Truong My Lan: Vietnamese billionaire sentenced to death for $44bn fraud
Truong My Lan started life as a market trader. Now, she has been convicted of stealing billions.
I don't think death sentences should be a thing.
I almost agree, as there are only very few crimes, and in absolutely certain circumstances, where I think a death sentence would be appropriate. As an example, cases like Anders Breivik.
Not trying to excuse his actions but read the _Early life and reports of abuse _section.
This guy is a product of a mentally ill mother who abused him. Imagine being 4 years old and your caregiver keeps telling you she wished you were dead. Not a recipe for a well balanced individual.
My point is yes, his place is in prison. But if you want to prevent other acts of this kind, social and mental services need to get better. They clearly failed in this case, more than once.
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.
I agree. Truong My Lan could just as well, lose her assets and spend her days repaying her debts to society. You know, on a normal person's wage, trying to make up for billions upon billions. Should be enough time.
as someone opposed to prison-culture, I would suggest instead forcing them to contribute to society meaningfully through acts of service while losing privileges such as running businesses, sitting on boards, and reducing their ill-gotten gains to something akin to the average income and redistributing their stolen wealth to benefit communities.
Them sitting in a cube doesn't help society, but if they were forced to solve homelessness or else face The Cube, that would be better.
They were arrested for ripping off people who were already rich. Nobody cares if a billion poors get ripped off.
I say turn them over to the Mechanicum and have yourself a new servitor loyal to the empirium.
In America they would likely do time in a country club prison if they didn’t only get fined for less than they profited in the fraud.
The only time they would get punished at all in the US is if they fucked over other billionaires. Even then, only maybe.
I bet that's part of why she's in this situation, rich people lost money. Lots of corrupt government officials also want the spotlight to stay on her. I mean of course in addition to the fact that she did ruin many people's lives...
"I sentence to you ten years, with 9 years 360 days credit for time served, and a $25 fine. Your incarceration shall consist of checking in once weekly via Zoom."
..."which we just did. You are now free to go."
Depends on who they defrauded. Millions of poors? That's just a mild case of affluenza, set her loose with a big tax cut and an interest-free loan.
She can appeal still, and they are doing it as an incentive for her to return 27b. I imagine she will attempt to return a large portion, appeal and then just be given life in prison.
Don't kill them. Redistribute their wealth.
Redistribute their wealth, then set their parole parameters: hold an average job in food service or retail; live in an average apartment off those wages; keep that up for a set number of years, without external assistance from any third parties.
Let them experience how the rest of us live.
Anything made in excess of that in any way is seized and applied towards repaying the fraudulent debt.
Plus constant checks to verify their life style is conforming to that, and seize one fifth of their salary until the debt is paid off
In this particular case, she's hidden money overseas and the death penalty is being used to compel her to recover and return it.
Removed by mod
Now do the other billionaires.
More seriously though, this is fucked up.
Fucked up is the amount of suffering inflicted on others is required to amass billions of dollars. I'm sure I'm preaching to the choir, though.
I'm not for the death penalty. She should be in prison for the rest of her life without a chance of getting out. Can't say I don't understand why they're opting for the death penalty though. 44 billion is a fuckload of money. Like more than the gdp of 84 countries.
It's been widely reported that the death sentence may be a plot to get her to return the money. If she does this she may have her sentence commuted on appeal.
Normally I'd say that if you empower the state to execute a certain class of person you can look forward to the state changing that definition so that inconvenient people who did nothing wrong meet it, but I'm unlikely to be mistaken for someone who has committed 10s of billions of dollars in fraud and I can't help but feel like maybe if just one robber baron is held responsible for the enormous suffering they cause in pursuit of an amount of wealth so vast that it can never be spent and essentially only functions as a high score then the rest will realize that there is the sharp, distinct possibility that they can be held responsible as well.
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.
cool to see white collar crime actually fucking punished, for once in my lifetime.
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?
It's just semantics at the end of the day, so not too important, but I'll play along because I happen to be someone who will call the U.S capitalist, but doesn't understand why people call China communist.
First, I'll start off with some definitions. If you disagree on one, provide your own and we can use those for the sake of discussion.
Capitalism is an economic system based on the private ownership of the means of production and their operation for profit.
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Socialism is an economic and political philosophy encompassing diverse economic and social systems characterized by social ownership of the means of production, as opposed to private ownership.
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Communism is a socioeconomic order centered around common ownership of the means of production, distribution, and exchange that allocates products to everyone in the society based on need. A communist society would entail the absence of private property, social classes, money and the state (or nation state).
So essentially the easiest way to determine if your society is capitalist or socialist is the existence of private property. If the society is devoid of private property, then the question remains what kind of socialism is it (is there money? Markets? Social classes? A state?).
China isn't even socialist by this definition, but even if it was, it would still be miles away from communist.
This is a rather reductionist view of capitalism, socialism, and communism. To understand these systems, we need to take a look at the actual literature.
In 1776, Adam Smith published his work "An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations," which defined the cornerstones of capital, money, and value theory in the context of the changing economies of the 18th century. Smith's work is known for concepts such as "the invisible hand" and "competition prevents exploitation" through free market capitalism.
In 1867, Karl Marx published his work "Das Kapital," which offered a critique on some of capitalism's theories. This work provided the foundation for work on class theory, class struggle, and the notion of socialist/communist states. The key definitions being that capitalism separates the workers (who contribute labour) from the capitalist class (who contribute capital and thus machines and forces to improve productivity) and that socialist states place increasing control of these productive forces in the hands of the state (as opposed to the capitalist class). The other key work towards these notions is "The Communist Manifesto," written with Friedrich Engels. The slogan "From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs" is perhaps the most representative.
