y ago
  It was over 11 years, so you'd compare to the GDP for the last 11 years. Still huge, but not ~7% of GDP huge. It was closer to ~0.5% of GDP per year for 11 years. This is probably typical in countries without really strong institutions. Vietnam isn't exactly a 3rd world country... The amount of fraud going on in 3rd world countries (as a % of GDP) is mind boggling.
andrewstuart 3y ago
Companies are switching China for Vietnam, India, Indonesia. One of the reasons is fear of this sort of thing. Makes me wonder if the same problems will pop up in the new destinations.
- pyth0 3y ago
  They could also avoid this sort of thing by not doing fraud.
- bastawhiz 3y ago
  > One of the reasons is fear of this sort of thing. Good? If you're planning to embezzle tens of billions of dollars, you probably should be scared of consequences.
- alephnerd 3y ago
  These are the standard kinds of problems that happen in every developing country. So long as it's out in the open it's not a big deal. Most Western commentators had a decent view of what's going on in China because there is a lot of business reporting there. In Vietnam's case, most foreign business reporting I've seen is in Korean, Japanese, and Mandarin, as SK, Japan, Taiwan, and PRC are the biggest FDI sources in VN. For Korean and Taiwanese investors, this isn't a big deal, as most dealt with similar stuff in 1970s-2000s Korea and Taiwan, as did Japanese who invested heavily in Korea, Taiwan, and PRC. Western investors on the other hand, will be much more skittish, and won't invest until the regional investors from the countries mentioned above are more established in VN.
kazinator 3y ago
So a human life is worth somewhere between $0 and $27B in Vietnam. Useful to know.
- alephnerd 3y ago
  Anywhere in the developing world. Life is worthless. This is why my parents immigrated to America.
  - readyplayernull 3y ago
    Yeah, they found keeping inmates alive is lucrative: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2022/jun/15/us-prison-workers-low-wages-exploited https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2022/jun/15/us-prison-wo...
    - alephnerd 3y ago
      Try dealing with Vietnam or Indian police as a Westerner "carrying" drugs. You better pay up or you might find yourself with a bullet in your head in a ditch. Oh, and body cams are not a thing.
      - ryanwaggoner 3y ago
        Many of these countries have extremely harsh punishments for drug offenses, AND have corrupt law enforcement where bribery is normal, but I challenge you to provide a single example of where a Westerner refused to bribe police and were subsequently shot in the head and dumped in a ditch. That makes little sense on multiple levels. Edit: Ironically, searching for examples of such an incident only brings up examples of Indians and Vietnamese folks getting shot by police in America.
        kazinator 3y ago
        Even in Midnight Express, it is the American who kills the Turk in the end. And one of the antagonists helping to enforce the draconian law is an American.
Suppafly 3y ago
Why is it that every site with a similar headline is reporting a different amount of billions? Wonder if they are all converting it differently and then using the wrong countries units or something.
- alephnerd 3y ago
  Because most western news outlets are crap at Tieng Viet. The BBC headline is correct (as they hired a lot of Vietnamese speaking journalists, some of whom have been targeted for assasination and kidnapping by the Vietnamese govt [0]). The amount stolen was $44B. She needs to return $27B to not be executed. [0] - https://www.theguardian.com/media/2022/sep/30/bbc-accused-of-endangering-world-service-vietnamese-staff https://www.theguardian.com/media/2022/sep/30/bbc-accused-of...
  - Suppafly 3y ago
    >The amount stolen was $44B. She needs to return $27B to not be executed. Ah, that's the context I was missing.
  - josu 3y ago
    OP's article states: >A total of $12.5bn (£10bn) was embezzled, the equivalent of almost 3% of Vietnamese gross domestic product, but prosecutors said on Thursday the total damages caused by the scam now amounted to $27bn.
    - zamadatix 3y ago
      Yes, that's the point of contention being discussed. E.g. https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-68778636 https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-68778636 > My Lan was convicted of taking out $44bn (£35bn) in loans from the Saigon Commercial Bank. The verdict requires her to return $27bn
  - Narkov 3y ago
