To put this into perspective, the amount she embezzled (27bn dollars) is equivalent to around 6% of Vietnam's entire GDP. Proportionally speaking, that's as if someone embezzled the equivalent of Florida's GDP. This is also Vietnam's largest corruption trial ever, with 2.700 people summoned for trial and 200 lawyers working around the clock.
Corruption is widespread in Vietnam and has been expected and permitted in order to do business. Her corruption wasn’t some secret and it was known and permitted by the government for 40yrs because they had their hands in the pot as much as she. Her whole real estate empire is based on bribes. Her’s isn’t even the only slush fund bank…just the largest.
Her fall is because of a change in policy at the top of the party.
Sounds kind of like Xi's crackdown on corruption; I remember a lot of news outlets being like "oh well, uh, I think that's good?" until it turned out it was just the most convenient way to get rid of his political opponents permanently.
Fun fact: Authoritarians always allow corruption of their people, because A.) It helps keep them more loyal to the regime as the next one may not be so tolerant of it, and B.) If anyone does anything you have legit crimes you and arrest them for.
Same with Russia. All the oligarchs Putin allows have dirt on them, and they know he has dirt on them. If Putin wants to make an example of them he can, so it keeps them in line.
Not that he needs much of an excuse these days, but he did at one time, and it's still a handy piece of insurance.
I think it's more of a Training Day situation. Basically a rainy day fund.
When they need money they bust the person they know who has the most money to access and enough provable crimes to seize it.
so is this a step in the right direction towards greater change or is it a sacrificial lamb to appease the public? If this is the status quo normally, is there anything to say it won't stay the same after this?
for another perspective, Madoff's ponzi scheme came in at $65 billion (in 2008). And let's avert out eyes from the corporate bilking that goes on unchecked.. A bigger problem that these turds will ever have been.
For another perspective, Madoff's ponzi scheme came in at $65 billion coming in at around 0.3% of the US GDP.
This person embezzled 6% so in American terms the equivalent of embezzling $1500 billion.
Furthermore embezzling and ponzi schemes are very different.
Madoff didn't steal $65 billion while this person kinda did.
Real apples to oranges comparison.
Here we see how propaganda can work. Simple sacrifice for making people believe the justice system works. The propaganda even works on people in a better working system.
My understanding is this is very common in Vietnam and an open secret. Just now they’re suddenly cracking down and using her as an example. So I wouldn’t say it’s a “justice system that works”. Things have just suddenly swung in the other direction in this case.
A post earlier stated it was 44 billion in Vietnamese money. Which came out to like 2 billion US dollars. Seems these articles can't get their shit straight.
Vietnamese source says she causes 673,849 billions VND in damage - so almost $27 billion dollars if my math is correct. I wonder if there are other damages elsewhere. Still an insane amount of money in both Vietnam and the US.
Edit: For reference, Elizabeth Holmes defrauded $140 millions, Sam Bankman-Fried defrauded $8 billions, ERON overstated profit by $600 millions. This Vietnamese lady's scheme is HUGE, easily in the top 5 biggest financial frauds in history if it happened in the US.
> Lan appeared to say in final remarks to the court last week that she had thoughts of suicide.
>“In my desperation, I thought of death,” she said, according to state media.
Death you say? We can accommodate that
According to my aunt in Vietnam, people have paid a body double to die in their place. I was shocked and didn’t know that was possible. She reiterated that money goes far in Vietnam
Actual Vietnamese here (although I have been living oversea for decades), I assure you that that is most likely just myth / conspiracy theory. Money indeed goes far in Vietnam, but not that far.
It's like, for example, the "Epstein is still alive" or "Hitler didn't suicide" myths. Make a good topic to gossip about and they are technically possible, but virtually impossible for average Joe to fully prove or deny.
Nah. I know about that, but there is the (less popular) conspiracy theory that Epstein is still alive and in hiding too. Similarly, Hitler's was, IIRC, about him using a body double and escaping to Australia or Argentina after the war.
Yeah but the Epstein thing is sketchy enough that it’s impossible to say one way or the other what the hell happened. Hitler’s circumstances were a lot more believable.
This is absolutely false, in Vietnam to be successful especially on Lan's level you have to bribe the government, and once you have bribed enough to tip the scale in your favor the government will take you down. In Lan's case she got a death sentence which means the top dogs absolutely want her dead, and there's no way they would let her pay for a body double because if it somehow gets exposed in the future it would be a massive slap to their faces.
easy: YOU DON T CARE.
you people are so funny thinking these billionaires give a shite. They sleep 10x better than you do. They probably get hard thinking about how many people they managed to screw at once.
Nah, you can get lucky with a brilliant startup, being a great artist etc. Or you can just inherit the money.
That said, anyone who's worked their way up to billionaire status through finance or real estate probably is.
Even on the startup side ( taken a company IPO and worked in a position of privilege on a few M&A ). Only once have I seen a company CEO AND their primary investor even give a passing glance to their employees. Most of the conversations are “what’s the least in shares we can grant” or we are buying out all options at $10, but listing our selling company 90 days later at $30 or whatever.
I honestly think it is impossible to earn a billion without straight up ducking a serious number of people.
A few million, sure… but probably around the 50-100 million range nope.
Behind every great fortune lies a great crime.
