Truong My Lan, a 67-year-old Vietnamese property developer, was sentenced to death on April 11 for looting one of the country’s largest banks over a period of 11 years.

It was the most spectacular trial ever held in Vietnam, befitting one of the greatest bank frauds the world has ever seen.

It’s a rare verdict – Truong My Lan is one of very few women in Vietnam to be sentenced to death for a white collar crime.

Image source: AP

The decision is a reflection of the dizzying scale of the fraud. Truong My Lan was convicted of taking out $44 billion in loans from the Saigon Commercial Bank. The verdict requires her to return $27 billion, 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.

The habitually secretive communist authorities were uncharacteristically forthright about this case, going into minute detail for the media. They said 2,700 people were summoned to testify, while 10 state prosecutors and around 200 lawyers were involved.

The evidence was in 104 boxes weighing a total of six tonnes. Eighty-five others were tried with Truong My Lan, who denied the charges and can appeal.

All of the defendants were found guilty. Four received life in jail. The rest were given prison terms ranging from 20 years to three years suspended. Truong Truong My Lan’s husband and niece received jail terms of nine and 17 years respectively.

The trial was the most dramatic chapter so far in the “Blazing Furnaces” anti-corruption campaign led by the Communist Party Secretary-General, Nguyen Phu Trong.

A conservative ideologue steeped in Marxist theory, Nguyen Phu Trong believes that popular anger over untamed corruption poses an existential threat to the Communist Party’s monopoly on power. He began the campaign in earnest in 2016 after out-manoeuvring the then pro-business prime minister to retain the top job in the party.