    > The amount stolen was $44B. Quite funny that you forgot to denominate the currency here. As a non-US reader (we actually exist on the Internet!), it wasn't $44B in my currency. I assume it is US$ ?
bblcla 3y ago
Friends don't let friends become Vietnamese billionaires!
jongjong 3y ago
It's a system flaw which allows certain people to come into possession of such large amounts of money to begin with. Ayn Rand said that when those who are receiving most of the money are dealing in favors instead of goods and services, that's when you know your society is declining. The reason that billionaires and celebrities are monopolizing most of the money is because the monetary system has made the entire global economy about social connections. Although many people have the skills necessary to invest money efficiently in a just monetary system, because we don't have such a system, that skill is worthless and instead, in the current system, the money MUST go to politically connected people in order to get a return. The pool of politically-connected individuals is tiny as politicians can only deal with a limited number of individuals and cater to the needs of a limited number of corporations. That's why we have such extreme centralization and fragility.
- mistermann 3y ago
  Everyone laughs at (their meme-based strawman model of) Ayn, but she warned us about this. Lots of her ideas were indeed simplistic if not downright dumb, but not all of them.
- grugagag 3y ago
  Don’t take that Ayn Rand too seriously…
- rufus_foreman 3y ago
  >> Ayn Rand said that when those who are receiving most of the money are dealing in favors instead of goods and services, that's when you know your society is declining. She said that in 1957. So your argument is that society has been declining since 1957. And I have to admit that I find that argument rather hard to believe. Society has, to me, obviously not been declining since 1957. It has been declining since 1959 (the year Buddy Holly died).
  - jongjong 3y ago
    Ayn Rand fled the USSR to come to the US. I assume this nugget of wisdom came out of that experience.
nimzoLarsen 3y ago
The details of this are just wild: According to prosecutors, over a period of three years from February 2019, she ordered her driver to withdraw 108 trillion Vietnamese dong, more than $4bn (£2.3bn) in cash from the bank, and store it in her basement. That much cash, even if all of it was in Vietnam's largest denomination banknotes, would weigh two tonnes.
- IAmNotACellist 3y ago
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- codetrotter 3y ago
  Yeah. I still find it hard to visualize though. A 1 meter x 1 meter x 1 meter container full of water would weigh about 1 metric ton. That’s how I usually think of 1 metric ton. If I saw a 1 meter x 1 meter x 1 meter neatly densely packed bunch of money bills on top of a euro pallet. I would have no idea if I was looking at the equivalent of some hundreds of thousands of dollars, or billions or what.
  - mcoliver 3y ago
    I went through this exercise a while back randomly sitting on my couch wondering how much it would cost to fill my house with $100 bills. For your purposes, assuming $100 USD bills, 1m cubed is roughly 71 million USD. A 2000 sqft house with 8 foot ceilings, 42 billion.
- eco 3y ago
  If I understood the figures I looked up correctly, she had about 8% of the entire printed/minted Vietnamese Dong currency in her basement (1,352,910 Billion VND in circulation).
  - throwoutway 3y ago
    There's a certain point between $5M and 4B where I wold just get out of dodge and buy a new identity.
gigatexal 3y ago
HN here delivers again. I’m voraciously consuming all this commentary. It’s very fascinating. I’m learning things I never knew about Vietnam. Props to Alephnerd and others for such intensely interesting commentary.
- NhanH 3y ago
  Some commentaries are heavily biased and borderline conspiratorial. I am Vietnamese, currently still living in the Vietnam, and I believe the VCP is doing what they are saying on the can: purging corruption (rather than this being political purge). Just as concrete counterexample on why it is not merely political purge: In the past 3 years, the last two Presidents of this term both had to resign due to corruption, the first one related to covid testing kit was from the Northern faction. The last two Chairman of People’s committee of Hanoi (basically Hanoi’s mayor/ governor) were also removed and arrested for corruption. Someone below was wondering what the trigger for this was, so here is it: people were tricked into buying bonds by SCB (My Lan’s bank) when trying to opening saving account. Some lost their entire life saving to the bullshit bonds, and to this day I still occasionally see protester in front of Vietnam’s state bank (it is on my daily commute). I am not saying there weren’t political infighting, but past few years weren’t it