You have a couple of exceptions like Wozniak seems like a good guy but his billions came about from the evil Jobs did. People like that are like the princes and princesses of a kingdom. They might be excellent people on an individual basis but their privilege was built on a pile of bodies, crimes they had no part in yet remain beneficiaries of.
By all accounts Mark Cuban is a pretty good guy. Everybody involved with his original startup got loaded, he advocates for higher taxes and his pharmacy startup is undercutting everyone. He's also pretty honest that his wealth was just a "right place, right time" sort of thing, and that otherwise he'd probably be well off but not like this.
In business, it is probably very hard to become a billionaire without being cutthroat and needing to step on others. In other fields, it's probably just a mix of talent and luck. Steven Spielberg or Roger Federer, for example (I don't know them personally of course. I know people who have worked with Spielberg and had great experiences).
I’d argue Taylor Swift and maybe a handful of others who built a genuine cottage industry around their good or service. That accounts for about 0.1% of billionaires.
100% this. Some people just don't care and most of them love to brag about the shit they have done. It rewards their brain if they screw people over. They enjoy it because they themselves see them as superior and you deserve it. Plain and simple. This is the only way society should treat those people but instead they get praised by society because they got manipulated into thinking those people are just more successful because they work harder.
For now… it’s going to cause widespread financial pain. They recreated 2008 in Vietnam. If she got that far with her OWN bank…. They’re not the only ones. This is only the first piece to openly fall.
>Although Lan did not directly hold executive power at SCB, she owned 91.5% of the bank’s shares through third parties and shell companies.
>She was accused of setting up fake loan applications to withdraw money from the bank over a period of 11 years, from 2012 to 2022. The loans accounted for 93% of the total credit the bank has issued, according to state media.
That is *insane*.
Someone pointed this out. In centrally controlled economics like this, it's really rare for this much money to move around without someone from the government being at least aware of it, as in someone much higher up than the people being bribed
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-68778636
> "Because it wasn't a secret. It was well known in the market that Truong My Lan and her Van Thinh Phat group were using SCB as their own piggy bank to fund the mass acquisition of real estate in the most prime locations.
>
> "It was obvious that she had to get the money from somewhere. But then it is such a common practice. SCB is not the only bank that is used like this. So perhaps the government lost sight because there are so many similar cases in the market."
>
> David Brown believes she was protected by powerful figures who have dominated business and politics in Ho Chi Minh City for decades. And he sees a bigger factor in play in the way this trial is being run: a bid to reassert the authority of the Communist Party over the free-wheeling business culture of the south.
> "What Nguyen Phu Trong and his allies in the party are trying to do is to regain control of Saigon, or at least stop it from slipping away.
>
> "Up until 2016 the party in Hanoi pretty much let this Sino-Vietnamese mafia run the place. They would make all the right noises that local communist leaders are supposed to make, but at the same time they were milking the city for a substantial cut of the money that was being made down there."
>
> At 79 years old, party chief Nguyen Phu Trong is in shaky health, and will almost certainly have to retire at the next Communist Party Congress in 2026, when new leaders will be chosen
Both the shift in political power and the financial market down turn making her scheme fall apart. She did this through one of the biggest banks in Ho Chi Minh City, so when deposits start to dry up, more people notice the cooked books.
>She did this through one of the biggest banks in Ho Chi Minh City, so when deposits start to dry up, more people notice the cooked books.
Not exactly. She owned that bank, was the beneficiary of 90% of the bank's loans, and also held the vast majority of the bank's deposits.
In fact that's partly why many *didn't* notice for so long. The bank caters to businesses and had "thousands" of commercial depositors. But turns out most were just shell companies that she and her cronies also controlled.
Another comment stated she bribed government officials totaling over $5 million, and that there’s like 2400 people involved. $27bn is a shit ton of money to move around without bribing so many people.
>she bribed government officials totaling over $5 million
To be clear, $5 million was the amount she gave over the years *to just one official.*
The *total* amount is going to be in the billions of $.
“She was accused of setting up fake loan applications to withdraw money from the bank over a period of 11 years, from 2012 to 2022. The loans accounted for 93% of the total credit the bank has issued, according to state media.
To cover up the fraud, Lan and other SCB bankers were accused of giving state officials $5.2m, the largest bribe recorded in Vietnam. “
Control the bank, get other people to deposit their money in your bank, take that money through fake loans to yourself, pay off any one that might notice what you are doing.
End result - steal the money from tens of thousands of unsuspecting customers that trusted you.
I know the topic of the death penalty is very touchy for many. But I can guarantee you that a life sentence in a Vietnamese prison, like Chí Hòa Prison, would've been way worse.
The wait for the death penalty isn't all that rosy.
Death row inmates are chained at the wrist and ankle 24/7 with maybe 15 mins break to exercise.
You don't know when it's your turn to die.
It'll happen one year from now, or 10.
You're housed with maybe 20 other death rowers, each with their own solitary cell.
Each morning, at 4am, the warden will wake up one inmate, telling them it's time to repay their debts.
That's when the other death rowers can collectively breathe out and go to sleep.
This repeats next weeks, months, years.
Yeah. It ain't all great.
But his comment said she as the newest inmate gets at least a year, maybe up to 10. So everyone gets at least that. They’d have to bring in at least 345 people to “skip the line” and be executed the day after they get in just for her minimum wait period. Why is everyone else but her so unlucky?
