ASEAN Beat | Society | Southeast Asia
The property developer Truong My Lan is currently serving a life sentence for masterminding Vietnam’s largest ever corruption scandal.
A luxury Maybach car and two white Hermès handbags once owned by the imprisoned Vietnamese property developer Truong My Lan were last week sold at an auction for more than $1 million, part of an effort by Vietnamese authorities to recover funds linked to her multibillion-dollar fraud.
Lan, who headed the real estate company Van Thinh Phat, was in 2024 sentenced to death on multiple counts of bribery, violating banking regulations, and embezzlement. She was convicted of using “thousands of ghost companies” to embezzle 304 trillion dong ($12.54 billion) from Saigon Commercial Bank (SCB), causing total losses of $27 billion between 2012 and 2022.
While Lan’s sentence was later commuted to life in prison after Vietnam removed the death penalty for selected criminal offenses, the authorities have been spending months attempting to recover lost assets from the case.
