Summary
Vietnam’s High People’s Court upheld the death sentence for real estate tycoon Truong My Lan, convicted of embezzlement and bribery in a record $12 billion fraud case.
Lan can avoid execution by returning $9 billion (three-quarters of the stolen funds), potentially reducing her sentence to life imprisonment.
Her crimes caused widespread economic harm, including a bank run and $24 billion in government intervention to stabilize the financial system.
Lan has admitted guilt but prosecutors deemed her actions unprecedentedly damaging. She retains limited legal recourse through retrial procedures.
returning $9 billion (three-quarters of the stolen funds)
You can keep the 3 billion and live?
reducing her sentence to life imprisonment.
but it has to be in jail?
She still deserves to be in jail. $12 billion is no small amount, and if she can pay back that $9 billion, or even if she can pay back the entire amount, she still had committed a serious crime and deserves to go to jail.
And don’t even think about her keeping that $3 billion. That’s illegal money that she still needs to pay back.
ok, so why not just have that be the condition for the removal of the death penalty?
Perhaps it’s a realization that under the circumstances of a forced sale, she couldn’t possibly repay the total. In which case, with death inevitable, could she leave it to a loved one instead? Probably it could be seized but there’d be a legal tangle which repayment would avoid? Just speculation.
You can keep the 3 billion and live?
No, as another comment pointed out, that isn’t legal. The assets she has from her embezzled money aren’t liquid; she doesn’t have $12 billion literally sitting in a bank account. These have to be sold off for đồng, and especially if she’s forced to quickly sell them off in exchange for her life (somehow another reason why the death penalty is stupid), she’ll likely retrieve substantially less than she could otherwise by being able to wait for better opportunities to sell.