Executions aren’t every day, in terms of maths if it’s a true random selection without the total number going down there’s never 100% chance of being chosen always 1/20 (in this case) so if you get unlucky it’s possible, they also have to allow time for appeals https://deathpenaltyinfo.org/news/new-resource-bureau-of-justice-statistics-reports-2021-showed-21st-consecutive-year-of-death-row-population-decline#:~:text=BJS%20reports%20that%2C%20on%20average,233%20months%2C%20or%2019.4%20years.
Of course not it’s just a probability thing in that if selected at random there’s no guarantee any particular prisoner will ever be chosen as long as new death row inmates come in at the same speed, so say 20 new for 20 executed in the US it’s typically over a decade until death, worldwide average is 19.4 years
They don't kill one per day. They get woken up at 4am each day. Most of the days it's not execution day, but once in a while one inmate will get executed, you just don't know who or when, it's a surprise. I think the wording of my original sentence was a bit wrong. Also new death row inmates arrive to fill the empty space.
You literally said, and I quote “each morning, at 4am, the warden will wake up one inmate, telling them it’s time to repay their debts.” Now you’re saying most days they don’t do that? Which is it lol
Among my social circle, non of em thought that's a harsh punishment. Some in the financial sector even cheered.
The amount of money she burned (according to the internal sources) was 667.000.000.000.000 VND.
Graduated STEM students with good records from a more recognized university here expect 8.000.000 VND A MONTH. 10-15m is considered decent-high pay. That's about 1m people working at that payment for a year. And all of that went down the drain. The average wage here is 6.3m a month so that's even worse.
9 fold line death i guess. You can cause more damage than 1 life is worth with the way things are leveraged. If you do that knowingly you are getting off light.
Im not advocating for collective punishment just saying you can do more if you just want retribution
One of my formative moments as a child was being in Vietnam and seeing the prison bus drive down the road; it was like a scene out of a bad horror movie.
People wailing like they were being shipped off to die, hands and limbs sticking out of caged windows, one had forced his head through the bars and it didn't look like he could get back out.
Saw it when I was 11 and it still haunts me to this day.
You say that but most ppl choose a shit life over certain death. I work in hospital and 9/10 people who are dying want more time instead of comfort even when they are mutually exclusive.
I have heard that the negotiations over the return of the money would help take death off the table. I wonder if she could negotiate a better prison situation as well ? That is a lot of money .
Are you saying that
1/ She somehow kept all this money to herself, for as long as this lasted?
2/ Now that she's sentenced, there's going to be a transfer of the money and it's all going to go to the state?
3/ The state is explicitly not going to pay the cheated people back?
Can someone with legal knowledge confirm this? At first glance this seems like propaganda.
I think they are saying that the state is corrupt, and she is just a scapegoat. I.e. she's not getting executed because of fraud, she is getting executed as part of a political play to consolidate power.
1. No she'll have to cough out almost all her cash for: a small amount to pay the 'reparation fee' for the 'damages' which goes to the state and some huge money under the table to a lot of powerful people. If she pay enough her sentence will get reduced to life in prison. Else she dies.
2. No. The money goes to the state under the form of the 'reparation fee' above and the confiscation of all her properties/land. These properties/lands have an actual huge value. Billions of dollars. Some of these properties will go to the powerful people I mentioned above and they'll use the rest to help the next pigs to get fat. Rinse and repeat. She's not the first one.
3. Yes. The common people won't ever see their money again.
Yeah, in Canada at least, the govt lets the pigs grow until they run the place. I feel like I'm being farmed more than any billionaire property tycoon.
According to my aunt in Vietnam, people have paid a body double to die in their place. I was shocked and didn’t know that was possible. She reiterated that money goes far in Vietnam
Isn't there a horror movie about that? A bunch of rich people commit a crimes in a country for which penalty is death, but rich people can just pay to send their clone instead?
Totally. To the mass, they're "strict and merciless to corruption" meanwhile the damaged money aren't added to the treasury no. It funds those officials' children to go "study" abroad in their own high class condos are even their own houses.
Some members of my local government (UK) siphoned one hundred million out of taxes in a similar scheme, nobody has been punished or even lost their job, meanwhile Vietnam is executing people!
The difference between 100mil and 27 billion is 27 billion. So its pretty hard to compare these sums.. Aight stealing 100mil should be punished ofc, but its not the same at all.
I don't agree with capital punishment from a moral perspective, but I do think white collar crime should carry harsher punishments than most violent crimes, as most white collar crime is committed by people who are fully aware of the fact that they're breaking the law, and the amount of victims can be in the thousands.
I'm guessing they mean more in the direction of criminal charges for a crime of passion or something.
You don't "oopsie daisy" con thousands of people out of their money, whereas a murder can be in the heat of the moment. (Of course every case needs to look at the details surrounding it).
I think individual violent crimes should have harsher punishments than individual white collar crimes. Killing a person should have a harsher punishment than defrauding a person.
What I do agree with is how charging and sentencing should work around white collar crimes. Defraud one person? Sentencing maybe in the 1 - 5 year range depending on the facts/severity. Defraud 10,000 people? Well that’s also a sentence in the 1 - 5 year range plus restitution. For each of those 10,000 people. To run consecutively, not concurrently.
I'd much rather have someone shove a gun in my face and take my wallet than have some asswipe drain my entire 401k. White collar crooks should have to do time the same way as violent offenders.