  - tuan 3y ago
    >> Some commentaries are heavily biased and borderline conspiratorial. yeah, just want to echo what NhanH said above. Please factcheck or ask for citations. Some comments are borderline conspiracies.
    - gigatexal 3y ago
      hrmm perhaps i got swindled by one who can speak so confidently -- either way -- i will have to collect all inputs (thank you all who responded) and use my best judgement and perhaps own research to confirm. it's too easy to be swindled these days and even my critical thinking might be not strong enough
- sho 3y ago
antoniuschan99 3y ago
I watched these three videos were pretty informative on the case: https://youtu.be/GmAcpqZPrMQ?si=7JUYg7itjba_uGaN https://youtu.be/GmAcpqZPrMQ?si=7JUYg7itjba_uGaN https://youtu.be/KudcZvoP3C0?si=tF1DKfFoJmolGn5m https://youtu.be/KudcZvoP3C0?si=tF1DKfFoJmolGn5m https://youtu.be/jv-j5AS3Fz0?si=lzRg0XhyNqtS3q9V https://youtu.be/jv-j5AS3Fz0?si=lzRg0XhyNqtS3q9V There’s other cases namely flc group
can16358p 3y ago
The person in question is indeed very guilty but death sentence in 21st century? What kind of an archaic system allows it?
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- bufferout 3y ago
  I used to think the same until contemplating how many destroyed families the drug trafficking penalties of Singapore have prevented.
  - holoduke 3y ago
    How many exactly?
  - can16358p 3y ago
    Having drug trafficking laws to prevent (potential) destroyed families is one thing (though I think all drugs should be legal and no government should have right to dictate what you can put into your own body, but that's not the point at this thread), but regardless of the extent of the crime, I think death sentence is unacceptable in any civilized justice system.
    - thinkerswell 3y ago
      [dead]
    - lostmsu 3y ago
      You really did not give any arguments for why it is unacceptable.
      - SliceOfWaifu 3y ago
        Cause innocent people are sometimes wrongly convicted, and sentenced to death. Life behind bars without the possibility of parole achieves pretty much the same effect for public safety, while still giving the wrongly accused a chance to live. There are also rare cases in which new evidence overturns their conviction decades into their sentence. If they're put to death, they never get that chance.
mrangle 3y ago
I'm not against the death penalty, in principle, but applying it risks both the moral and, slightly more more important, the judicial legitimacy of the system. Therefore, if it is to be considered and applied then moral care and sound judicial logic are paramount. Whatever the amount of stolen money, currency theft on its own it will never rise to the objective moral and logical base-level required to apply the death penalty. If the governments of developing nations want to be seen as other than basketcases, they need to be more judicious than this.
- brhsagain 3y ago
  Why are financial crimes morally exempt in a way that, say, violent crime is not, even if the aggregate damage from the financial crime is greater? Unless you’re arguing that this isn’t possible?
  - scrubs 3y ago
    I agree. In my corner of the universe (the US) I think the sec, Finra, doj, fbi need the pendulum to swing back 35% to correct for being too nice. What would happen if we had two kinds of c-corps? One fairly if strictly regulated leading to fines, civil cases, and criminal cases in exceptions And option two ... Very light regulation but if a regulatory agency or fbi finds malfeasance only criminal charges, jail time, loss of lawyer license, inability to serve at public companies and more ie. hardball. Maybe the elites should choose their risk level. I think it'd say a lot.
- jbm 3y ago
  > Whatever the amount of stolen money, currency theft on its own it will never rise to the objective moral and logical base-level required to apply the death penalty If we take it as a given that people spend large parts of their lives, mostly forced (as in they would not work if they didn't have to), we can see money as being a direct representation of human life. If someone stole X dollars, you could extrapolate it to entire lives that were stolen. How many suicides happen over money for this very reason? Making a case for the death penalty given those priors is not hard, especially for stealing from the impoverished.
herunan 3y ago
That much money is less about getting caught but more about falling out with someone.

