She was going to be silenced, because if she lived, more people would be exposed
cool to see white collar crime actually fucking punished, for once in my lifetime.
I am all for billionaires facing consequences for their actions. The death penalty is still deeply immoral though. Locking financial criminals up like for example the American state did with Martin Shkreli or Sam Bankman-Fried though is completely o.K. and should happen more often.
The death penalty is still deeply immoral though.
The decision is a reflection of the dizzying scale of the fraud. Truong My Lan was convicted of taking out $44bn (£35bn) in loans from the Saigon Commercial Bank. The verdict requires her to return $27bn, a sum prosecutors said may never be recovered. Some believe the death penalty is the court’s way of trying to encourage her to return some of the missing billions.
It appears to be a method the courts are employing to encourage her to surrender overseas assets.
In this particular situation, that $27bn is over 5% of Vietnam’s GDP. This is a very significant hit to the nation’s financial stability and one that will likely result in substantial number of excess deaths entirely due to increased poverty. I can see the threat of execution as a method to compel repayment as necessary.
In a better world, foreign banks complicit in Truong’s 11 year long theft would cooperate to return the stolen money, thereby making this threat unnecessary. But so long as foreign financial institutions can hold a nation’s wealth hostage, all the Vietnamese state leadership can manage is to respond in kind.
Disclaimer: didn’t read the article yet.
But surely someone can’t commit such a huge fraud alone. Nobody at Saigon Commercial Bank is involved or culpable for loaning that amount to a fraudster?
But surely someone can’t commit such a huge fraud alone.
Right. I’m less upset by a single individual facing execution than I am not seeing a dozen other crooks lined up on the docket.
Don’t kill them. Redistribute their wealth.
In this particular case, she’s hidden money overseas and the death penalty is being used to compel her to recover and return it.
in socialism rich people have way less influence to snake out of consequences. good on them.
Political power projection and the manuevering to hide corruption is the ‘rich’ equivalent in highly socialist systems. Smart adaptive people are not necessarily moral or ethical people, so regardless of economic system or government types, you will always have the worry of unscrupulous opportunists.
If Vietnam has billionaires then why the f*ck were they fighting against capitalism in the Vietnam War? North Vietnam might as well have just asked to join South Vietnam and they could have skipped 20 years of wars. Looks like all they were really fighting against was democracy.
The South Vietnamese governments were all extremely repressive and pretty much openly fascist. The US pretty much didn’t care so long as they were opposed to communism (a recurring theme in US cold war foreign policy)…
So much of that was wrong. The last government was not “openly fascist” Thanks to the USA, it was democratically elected. North Vietnam was 100x more repressive than South Vietnam in 1975.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/South_Vietnam
Under pressure from the US, they held elections for president and the legislature in 1967. The Senate election took place on 2 September 1967. The Presidential election took place on 3 September 1967
The US should really be congratulated for not installing a fully fascist puppet government that one time.
Even in that last election, 57% of the voting age population voted, which sounds great but it was 84% of those eligible to vote. Huge swathes of the population were not allowed to vote due to their political beliefs or past opposition to the government.
Even in that last election, 57% of the voting age population voted
That was actually better than most countries.
The big picture is that the Vietnamese dictatorship did exactly the wrong thing. Creating a billionaire class proves that they ditched socialism. But they kept the dictatorship. They should have instead entrenched socialism and become a democracy. That would have been a very interesting thing to see. That they did exactly the wrong thing proves that North Vietnam’s entire reason for fighting the war was a farce.
Are they really fair elections if the communist parties, the ones with large rural support, are banned from taking part?
They were not fighting against capitalism, they were fighting for independence. They didn’t care who supported them, they just needed support. Because France was in the West, and had Western support, the only external support they could easily find was communist. So they put on the Communist hat, but they really cared about independence
The history is fascinating
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Viet_Minh
the Việt Minh established itself as the only organized anti-French and anti-Japanese resistance group.[6] The Việt Minh initially formed to seek independence for Vietnam from the French Empire. The United States supported France. When the Japanese occupation began, the Việt Minh opposed Japan with support from the United States and the Republic of China. After World War II, the Việt Minh opposed the re-occupation of Vietnam by France, resulting in the Indochina War, and later opposed South Vietnam and the United States in the Vietnam War.
They were not fighting against capitalism, they were fighting for independence.
Both North Vietnam and South Vietnam gained their independence in 1954. So whatever they were fighting for in the 1960’s, it was definitely not “independence”.
The history is fascinating
Yeah, but I was talking about the Vietnam War against north and south of the 1960’s. Not the separate colonial war against France in the 1950’s.
That isn’t how they saw the situation. Colonial powers drawing lines on maps has famously been a way to make people happy with outcomes
https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLdUa84NB-3eiXhRtECg8mwCr6JDwgPtty&si=yC8tKjh058A9uxZo
Here is some fun documentaries to watch
That isn’t how they saw the situation
“They” == North Vietnamese propaganda. The actual facts are that colonialism ended 10 full years before the US sent troops to protect South Vietnam. This was a civil war, not a colonial war. It doesn’t matter what North Vietnamese propaganda wants you to think. It matters what reality is. If all your information is coming from youtube you are definitely getting your information from the wrong sources.
Colonial powers drawing lines on maps has famously been a way to make people happy with outcomes
Doesn’t apply at all here. The only ‘border’ they were fighting over was the border between North and South Vietnam. And that border was created by North Vietnam, not by any colonialists.
sigh
Do people consider the US to not be capitalist because of SEC regulations, the FDA, FAA, and other organizations impeding the free market? Do people consider the US to not be capitalist because of tariffs on, say, Canadian aluminum?
Why do people consider only end-stage communism to be true communism? Why do people consider only end-stage socialism to be true socialism?
Because there is text book pretty and harmonious communism, and there is the read thing in practice which is always bloody, hungry, horrible, and just absolutely terrible
No country in the world has claimed to achieve communism. What are you even trying to say?
This is why citing Wikipedia leads you astray. For example, read more carefully into what the CPC actually claims. They do not claim to have achieved communism.
Because “technically correct but so so wrong”
Uh huh…
Read what the CPC actually claims. It’s rather enlightening.
English language journalists opt for the more sensationalist take rather than the more accurate one.
I don’t think death sentences should be a thing.
Neither should billionaires
Now do the other billionaires.
More seriously though, this is fucked up.
Anyone worth more than a billion dollars is guilty.
Some are more guilty than others, and she’s definitely near the top of the list.
Still, curious to see what a Socialist country like Vietnam does when its prosecutors catch a person like Truong My Lan red handed. Its such a far cry from what American prosecutors did with offending bank managers after the 2008 Financial Collapse or the UK prosecutors who investigated the Wirecard scandal or the SEC/FCC responded to countless instances in which Elon Musk got caught manipulating stock prices.
Goes to show you what happens when your country has a tyrannical government and its billionaires don’t enjoy any freedoms.
I Propose we make any Fraud worldwide over a Billion Dollars punishable by Death to!