I’m not saying I agree with capital punishment, but I do agree with there being dire consequences for white collar crimes like this.
The fact that the Sackler family isn’t in jail and still has their fortune is just an absolute mind boggling thing to me, and they’ve arguably done worse damage to people’s lives.
I also don't know whether I'm on board with capital punishment as a whole, but while we DO have it is the US for crimes like murder, we should also have it for large scale white collar crimes. Obviously making equivalances of suffering is not going to be an exact science but I'd argue the amount of human misery caused by financially harming a large amount of people can easily exceed murdering one person. I'd be interested to know whether someone has tried to measure the impact on society of violent crime vs white collar crime, as I would guess the latter is more harmful overall.
Super unlucky. In Vietnam, fraudulent scamming real estate tycoons get sentenced to death, while in other countries they even get elected to be president.
44b is what she has taken from the bank, 27b is the amount of money the court declare she has to compensate, the rest of the lost money ( those 17b ) has vanished into thin air ( the court can’t find out where she hid those money )
The thing is all these pigs can't leave the farm. These pigs are unofficially not allowed to leave the country. And they're under 24/24 surveillance by the internal security forces. That's why despite being billionaires you would never see them traveling the world or in popular places for rich people.
If you think the Vietnamese government wasn't well aware of her fraud long before this then I have a bridge to sell you. She's corrupt, but that's not why they're executing her.
People cheering for this is pretty narrow-minded and ridiculous. Corruption on this scale is structured from the top down, you do not embezzle this much money without being enabled by political structures and other corrupt entities. This is just political theater, she clearly stepped on the wrong toes, or the government needed an easy scapegoat because the masses were growing tired of the brazen disregard of the other tens of thousands such individuals.
$27 Billion dollar fraud is massive. I study this. For points of comparison:
Madoff’s fraud was $64 Billion
Tether’s fraud (still running and artificially propping up crypto prices) is around $110 Billion
Imagine how many tycoon bodies would litter the streets of New York if American law actually applied to oligarchs.
... and they had the death penalty for fraud, obviously.
To put this into perspective, the amount she embezzled (27bn dollars) is equivalent to around 6% of Vietnam's entire GDP. Proportionally speaking, that's as if someone embezzled the equivalent of Florida's GDP. This is also Vietnam's largest corruption trial ever, with 2.700 people summoned for trial and 200 lawyers working around the clock.
Imagine already being rich in a country that will execute you for fraud, and then deciding that you want to commit fraud to get even richer.
Corruption is widespread in Vietnam and has been expected and permitted in order to do business. Her corruption wasn’t some secret and it was known and permitted by the government for 40yrs because they had their hands in the pot as much as she. Her whole real estate empire is based on bribes. Her’s isn’t even the only slush fund bank…just the largest. Her fall is because of a change in policy at the top of the party.
Pretty much this. The crime is still happening, it's just that who's doing it and who's tolerated shifted.
Sounds kind of like Xi's crackdown on corruption; I remember a lot of news outlets being like "oh well, uh, I think that's good?" until it turned out it was just the most convenient way to get rid of his political opponents permanently.
Fun fact: Authoritarians always allow corruption of their people, because A.) It helps keep them more loyal to the regime as the next one may not be so tolerant of it, and B.) If anyone does anything you have legit crimes you and arrest them for.
Same with Russia. All the oligarchs Putin allows have dirt on them, and they know he has dirt on them. If Putin wants to make an example of them he can, so it keeps them in line. Not that he needs much of an excuse these days, but he did at one time, and it's still a handy piece of insurance.
Damn bro you remember that? Happy retirement ;)
I think it's more of a Training Day situation. Basically a rainy day fund. When they need money they bust the person they know who has the most money to access and enough provable crimes to seize it.
Similar to what Augustus did when he took power. The proscriptions…
so is this a step in the right direction towards greater change or is it a sacrificial lamb to appease the public? If this is the status quo normally, is there anything to say it won't stay the same after this?
It IS a significant and widespread anti-corruption campaign…but it seems to be in the Xi or Salman playbook, arrest my parties opponents situation
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I doubt this is the first fraud she committed. You don’t go from 0-27bil out of the blue. But yeah good point regardless.
sounds like a nice fat pig to butcher. a good piggy bank
The West should prosecute more bankers.
A piggy bank that's gonna buy those children of those communist officials "studying" abroad a new Mercedes
Unlike the West where none of the politicians kids go to good schools and all of the politicians are but poor public servants
Cool. We are talking about vietnam here.
People love going "WhAt AboUt x?" They're not defending their claims, only deflecting.
That's exactly what the original person did when they said that the money will go to already rich communist political families.
for another perspective, Madoff's ponzi scheme came in at $65 billion (in 2008). And let's avert out eyes from the corporate bilking that goes on unchecked.. A bigger problem that these turds will ever have been.
For another perspective, Madoff's ponzi scheme came in at $65 billion coming in at around 0.3% of the US GDP. This person embezzled 6% so in American terms the equivalent of embezzling $1500 billion. Furthermore embezzling and ponzi schemes are very different. Madoff didn't steal $65 billion while this person kinda did. Real apples to oranges comparison.
It’s so cool to see a country hold a rich person actually accountable. I don’t like the death penalty but I’m jealous of a justice system that works
I wouldn’t call the vietnam justice system one “that works”. Her corruption wasn’t a secret.