270 points by spxneo 3y ago

I kept trying to figure out what does someone's Local Area Network have to do with this story, but after skimming the article I realized that "My LAN" is the name of the accused. In my eastern EU country, following the fall of communism, a lot of fraudsters got wealthy over night by selling the state's(the people's) assets and pocketing the money themselves while the common people were wallowing in poverty worse than during communism. Similarly, they all deserve the death sentence too but most of them haven't even served jail time.

cgeier 3y ago
According to the article, she is called "Truong My Lan", perhaps the author's muscle memory or autocorrect was kicking in.
- Rinzler89 3y ago
  No, it's just the silly HN parser that automatically changes the case of some words in titles based on an obscure internal rulebook dictionary and also removes other words that sound click-baity. I'm still baffled HN hasn't opensourced their stack.
  - olddustytrail 3y ago
    It's Lisp. I suspect there is no copy of the source code, they've just kept adding to the running program. Just kidding but that does sound like a fun art project to see how complex you could get...
- mintplant 3y ago
  Hacker News auto-"fixes" some keywords in story titles, it could be that.
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philsnow 3y ago
Not sure (because I don't know Vietnamese names very well but I thought Truong would be her surname) but some communities write the surname / family name in allcaps for cultural disambiguation, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Personal_name#Eastern_name_order https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Personal_name#Eastern_name_ord...
- chrisfinazzo 3y ago
  This is the part of the conversation where I'll point out that Eastern name order is - in a sense - incorrect, because The Guardian is a UK publication. I know why they do it, because Romanization[1] and transliteration[2] exist, but it still looks odd. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Romanization https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Romanization [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transliteration https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transliteration
  - philsnow 3y ago
    Every organization that publishes (or at least has a style guide) has to make a decision about whether to put names in their "native" order or to standardize to their audience's expected order. I can see an argument for either way: Standardize on audience expected order: we're a UK publication, we're going to write the way names are in the UK Standardize on native order: we want to respect the cultures of the people in our publications
    - digestivetires 3y ago
      There is always possibiltiy to add little asterisk and disambugate with small text if you choose the second. (Respecting one side and educating the other)
    - chrisfinazzo 3y ago
      You can address native order by publishing in multiple languages. The NYT has editions for Canada and "International" (both of which presumably use British spelling along with local expressions as appropriate), Spanish, as well as a version of the site entirely in Chinese. To me, this seems like an easier -- read: less confusing -- way to address a diverse audience than ad-hoc changes to name order or other style conventions. Some might say that's exclusionary of certain groups, but localization exists to solve exactly that kind of problem, and doing both isn't nearly as hard as it used to be.

andsoitis 3y ago

Death penalty for corruption? That seems barbaric. Then I read there are a few countries that impose capital punishment for non-violent crimes: China, Indonesia (some acts of corruption which "damage national economy or finances"), Morocco, Thailand (bribery), Vietnam (bribery). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capital_punishment_for_non-violent_offenses https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capital_punishment_for_non-vio...

shp0ngle 3y ago
On one hand it's Vietnam where everyone bribes everyone. (Literally. Stealing country funds is a fact of life.) On the other hand it's 21 billion. Still rough.
- Saigonautica 3y ago
  Some people here do pay bribes. I do not. Neither do most people around my age that I know. I immigrated here 12 years ago. I have a company license, a driving license, proper residency, and so on. I got every last piece of it by filling out forms, and waiting a normal amount of time. I speak Vietnamese like a small child and have no Vietnamese heritage. Perhaps some people will report something different, and perhaps they are also correct. However, this is my story.
  - alephnerd 3y ago
    We're Westerners so we're insulated from low level corruption because we can report to the Tourist Police and our local Consulate or Embassy, who will complain to that Quan's MPS. The kind of low level corruption your mentioning impacts the working class or middle class (the kind living in a 1 bedroom apartment in D10 with a Honda motorbike) because they have no recourse. That said, the mid-upper level corruption is very significant. How else do you see retired generals and senior party apparatchiks with a $50/mo pension eating steaks at the Landmark 81 and living in a villa in Thao Dien. And this is why my SO makes it a principle to always speak in English so she doesn't get Vietnamese service.
    - 3y ago

shp0ngle 3y ago

Note that she got a death sentence for fraud. It's... rough. (In my opinion.)

keybored 3y ago
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spxneo 3y ago
Statements like this ignore the victims: - 3% of vietnam's GDP - Roughly the equivalent of an entire city losing their livelihood to one person - The trauma and ruin people around the victims will feel - Orphaned children, suicides, intragenerational trauma that will last for many rebirths. It's the same cavalier attitude I see towards victims of SBF on this forum. "Its their fault", "they were asking for it". You have compassion for the perpetrator but not the victims who are dead and are going to end up dead. I only pray that you will not experience the pain of being manipulated and scammed. It's truly awful because I experienced it. I know some religions/SF bay cults try to justify it but at the end of the day its the lapse in responsibility and compassion, the same disregard for others but your own.
- water-data-dude 3y ago
  I recognize that they’ve done a LOT of harm, but death is a harsh punishment under almost any circumstances. The death penalty seems like one of those ideological issues where people fall on one side or the other, and they pretty much stay on that side. My perspective is: if the point is to dissuade people from committing crimes like this, it seems like a lengthy prison sentence would achieve the same thing. The harm has already been done, and killing them doesn’t fix anything. Death is just so damn final.
  - bigcat12345678 3y ago
    You need to realize that non-zero people probably committed suicide becomes of lost money, right? The line of death being harsh punishment in any circumstance is simply not true. I.e., by contraditory, if it is true that "death is too harsh" is true, then it should reasonably deter "bad guys". Did that happen? No It did not happen in history, now; and it wont happen in any foreseeable further

