Former Vietnam banker jailed for US$190m scam
Print Edition
A FORMER banker at a state-owned Vietnamese lender was sentenced to life imprisonment yesterday for masterminding a scam that swindled customers of US$190 million in the country’s highest-value bank fraud case.
A court in Ho Chi Minh City found Huynh Thi Huyen Nhu, 36, guilty of “swindling to appropriate assets” and using counterfeit documents and stamps to steal customers’ deposits while working at Vietinbank, Vietnam’s biggest partly private bank by assets, from 2007-2011.
A former Vietinbank branch manager, Vo Anh Tuan, received 20 years in jail and 20 other accomplices were given punishments ranging from 12 months of house arrest to 14 years behind bars.
This was the latest conviction of a top banker who stole millions by exploiting loopholes and laxness during Vietnam’s 2003-2007 boom, when banks grew rapidly and collected record deposits, but lent frivolously.
The economy overheated and banks’ weaknesses were exposed, revealing a crippling ratio of non-performing loans and a tightening of credit that slowed retail growth, left tens of thousands of businesses bankrupt and froze the property market.
Two former executives of state-owned Agribank were sentenced to death last year for embezzling US$25 million in one of dozens of bank fraud cases, with losses totalling hundreds of millions of dollars.
Nhu only escaped death because the money she stole was from customers and not the bank itself. The judge ordered her to repay of the depositors.
Her case was made more prominent because it exposed illegal lending at high rates by Asia Commercial Bank and implicated its founder, tycoon Nguyen Duc Kien and its ex-chairman, former government minister Tran Xuan Gia. Gia and Kien are awaiting trial.
Toxic debt and fraud has dented Vietnam’s banking sector, which the government has sought to clean up by ordering restructuring and setting up an asset management firm to buy bad loans and rescue banks.
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