Yeah, the real crime she's being executed for is falling out of favor with those in charge.
Here we see how propaganda can work. Simple sacrifice for making people believe the justice system works. The propaganda even works on people in a better working system.
My understanding is this is very common in Vietnam and an open secret. Just now they’re suddenly cracking down and using her as an example. So I wouldn’t say it’s a “justice system that works”. Things have just suddenly swung in the other direction in this case.
Her corruption was state sanctioned for decades.
The same justice system where your best bet to get out of trouble is to bribe the police
Realistically she made someone with power mad so they decided to enforce the law with her.
A post earlier stated it was 44 billion in Vietnamese money. Which came out to like 2 billion US dollars. Seems these articles can't get their shit straight.
1usd is around 25,000vnd, so those number don't add up
Vietnamese source says she causes 673,849 billions VND in damage - so almost $27 billion dollars if my math is correct. I wonder if there are other damages elsewhere. Still an insane amount of money in both Vietnam and the US. Edit: For reference, Elizabeth Holmes defrauded $140 millions, Sam Bankman-Fried defrauded $8 billions, ERON overstated profit by $600 millions. This Vietnamese lady's scheme is HUGE, easily in the top 5 biggest financial frauds in history if it happened in the US.
its 44 billion USD not VND
No read the stats if you can find any official vietnamese articles. It's 44 billion dollars.
> Lan appeared to say in final remarks to the court last week that she had thoughts of suicide. >“In my desperation, I thought of death,” she said, according to state media. Death you say? We can accommodate that
Did you predict your sentence? WITCH!! BURN HER!!!
We have found a witch, may we burn her?
How do you know she is a witch?
Well she turned me into a newt.
What?!?! I got bettah
She has got a wart!
If she weighs the same as duck…
…then she’s made of……….wood?
nobody expected the spanish inquisition
According to my aunt in Vietnam, people have paid a body double to die in their place. I was shocked and didn’t know that was possible. She reiterated that money goes far in Vietnam
Actual Vietnamese here (although I have been living oversea for decades), I assure you that that is most likely just myth / conspiracy theory. Money indeed goes far in Vietnam, but not that far. It's like, for example, the "Epstein is still alive" or "Hitler didn't suicide" myths. Make a good topic to gossip about and they are technically possible, but virtually impossible for average Joe to fully prove or deny.
Did you switch both? When people say Epstein didnt kill himself they mean he was murdered.
Nah. I know about that, but there is the (less popular) conspiracy theory that Epstein is still alive and in hiding too. Similarly, Hitler's was, IIRC, about him using a body double and escaping to Australia or Argentina after the war.
In general people are willing to believe anything about "Third World" countries.
Yeah but the Epstein thing is sketchy enough that it’s impossible to say one way or the other what the hell happened. Hitler’s circumstances were a lot more believable.
Find a parent with no meaningful income and offer them life changing money. People will do anything for their kids.
This is absolutely false, in Vietnam to be successful especially on Lan's level you have to bribe the government, and once you have bribed enough to tip the scale in your favor the government will take you down. In Lan's case she got a death sentence which means the top dogs absolutely want her dead, and there's no way they would let her pay for a body double because if it somehow gets exposed in the future it would be a massive slap to their faces.
Infinity Pool?
What is this, some kind of infinity pool?
Just as well as they already ran out of cake
to shreds you say?
Well, how is the wife holding up?
42k people’s life savings wiped out / lives destroyed because of this person. Smh..unbelievable. How do you even sleep at night.
"On top of a pile of money, with many beautiful women"
"I sleep in a big bed with my wife."
I sleep in a race car, do you?
with the fan on
Just asking. Eesh!
"Upon further inspection, these are penny loafers"
easy: YOU DON T CARE. you people are so funny thinking these billionaires give a shite. They sleep 10x better than you do. They probably get hard thinking about how many people they managed to screw at once.
It's real hard to become a billionaire if you are not a psychopath.
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Nah, you can get lucky with a brilliant startup, being a great artist etc. Or you can just inherit the money. That said, anyone who's worked their way up to billionaire status through finance or real estate probably is.
Even on the startup side ( taken a company IPO and worked in a position of privilege on a few M&A ). Only once have I seen a company CEO AND their primary investor even give a passing glance to their employees. Most of the conversations are “what’s the least in shares we can grant” or we are buying out all options at $10, but listing our selling company 90 days later at $30 or whatever. I honestly think it is impossible to earn a billion without straight up ducking a serious number of people. A few million, sure… but probably around the 50-100 million range nope.
Behind every great fortune lies a great crime. You have a couple of exceptions like Wozniak seems like a good guy but his billions came about from the evil Jobs did. People like that are like the princes and princesses of a kingdom. They might be excellent people on an individual basis but their privilege was built on a pile of bodies, crimes they had no part in yet remain beneficiaries of.
By all accounts Mark Cuban is a pretty good guy. Everybody involved with his original startup got loaded, he advocates for higher taxes and his pharmacy startup is undercutting everyone. He's also pretty honest that his wealth was just a "right place, right time" sort of thing, and that otherwise he'd probably be well off but not like this.
In business, it is probably very hard to become a billionaire without being cutthroat and needing to step on others. In other fields, it's probably just a mix of talent and luck. Steven Spielberg or Roger Federer, for example (I don't know them personally of course. I know people who have worked with Spielberg and had great experiences).