sickofparadox 3y ago

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retrac 3y ago
Corruption purges in Leninist states are always political. In many cases, the officials and executives purged are, in fact, corrupt, and breaking domestic law. But the political element is really unavoidable. These serve as demonstrations of the state's power, and its legitimacy. Sort of a paradox there - if the state is so powerful and legitimate, how did such a massive scale of embezzlement go on for so long? Never mind that, let's watch the execution. One might even say, particularly at the highest level, that these matters are also political in constitutional republics, like the USA. How aggressively CEOs get prosecuted, does depend on the executive investigating and prosecuting offenders, and whether Congress wants to pass stricter laws. One interpretation, is that the American state, does not feel the need to demonstrate its authority in such a dramatic way.
- ToucanLoucan 3y ago
  > Corruption purges in Leninist states are always political... How aggressively CEOs get prosecuted, does depend on the executive investigating and prosecuting offenders, and whether Congress wants to pass stricter laws Do you have a source for these ideas, or are they your own? I can't speak for everyone of course but for myself and any of the many people I've had in-depth conversations with, none of us generally wonder how embezzlement happened in the first place, regardless of length, instead we marvel at the utter lack of any consequences for the convicted individual. In this way the state's power is far, far more illegitimized by the fact that it's apparently fine with people stealing incredible sums of money either from itself or from it's citizens and seems content to levy meaningless fines on the perpetrator after the fact, if even that. (or, in my leftier and more conspiratorial groups, that the weakness of the state to prosecute financial crimes is a direct result of the system being designed by rich people to facilitate the activities of other rich people, but I digress) The only ones in recent memory I can recall are Sam Bankman-Fried, which is still ongoing, and Elizabeth Holmes, both of whom seemed to have committed the proper crime of stealing from other rich people, whereas the ones who steal from the working/middle class are left largely untouched. A coincidence I'm sure. Where Government funds land in terms of "is this rich people's money or poor people's money" is up to the reader of the comment to determine, that one's prosecution rate does seem to trend more political, as tons of incredibly wealthy people are milking the government cow for absolutely mind-bending amounts of money and delivering basically nothing. > One interpretation, is that the American state, does not feel the need to demonstrate its authority in such a dramatic way. Maybe it should feel that need, since the lion's share of it's population on either side of the political spectrum thinks of the government as largely a joke. But they've also dis-empowered us to such a degree that our opinion on them largely doesn't matter anyway, so, on it goes.

adamnemecek 3y ago

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HarryHirsch 3y ago
His backers are even luckier. In a functioning country there would be a public inquiry and adequate sentences handed out.
- grecy 3y ago
  > In a functioning country The country functions just fine. For them.
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alephnerd 3y ago

I've travelled to Vietnam a lot over the past couple years for work and my SO's family, and there is a lot of rot in the VN economy that has finally caught up to it. Most of the growth could be attributed to Korean, Japanese, and Chinese conglomerates spending a LOT of money moving factories from China to VN in the 2014-22 period after China started trade wars with Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, and the US. While this lead to massive capital expenditures, the average Vietnamese person's life didn't change too drastically, as most of the investments were located in Hanoi (Chinese) or HCMC (Korean+Japanese) and only captured by the capital owning class. While there are more FMCGs and brands now, almost everything has a luxury tax on it or is imported from the US, Thailand, or South Korea, and even Temu quality clothes cost as much as they would in the US, and furthermore - rent is insanely high in HCMC and Hanoi, so 50-60% of your income is spent on rent alone. Furthermore, party apparatchiks decided to maximize the graft they could partake in by investing heavily in boondoggle hotel and apartment projects (similar to the Ghost cities you see in China and India). When the COVID pandemic happened, the gravy train ended. Vietnam followed a zero-covid policy that caused migrant workers to return to their hometowns, and there was a massive corruption scandal around COVID testing infrastructure and repatriating Vietnamese migrant workers from abroad. This was also around the time an internal conflict began brewing between the Northern VCP (supported by the VinGroup billionaire who is also from Vietnamese Military royalty), Southern VCP (supported by this billionaire), the Army (they own Vietnam's largest telco and most of the PSUs), and the Ministry of Public Security (they have the dirt on everybody and are the actual enforcers in Vietnam). Basically, the MPS backed the Northern faction and won this round, and the Army stayed out of this fight in order to keep making money. That said, all this upper level turmoil (under the guise of a corruption purge) dented investor confidence recently, along with some very prominent infrastructure collapses like the power outages and the internet slowdowns. For example, this past Tet people didn't spend as much on fireworks or red money compared to the 2023 Tet, real estate projects have started slowing down, and it's not uncommon to see abandoned construction projects once you leave HCMC or Hanoi. If you're part of the expat Bui Vien/D1/Thao Dien scene you wouldn't notice this kind of stuff (they're too busy huffing balloons/nitrous despite it being banned in VN leaving surgeons to physically restrain patients), but once you go to "real" Saigon (eg. D10, D8) let alone outside of HCMC/Hanoi/DaNang/DaLat these issues become very prominent. This is a fairly good overview of some of the changes I've (or moreso my SO) been noticing - https://asialink.unimelb.edu.au/insights/vietnam-the-purge https://asialink.unimelb.edu.au/insights/vietnam-the-purge