Following Marx, Vladimir Lenin wrote critiques of capitalism and described how revolution could be used to achieve a socialist and (eventually) communist society. Mao Zedong's writings discuss the ideas of revolution to achieve socialism and communism from a Chinese perspective, rather than the Russian one that Lenin had. Crucially, while Marx had written on the socialist transition as one for the advanced capitalist societies of Germany and England, Lenin and Mao approached it more from the perspective of how socialism could be realized from the predominantly agricultural economies of Russia and China.
In 1936, John Maynard Keynes published his work "The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money," which looked at savings and consumption in the context of the Great Depression. This work forms the foundation for much of modern fiscal and economic policy in the West. Keynes called for government intervention in support of the economy, deviating from Smith's notions of a free market.
Perhaps the most relevant ideas on the topic today are from Deng Xiaoping Thought, which provided concrete ideas of developing Chinese socialism in the context of a capitalist global economy and in the context of China's predominantly agricultural economy. This work was kick-started by "Putting into Effect the Socialist Principle of Distribution According to Work," which described how China was unable to make progress from the primary stage of socialism due to the lack of productive forces which could be leveraged. Remember that Marx' writings were written from observations of the great industrialized European powers, not the perceived agricultural backwaters of Russia and China.
The crucial concept of Deng Xiaoping Thought is the idea of a socialist market economy. Crucially, that socialism inherently involves the elimination of poverty (pulling people up) rather than the moderation of productivity (pulling people down). As per Keynes, a planned economy with government intervention does not preclude capitalism, and the lack of one does not preclude socialism. Indeed, per Keynes, public ownership of property did not preclude capitalism, and by extension Deng Xiaoping Thought argues that private ownership of property does not necessarily preclude socialism. Indeed, Engels work on the subject discusses that the abolishment of private property cannot happen immediately, and instead proposes alternatives (progressive taxation, inheritance taxes, development of state-owned enterprises) in the meantime for those countries struggling to get past the primary stage of socialism.
Just as a true Smithian free market capitalist economy does not exist, a true Marxist end-stage socialist economy does not exist. If you've any interest in this space, the works of Smith and Keynes on one side and Marx, Engels, and Deng on the other side provide pretty complementary coverage of things. In this framework, Smith, Marx, and Engels can be treated as one group (laying the foundations of the work) while Deng and Keynes can be treated as the ones building on top of those core ideas to adapt them to the realities of the situation (for Deng, China's agriculturally-dependent economy, and for Keynes, the Great Depression).
In practice, we can see the obvious differences between the American and Chinese economies. Whereas the US economy is led by giant multinationals, China's is led primarily by SOEs. Whereas US billionaires who hold productive forces are essentially invulnerable to government prosecution, Chinese billionaires are not. Whereas land in China is either owned by the state or by farmer collectives, land in the US is mostly privately held.
So essentially the easiest way to determine if your society is capitalist or socialist is the existence of private property.
India is considered socialist, even though it has private property.
something something contemplating anything more than the two existing options is too difficult and cannot be done.
This is a very rare situation that almost never happens.
Eighty-five others were tried with Truong My Lan
All of the defendants were found guilty.
Uh... either the scale of fraud is huge, at the level of a crime syndicate, or they are convicting some innocent people. Usually the government overcharges people to encourage confessions, leading to some people being found innocent.
Do we really think the Vietnamese prosecutors are the best in the world? Maybe the jury really hated these people.
Vietnamese law prohibits any individual from holding more than 5% of the shares in any bank. But prosecutors say that through hundreds of shell companies and people acting as her proxies, Truong My Lan actually owned more than 90% of Saigon Commercial.
They accused her of using that power to appoint her own people as managers, and then ordering them to approve hundreds of loans to the network of shell companies she controlled.
The amounts taken out are staggering. Her loans made up 93% of all the bank's lending.
The scale of fraud was huge.
She was a nobody in the 80s. The Mafia wishes they were this successful.
This is only possible with a corrupt system enabling behavior like this. I can see why Prime Ministers were caught up in this.
The Vietnamese government is highly corrupt, the billionaire could probably pay them off.
I Propose we make any Fraud worldwide over a Billion Dollars punishable by Death to!
Man, if you think this is actually about fraud and she had dump trucks of cash in her basement...
"Show trial" usually means "nit a real trial and the person may be innocent". The tone of the article is that she did the crime.
I am confused.
Has nothing to do with the legitimacy of the verdict, it's just a specific type of trial with a specific purpose.
She was going to be silenced, because if she lived, more people would be exposed
Yes
It kind of feels a bit weird being done officially.
You know we're living in strange times when the commies are doing something good.
the commies
Like resisting imperial forces in their country? Helping in WW2?
That's been too long, people can't even remember what their own government promised during their election campaign.
And "helping" is still a major understatement
Talking about the Russians who fought side-by-side with their Nazi pals up until Hitler decided he wanted their country too?
Yikes
Executing people who screw over investors?
In some cases, yes. We should do the same here in the USA once the value of a person's theft exceeds a limit based on the value of a human life. There is a number for that based on earning potential and some other factors. Give it a multiplier (maybe ten times the value of a life but that's for bean counters to figure out) and also consider mitigating factors like we do in homicide cases. Somebody who steals enough to wipe out many lifetimes of hard, honest work may not be directly killing anyone but theft at that scale has destructive and deadly consequences.