A well-known Vietnamese business mogul has been found guilty of misleading investors about the value of his company to cheat them of about 150 million dollars (£117 million).
Following a two-week trial in which 49 defendants were identified as accomplices, the Hanoi People’s Court sentenced Trinh Van Quyet, 48, to 21 years in jail, according to state-run VN Express.
When Quyet was detained in 2022, it was unclear at first whether he would challenge the verdict. The millionaire served as the FLC Group’s chairman and founder.
The company owns cheap airline Bamboo Airways and a variety of real estate interests, such as hotels, resorts, and golf courses, among other assets.
Quyet reported false capital contributions to FLC Faros, the group’s general contractor business, to fraudulently increase the company’s valuation before its 2016 public offering, according to the indictment.
The accusation states that during the company’s initial public offering, it offered around 391 million shares to roughly 30,000 investors, defrauding them of 3.6 trillion Vietnamese dong (roughly £112 million).
Several officials who were accused of endorsing and assisting the original public offering while knowing there were errors in the data were among Quyet’s co-defendants. The punishments for the co-defendants, which ranged from probation to several years in prison, were all found guilty of different counts.
Trinh Thi Minh Hue and Trinh Thi Thuy Nga, Quyet’s sisters, were found guilty of the same allegations against him and were sentenced to 14 and 8 years in jail, respectively. After being found guilty of abusing their positions of power to allow Quyet to inflate the value of his company, Tran Dac Sinh, the former chairman of the Ho Chi Minh Stock Exchange, Le Hai Tra, the deputy CEO, and Tram Tuan Vu, the former deputy chief executive, were each sentenced to 6.5 years, 5 years, and 5.5 years in prison.
The Vietnamese government launched a campaign against corruption, which included Quyet’s imprisonment. The Communist Party launched its Blazing Furnace campaign in 2013, but the government didn’t start looking at the private sector until 2018.
Many of the rapidly expanding businesses in Vietnam have had their founders imprisoned since then. Three days before Quyet’s trial began, last month, Nguyen Phu Trong, the highest politician in Vietnam and general secretary of the Communist Party, passed away at the age of 80, leaving behind an anti-corruption drive that had distinguished him.
Declaring that the campaign would be a “blazing furnace” in which nobody would be safe from corruption, the ideologue termed corruption a serious threat to the party. A court in Ho Chi Minh City condemned real estate mogul Truong My Lan, who was one of the most significant businessmen in Vietnam for many years, to death in April for masterminding the nation’s worst financial fraud case.
According to official media outlets, she was found guilty of two crimes: unlawfully running a major bank and approving loans that caused losses of $27 billion (£21 billion) and fraud totaling 12.5 billion dollars (£9.7 billion), or almost 3% of the nation’s 2022 GDP.
Thousands of party officials have been disciplined since 2016. These officials include the former heads of parliament, Vuong Dinh Hue, and presidents Nguyen Xuan Phuc and Vo Van Thuong. Eight members of the influential Politburo were removed overall due to accusations of corruption, as opposed to none from 1986 to 2016.