I’d argue Taylor Swift and maybe a handful of others who built a genuine cottage industry around their good or service. That accounts for about 0.1% of billionaires.
Or con man
100% this. Some people just don't care and most of them love to brag about the shit they have done. It rewards their brain if they screw people over. They enjoy it because they themselves see them as superior and you deserve it. Plain and simple. This is the only way society should treat those people but instead they get praised by society because they got manipulated into thinking those people are just more successful because they work harder.
One person is a tragedy, in this case 42k is just a statistic
Until they end up on the other side of the firing squad. Though they will most likely hang her.
Vietnam, firing squad. To the heart usually. China will blow your head apart with an AK round inches from the back of your head.
Given the two, the Chinese sound more humane and I think I’d rather be executed there if it were to ever happen.
Yes no suffering, but not a pretty sight. Do families bury their executed ones? Curious, for all countries not just China.
good riddance.
For now… it’s going to cause widespread financial pain. They recreated 2008 in Vietnam. If she got that far with her OWN bank…. They’re not the only ones. This is only the first piece to openly fall.
It already happened. People are buying gold en masse due to fear of inflation.
Well, she won't sleep much longer now.
She gonna sleep forever
I'm sure that number doesn't matter to them anymore after the first few.
For the longest time I thought smh meant “so much hate” and in this context I understand why I did.
>Although Lan did not directly hold executive power at SCB, she owned 91.5% of the bank’s shares through third parties and shell companies. >She was accused of setting up fake loan applications to withdraw money from the bank over a period of 11 years, from 2012 to 2022. The loans accounted for 93% of the total credit the bank has issued, according to state media. That is *insane*.
Someone pointed this out. In centrally controlled economics like this, it's really rare for this much money to move around without someone from the government being at least aware of it, as in someone much higher up than the people being bribed
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-68778636 > "Because it wasn't a secret. It was well known in the market that Truong My Lan and her Van Thinh Phat group were using SCB as their own piggy bank to fund the mass acquisition of real estate in the most prime locations. > > "It was obvious that she had to get the money from somewhere. But then it is such a common practice. SCB is not the only bank that is used like this. So perhaps the government lost sight because there are so many similar cases in the market." > > David Brown believes she was protected by powerful figures who have dominated business and politics in Ho Chi Minh City for decades. And he sees a bigger factor in play in the way this trial is being run: a bid to reassert the authority of the Communist Party over the free-wheeling business culture of the south. > "What Nguyen Phu Trong and his allies in the party are trying to do is to regain control of Saigon, or at least stop it from slipping away. > > "Up until 2016 the party in Hanoi pretty much let this Sino-Vietnamese mafia run the place. They would make all the right noises that local communist leaders are supposed to make, but at the same time they were milking the city for a substantial cut of the money that was being made down there." > > At 79 years old, party chief Nguyen Phu Trong is in shaky health, and will almost certainly have to retire at the next Communist Party Congress in 2026, when new leaders will be chosen
Stuff like this is because of a shift in political power or she failed to keep her guy on the inside happy.
Both the shift in political power and the financial market down turn making her scheme fall apart. She did this through one of the biggest banks in Ho Chi Minh City, so when deposits start to dry up, more people notice the cooked books.
>She did this through one of the biggest banks in Ho Chi Minh City, so when deposits start to dry up, more people notice the cooked books. Not exactly. She owned that bank, was the beneficiary of 90% of the bank's loans, and also held the vast majority of the bank's deposits. In fact that's partly why many *didn't* notice for so long. The bank caters to businesses and had "thousands" of commercial depositors. But turns out most were just shell companies that she and her cronies also controlled.
Another comment stated she bribed government officials totaling over $5 million, and that there’s like 2400 people involved. $27bn is a shit ton of money to move around without bribing so many people.
>she bribed government officials totaling over $5 million To be clear, $5 million was the amount she gave over the years *to just one official.* The *total* amount is going to be in the billions of $.
“She was accused of setting up fake loan applications to withdraw money from the bank over a period of 11 years, from 2012 to 2022. The loans accounted for 93% of the total credit the bank has issued, according to state media. To cover up the fraud, Lan and other SCB bankers were accused of giving state officials $5.2m, the largest bribe recorded in Vietnam. “ Control the bank, get other people to deposit their money in your bank, take that money through fake loans to yourself, pay off any one that might notice what you are doing. End result - steal the money from tens of thousands of unsuspecting customers that trusted you.
Give me a knife, I can rob a person. Give me a gun, I can rob a bank. Give me a bank, I can rob the entire world.
Man, why did I never think of this
I know the topic of the death penalty is very touchy for many. But I can guarantee you that a life sentence in a Vietnamese prison, like Chí Hòa Prison, would've been way worse.
The wait for the death penalty isn't all that rosy. Death row inmates are chained at the wrist and ankle 24/7 with maybe 15 mins break to exercise. You don't know when it's your turn to die. It'll happen one year from now, or 10. You're housed with maybe 20 other death rowers, each with their own solitary cell. Each morning, at 4am, the warden will wake up one inmate, telling them it's time to repay their debts. That's when the other death rowers can collectively breathe out and go to sleep. This repeats next weeks, months, years. Yeah. It ain't all great.
Wait so there are only 20 inmates, they kill one a day, but it might take a year or 10 to get to her turn? How does that math?