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somberi 3y ago

This entry from Wikipedia was impactful: "Lan's embezzlement of $12.5 billion equals about three percent of Vietnam's total GDP for 2022." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tr%C6%B0%C6%A1ng_M%E1%BB%B9_Lan https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tr%C6%B0%C6%A1ng_M%E1%BB%B9_La.... King Lear comes to mind: As flies to wanton boys are we to the gods; They kill us for their sport.

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speedylight 3y ago

Yeah Vietnam has a GDP of $408.8 Billion, a fraud of this magnitude is probably tantamount to treason.

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onlyrealcuzzo 3y ago
It was over 11 years, so you'd compare to the GDP for the last 11 years. Still huge, but not ~7% of GDP huge. It was closer to ~0.5% of GDP per year for 11 years. This is probably typical in countries without really strong institutions. Vietnam isn't exactly a 3rd world country... The amount of fraud going on in 3rd world countries (as a % of GDP) is mind boggling.

andrewstuart 3y ago

Companies are switching China for Vietnam, India, Indonesia. One of the reasons is fear of this sort of thing. Makes me wonder if the same problems will pop up in the new destinations.

pyth0 3y ago
They could also avoid this sort of thing by not doing fraud.
bastawhiz 3y ago
> One of the reasons is fear of this sort of thing. Good? If you're planning to embezzle tens of billions of dollars, you probably should be scared of consequences.
alephnerd 3y ago
These are the standard kinds of problems that happen in every developing country. So long as it's out in the open it's not a big deal. Most Western commentators had a decent view of what's going on in China because there is a lot of business reporting there. In Vietnam's case, most foreign business reporting I've seen is in Korean, Japanese, and Mandarin, as SK, Japan, Taiwan, and PRC are the biggest FDI sources in VN. For Korean and Taiwanese investors, this isn't a big deal, as most dealt with similar stuff in 1970s-2000s Korea and Taiwan, as did Japanese who invested heavily in Korea, Taiwan, and PRC. Western investors on the other hand, will be much more skittish, and won't invest until the regional investors from the countries mentioned above are more established in VN.

kazinator 3y ago

So a human life is worth somewhere between $0 and $27B in Vietnam. Useful to know.

alephnerd 3y ago
Anywhere in the developing world. Life is worthless. This is why my parents immigrated to America.
- readyplayernull 3y ago
  Yeah, they found keeping inmates alive is lucrative: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2022/jun/15/us-prison-workers-low-wages-exploited https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2022/jun/15/us-prison-wo...
  - alephnerd 3y ago
    Try dealing with Vietnam or Indian police as a Westerner "carrying" drugs. You better pay up or you might find yourself with a bullet in your head in a ditch. Oh, and body cams are not a thing.
    - ryanwaggoner 3y ago
      Many of these countries have extremely harsh punishments for drug offenses, AND have corrupt law enforcement where bribery is normal, but I challenge you to provide a single example of where a Westerner refused to bribe police and were subsequently shot in the head and dumped in a ditch. That makes little sense on multiple levels. Edit: Ironically, searching for examples of such an incident only brings up examples of Indians and Vietnamese folks getting shot by police in America.
      - kazinator 3y ago
        Even in Midnight Express, it is the American who kills the Turk in the end. And one of the antagonists helping to enforce the draconian law is an American.

Suppafly 3y ago

Why is it that every site with a similar headline is reporting a different amount of billions? Wonder if they are all converting it differently and then using the wrong countries units or something.

alephnerd 3y ago
Because most western news outlets are crap at Tieng Viet. The BBC headline is correct (as they hired a lot of Vietnamese speaking journalists, some of whom have been targeted for assasination and kidnapping by the Vietnamese govt [0]). The amount stolen was $44B. She needs to return $27B to not be executed. [0] - https://www.theguardian.com/media/2022/sep/30/bbc-accused-of-endangering-world-service-vietnamese-staff https://www.theguardian.com/media/2022/sep/30/bbc-accused-of...
- Suppafly 3y ago
  >The amount stolen was $44B. She needs to return $27B to not be executed. Ah, that's the context I was missing.
- josu 3y ago
  OP's article states: >A total of $12.5bn (£10bn) was embezzled, the equivalent of almost 3% of Vietnamese gross domestic product, but prosecutors said on Thursday the total damages caused by the scam now amounted to $27bn.
  - zamadatix 3y ago
    Yes, that's the point of contention being discussed. E.g. https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-68778636 https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-68778636 > My Lan was convicted of taking out $44bn (£35bn) in loans from the Saigon Commercial Bank. The verdict requires her to return $27bn
- Narkov 3y ago
  > The amount stolen was $44B. Quite funny that you forgot to denominate the currency here. As a non-US reader (we actually exist on the Internet!), it wasn't $44B in my currency. I assume it is US$ ?

bblcla 3y ago

Friends don't let friends become Vietnamese billionaires!

jongjong 3y ago

It's a system flaw which allows certain people to come into possession of such large amounts of money to begin with. Ayn Rand said that when those who are receiving most of the money are dealing in favors instead of goods and services, that's when you know your society is declining. The reason that billionaires and celebrities are monopolizing most of the money is because the monetary system has made the entire global economy about social connections. Although many people have the skills necessary to invest money efficiently in a just monetary system, because we don't have such a system, that skill is worthless and instead, in the current system, the money MUST go to politically connected people in order to get a return. The pool of politically-connected individuals is tiny as politicians can only deal with a limited number of individuals and cater to the needs of a limited number of corporations. That's why we have such extreme centralization and fragility.

mistermann 3y ago
Everyone laughs at (their meme-based strawman model of) Ayn, but she warned us about this. Lots of her ideas were indeed simplistic if not downright dumb, but not all of them.
grugagag 3y ago
Don’t take that Ayn Rand too seriously…
rufus_foreman 3y ago
>> Ayn Rand said that when those who are receiving most of the money are dealing in favors instead of goods and services, that's when you know your society is declining. She said that in 1957. So your argument is that society has been declining since 1957. And I have to admit that I find that argument rather hard to believe. Society has, to me, obviously not been declining since 1957. It has been declining since 1959 (the year Buddy Holly died).
- jongjong 3y ago
  Ayn Rand fled the USSR to come to the US. I assume this nugget of wisdom came out of that experience.

nimzoLarsen 3y ago

The details of this are just wild: According to prosecutors, over a period of three years from February 2019, she ordered her driver to withdraw 108 trillion Vietnamese dong, more than $4bn (£2.3bn) in cash from the bank, and store it in her basement. That much cash, even if all of it was in Vietnam's largest denomination banknotes, would weigh two tonnes.

IAmNotACellist 3y ago
[flagged]
codetrotter 3y ago
Yeah. I still find it hard to visualize though. A 1 meter x 1 meter x 1 meter container full of water would weigh about 1 metric ton. That’s how I usually think of 1 metric ton. If I saw a 1 meter x 1 meter x 1 meter neatly densely packed bunch of money bills on top of a euro pallet. I would have no idea if I was looking at the equivalent of some hundreds of thousands of dollars, or billions or what.
- mcoliver 3y ago
  I went through this exercise a while back randomly sitting on my couch wondering how much it would cost to fill my house with $100 bills. For your purposes, assuming $100 USD bills, 1m cubed is roughly 71 million USD. A 2000 sqft house with 8 foot ceilings, 42 billion.
eco 3y ago
If I understood the figures I looked up correctly, she had about 8% of the entire printed/minted Vietnamese Dong currency in her basement (1,352,910 Billion VND in circulation).
- throwoutway 3y ago
  There's a certain point between $5M and 4B where I wold just get out of dodge and buy a new identity.

gigatexal 3y ago

HN here delivers again. I’m voraciously consuming all this commentary. It’s very fascinating. I’m learning things I never knew about Vietnam. Props to Alephnerd and others for such intensely interesting commentary.