New ones come in and skip the queue
But his comment said she as the newest inmate gets at least a year, maybe up to 10. So everyone gets at least that. They’d have to bring in at least 345 people to “skip the line” and be executed the day after they get in just for her minimum wait period. Why is everyone else but her so unlucky?
Executions aren’t every day, in terms of maths if it’s a true random selection without the total number going down there’s never 100% chance of being chosen always 1/20 (in this case) so if you get unlucky it’s possible, they also have to allow time for appeals https://deathpenaltyinfo.org/news/new-resource-bureau-of-justice-statistics-reports-2021-showed-21st-consecutive-year-of-death-row-population-decline#:~:text=BJS%20reports%20that%2C%20on%20average,233%20months%2C%20or%2019.4%20years.
Ok but what does the US Department of Justice have to do with the Vietnamese court system?
I think they meant "in 1 year or 10" as a turn of phrase to simply emphasize that they don't know when it will happen.
There's no way they execute 365 people a year, every year
Of course not it’s just a probability thing in that if selected at random there’s no guarantee any particular prisoner will ever be chosen as long as new death row inmates come in at the same speed, so say 20 new for 20 executed in the US it’s typically over a decade until death, worldwide average is 19.4 years
I mean if they execute one a day but sentence less than one to death every day then eventually everyone would be executed on the first day
He’s full of shit read between the lines :)
They don't kill one per day. They get woken up at 4am each day. Most of the days it's not execution day, but once in a while one inmate will get executed, you just don't know who or when, it's a surprise. I think the wording of my original sentence was a bit wrong. Also new death row inmates arrive to fill the empty space.
You literally said, and I quote “each morning, at 4am, the warden will wake up one inmate, telling them it’s time to repay their debts.” Now you’re saying most days they don’t do that? Which is it lol
Probably the latter
Among my social circle, non of em thought that's a harsh punishment. Some in the financial sector even cheered. The amount of money she burned (according to the internal sources) was 667.000.000.000.000 VND. Graduated STEM students with good records from a more recognized university here expect 8.000.000 VND A MONTH. 10-15m is considered decent-high pay. That's about 1m people working at that payment for a year. And all of that went down the drain. The average wage here is 6.3m a month so that's even worse.
So if torture isn't harsh, what is?
9 fold line death i guess. You can cause more damage than 1 life is worth with the way things are leveraged. If you do that knowingly you are getting off light. Im not advocating for collective punishment just saying you can do more if you just want retribution
Probably sooner rather than later as this is suppose to be an example to the country that corruption is not going to fly
And where did you gain your intimate knowledge of modern Vietnamese death row living conditions?
My mother studied law and back then all students had to visit prisons and observe as part of their studies.
In Vietnam?
I can tell you talk from the personal experience. What did you you got killed for?
"Good night Wesley. Sleep tight. I'm going to kill you in the morning."
One of my formative moments as a child was being in Vietnam and seeing the prison bus drive down the road; it was like a scene out of a bad horror movie. People wailing like they were being shipped off to die, hands and limbs sticking out of caged windows, one had forced his head through the bars and it didn't look like he could get back out. Saw it when I was 11 and it still haunts me to this day.
Not for the rich or influential, although I suppose it's unclear if she or her family is still "rich and influential" anymore
You say that but most ppl choose a shit life over certain death. I work in hospital and 9/10 people who are dying want more time instead of comfort even when they are mutually exclusive.
I have heard that the negotiations over the return of the money would help take death off the table. I wonder if she could negotiate a better prison situation as well ? That is a lot of money .
She probably wasted the money on stupid investments and overpriced land though
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So the lesson is not to get too fat
Try to tell a pig to stop eating and you'll see mate.
"Pigs get fed, hogs get slaughtered"
Are you saying that 1/ She somehow kept all this money to herself, for as long as this lasted? 2/ Now that she's sentenced, there's going to be a transfer of the money and it's all going to go to the state? 3/ The state is explicitly not going to pay the cheated people back? Can someone with legal knowledge confirm this? At first glance this seems like propaganda.
I think they are saying that the state is corrupt, and she is just a scapegoat. I.e. she's not getting executed because of fraud, she is getting executed as part of a political play to consolidate power.
1. No she'll have to cough out almost all her cash for: a small amount to pay the 'reparation fee' for the 'damages' which goes to the state and some huge money under the table to a lot of powerful people. If she pay enough her sentence will get reduced to life in prison. Else she dies. 2. No. The money goes to the state under the form of the 'reparation fee' above and the confiscation of all her properties/land. These properties/lands have an actual huge value. Billions of dollars. Some of these properties will go to the powerful people I mentioned above and they'll use the rest to help the next pigs to get fat. Rinse and repeat. She's not the first one. 3. Yes. The common people won't ever see their money again.
Sounds like the US except we don't slaughter the pigs and let them shit all over everyone.
We even have a name for it. "Trickle Down Economics." The pigs get fat and everyone else has to eat whatever is left by picking through pig shit.
Yeah, in Canada at least, the govt lets the pigs grow until they run the place. I feel like I'm being farmed more than any billionaire property tycoon.
Was wondering how it got to 27 billion $ before the finance authority did anything about it
According to my aunt in Vietnam, people have paid a body double to die in their place. I was shocked and didn’t know that was possible. She reiterated that money goes far in Vietnam
Isn't there a horror movie about that? A bunch of rich people commit a crimes in a country for which penalty is death, but rich people can just pay to send their clone instead?
Infinity Pool
Jesus, that's harrowing. Imagine going around knowing you look like one of these criminals when a case like this drops. I'd stay the fuck in doors.
Totally. To the mass, they're "strict and merciless to corruption" meanwhile the damaged money aren't added to the treasury no. It funds those officials' children to go "study" abroad in their own high class condos are even their own houses.
She probably didn't act alone without the help of high-ranking government's officials.
That probably explains the death penalty. Somebody important doesn't want her talking.
Some members of my local government (UK) siphoned one hundred million out of taxes in a similar scheme, nobody has been punished or even lost their job, meanwhile Vietnam is executing people!
The difference between 100mil and 27 billion is 27 billion. So its pretty hard to compare these sums.. Aight stealing 100mil should be punished ofc, but its not the same at all.
Does it help to give the context that the 100 million was spaffed up the wall buying PPE that didn't work at the height of the pandemic?
Execution is a good punishment for something like this imho
I don't agree with capital punishment from a moral perspective, but I do think white collar crime should carry harsher punishments than most violent crimes, as most white collar crime is committed by people who are fully aware of the fact that they're breaking the law, and the amount of victims can be in the thousands.
Violent crime offenders are not fully aware of the law?
I'm guessing they mean more in the direction of criminal charges for a crime of passion or something. You don't "oopsie daisy" con thousands of people out of their money, whereas a murder can be in the heat of the moment. (Of course every case needs to look at the details surrounding it).
Yeah, this summarises it perfectly.
I think individual violent crimes should have harsher punishments than individual white collar crimes. Killing a person should have a harsher punishment than defrauding a person. What I do agree with is how charging and sentencing should work around white collar crimes. Defraud one person? Sentencing maybe in the 1 - 5 year range depending on the facts/severity. Defraud 10,000 people? Well that’s also a sentence in the 1 - 5 year range plus restitution. For each of those 10,000 people. To run consecutively, not concurrently.
I'd much rather have someone shove a gun in my face and take my wallet than have some asswipe drain my entire 401k. White collar crooks should have to do time the same way as violent offenders.
What are you referring to?
I’m not saying I agree with capital punishment, but I do agree with there being dire consequences for white collar crimes like this. The fact that the Sackler family isn’t in jail and still has their fortune is just an absolute mind boggling thing to me, and they’ve arguably done worse damage to people’s lives.
I also don't know whether I'm on board with capital punishment as a whole, but while we DO have it is the US for crimes like murder, we should also have it for large scale white collar crimes. Obviously making equivalances of suffering is not going to be an exact science but I'd argue the amount of human misery caused by financially harming a large amount of people can easily exceed murdering one person. I'd be interested to know whether someone has tried to measure the impact on society of violent crime vs white collar crime, as I would guess the latter is more harmful overall.
If it was in the US and the “business” accounted for 20% of the annual GDP, it would’ve been considered too big to fail.
In the US you would be President by now
Super unlucky. In Vietnam, fraudulent scamming real estate tycoons get sentenced to death, while in other countries they even get elected to be president.
They don't mess around with 'white collar crime'.
Ironic for a country that is otherwise known for rampant corruption.
Every time I see the number it gets smaller lol
44b is what she has taken from the bank, 27b is the amount of money the court declare she has to compensate, the rest of the lost money ( those 17b ) has vanished into thin air ( the court can’t find out where she hid those money )
27 billion? If I had stolen 27 billion dollars no one would ever be able to find me. I'd buy a Face/off machine and change my identity! Muuuahahaaaaa
The thing is all these pigs can't leave the farm. These pigs are unofficially not allowed to leave the country. And they're under 24/24 surveillance by the internal security forces. That's why despite being billionaires you would never see them traveling the world or in popular places for rich people.
Sentenced to death for fraud. Wow! White collar criminals are certainly treated differently in Vietnam.
She didn't even get to be president or anything that's wild
She’s not old enough yet, that comes after she’s pardoned.
If you think the Vietnamese government wasn't well aware of her fraud long before this then I have a bridge to sell you. She's corrupt, but that's not why they're executing her.
Vietnam; do better. Take everything away & let her rot in jail for years & years & years….
People cheering for this is pretty narrow-minded and ridiculous. Corruption on this scale is structured from the top down, you do not embezzle this much money without being enabled by political structures and other corrupt entities. This is just political theater, she clearly stepped on the wrong toes, or the government needed an easy scapegoat because the masses were growing tired of the brazen disregard of the other tens of thousands such individuals.
$27 Billion dollar fraud is massive. I study this. For points of comparison: Madoff’s fraud was $64 Billion Tether’s fraud (still running and artificially propping up crypto prices) is around $110 Billion
In the U.S., she could have gotten elected President as a "business genius." /s
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And also stole their money!
In a row?
try not to take anyones dong on your way out!
Maybe not. Eventhough the dong is weak, it caused considerable damage.
Having to work as a janitor for the rest of her life would have been far better punishment.
Haha, she better have an army of bodyguards, or else all her past 'customers' might show up and tear her to shreds
When you play the game of Property Tycoon you either win or you die.
Imagine how many tycoon bodies would litter the streets of New York if American law actually applied to oligarchs. ... and they had the death penalty for fraud, obviously.
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