NhanH 3y ago
Some commentaries are heavily biased and borderline conspiratorial. I am Vietnamese, currently still living in the Vietnam, and I believe the VCP is doing what they are saying on the can: purging corruption (rather than this being political purge). Just as concrete counterexample on why it is not merely political purge: In the past 3 years, the last two Presidents of this term both had to resign due to corruption, the first one related to covid testing kit was from the Northern faction. The last two Chairman of People’s committee of Hanoi (basically Hanoi’s mayor/ governor) were also removed and arrested for corruption. Someone below was wondering what the trigger for this was, so here is it: people were tricked into buying bonds by SCB (My Lan’s bank) when trying to opening saving account. Some lost their entire life saving to the bullshit bonds, and to this day I still occasionally see protester in front of Vietnam’s state bank (it is on my daily commute). I am not saying there weren’t political infighting, but past few years weren’t it
- tuan 3y ago
  >> Some commentaries are heavily biased and borderline conspiratorial. yeah, just want to echo what NhanH said above. Please factcheck or ask for citations. Some comments are borderline conspiracies.
  - gigatexal 3y ago
    hrmm perhaps i got swindled by one who can speak so confidently -- either way -- i will have to collect all inputs (thank you all who responded) and use my best judgement and perhaps own research to confirm. it's too easy to be swindled these days and even my critical thinking might be not strong enough
sho 3y ago

antoniuschan99 3y ago

I watched these three videos were pretty informative on the case: https://youtu.be/GmAcpqZPrMQ?si=7JUYg7itjba_uGaN https://youtu.be/GmAcpqZPrMQ?si=7JUYg7itjba_uGaN https://youtu.be/KudcZvoP3C0?si=tF1DKfFoJmolGn5m https://youtu.be/KudcZvoP3C0?si=tF1DKfFoJmolGn5m https://youtu.be/jv-j5AS3Fz0?si=lzRg0XhyNqtS3q9V https://youtu.be/jv-j5AS3Fz0?si=lzRg0XhyNqtS3q9V There’s other cases namely flc group

can16358p 3y ago

The person in question is indeed very guilty but death sentence in 21st century? What kind of an archaic system allows it?

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bufferout 3y ago
I used to think the same until contemplating how many destroyed families the drug trafficking penalties of Singapore have prevented.
- holoduke 3y ago
  How many exactly?
- can16358p 3y ago
  Having drug trafficking laws to prevent (potential) destroyed families is one thing (though I think all drugs should be legal and no government should have right to dictate what you can put into your own body, but that's not the point at this thread), but regardless of the extent of the crime, I think death sentence is unacceptable in any civilized justice system.
  - thinkerswell 3y ago
    [dead]
  - lostmsu 3y ago
    You really did not give any arguments for why it is unacceptable.
    - SliceOfWaifu 3y ago
      Cause innocent people are sometimes wrongly convicted, and sentenced to death. Life behind bars without the possibility of parole achieves pretty much the same effect for public safety, while still giving the wrongly accused a chance to live. There are also rare cases in which new evidence overturns their conviction decades into their sentence. If they're put to death, they never get that chance.

mrangle 3y ago

I'm not against the death penalty, in principle, but applying it risks both the moral and, slightly more more important, the judicial legitimacy of the system. Therefore, if it is to be considered and applied then moral care and sound judicial logic are paramount. Whatever the amount of stolen money, currency theft on its own it will never rise to the objective moral and logical base-level required to apply the death penalty. If the governments of developing nations want to be seen as other than basketcases, they need to be more judicious than this.

brhsagain 3y ago
Why are financial crimes morally exempt in a way that, say, violent crime is not, even if the aggregate damage from the financial crime is greater? Unless you’re arguing that this isn’t possible?
- scrubs 3y ago
  I agree. In my corner of the universe (the US) I think the sec, Finra, doj, fbi need the pendulum to swing back 35% to correct for being too nice. What would happen if we had two kinds of c-corps? One fairly if strictly regulated leading to fines, civil cases, and criminal cases in exceptions And option two ... Very light regulation but if a regulatory agency or fbi finds malfeasance only criminal charges, jail time, loss of lawyer license, inability to serve at public companies and more ie. hardball. Maybe the elites should choose their risk level. I think it'd say a lot.
jbm 3y ago
> Whatever the amount of stolen money, currency theft on its own it will never rise to the objective moral and logical base-level required to apply the death penalty If we take it as a given that people spend large parts of their lives, mostly forced (as in they would not work if they didn't have to), we can see money as being a direct representation of human life. If someone stole X dollars, you could extrapolate it to entire lives that were stolen. How many suicides happen over money for this very reason? Making a case for the death penalty given those priors is not hard, especially for stealing from the impoverished.

herunan 3y ago

That much money is less about getting caught but more about falling out with someone.