How One Woman Stole 3% of Vietnam’s GDP

this video is brought to you by ground news welcome to another episode of Cold Fusion think of all the major Bank frauds that you've heard of from JP Morgan rigging precious metals markets to Wells Fargo making up fake consumer accounts and scamming customers to all of the banks involved in The Reckless greed of 2008 a disaster that damaged the global economy no justice is ever served nobody goes to jail and no one in power seems to care but what if the opposite happened what if white col criminals were served the ultimate punishment this is the

story of a woman who's just been sentenced to death in Vietnam trong Myan didn't murder anyone she didn't traffic drugs she didn't commit treason but what she did do was commit a fraud so enormous that it amounted to around 3% of the entire country's GDP in the past few minutes a court in Vietnam has sentenced a wealthy proper developer to death for defrauding a bank of billions of dollars 67-year-old trong Milan was found guilty of embezzlement bribing State officials and violating Bank lending regulations after she used her hidden ownership of the Saigon Commercial Bank to

channel $44 billion of loans to her own companies it's been described as one of the greatest Brank frauds in history and how for over a decade did this woman allegedly steal so much money without anyone taking her down get ready for a wild ride as we dive into one of the biggest fraud cases in history this is bigger than teros or Sam bankman freed and it's a scandal that stained Asia's fastest growing economy you are watching cold fusion TV Trang Milan was born in 1956 in Saigon South Vietnam to a modest but entrepreneurial family scared

her story really begins at the benthan market an iconic and bustling Hub known for its intense bargaining culture Lan learned how to hustle from an early age as a teenager she and her mother became a familiar site at the market selling Cosmetics together detectives always look to a corporate's early life for clues about why they did what they later did but with Lan her early life doesn't give much away there were no telltale signs that we know of and nothing that would point to the criminal mastermind that she'd eventually become Lan's negotiating skills must have

really been something because by the mid 1990s she ventured into the property market and founded F Thin fat group around this time Vietnam was undergoing a transformation reforms had opened the doors for private businesses and families to compete but land was officially under State control so getting access to it would require some serious charm in Your Arsenal to sway State officials trong my land's rise was as dramatic as her fault in 1992 she met Eric trueu napne an investor from Hong Kong they got married had two daughters and built an Empire of restaurants hotels and

properties across Vietnam and Hong Kong and her wealth exploded if we check out our typical profile of a white collar criminal this all fits the bill with seemingly no reason to break the law so that's why it's always so infuriating when they do they get greedy and as you'll see they just want more and more and more around 2010 is when things start to go dodgy Mrs Lan was a major player in Vietnam's Financial scene and her company was one of Vietnam's richest real estate firms she was powerful and had good standing with the community

because of this and presumably her connections she was entrusted with arranging the merger of three struggling Banks into the Saigon Commercial Bank which will call SCB in this video the plan was approved by Vietnam Central Bank big mistake from 2012 she began to siphon funds she gave loans to herself and her friends and paid bribes to government officials to keep them quiet and from here her power would remain unchecked for now so aren't there supposed to be laws to stop this from happening well there were Vietnamese law clearly caps an individual's ownership in a bank

at 5% but somehow over the years she ended up owning 90% of the bank so how on Earth did she manage to own 90% step one in Lan's multi-billion Dollar Bank fraud scheme set up thousands of shell companies she put the ownership of these companies and Bank shares in other people's name so a cursory glance from the outside would look like a healthy and diverse range of leaders and CEOs controlling the bank's subsidiaries and partners but in reality it was just her whoops and then it became an inside job Lan stacked the deck with her

own people she hired trusted Associates as managers at SCB and instructed them to approve loans to her network of shell companies around the world these companies often had no operations or employees she would use fake contracts to move money out of the country as the scheme grew she needed more people to be in charge of her ever growing list of fake companies her husband her niece and other family members got involved 93% of the approved loans at SCB went straight into Trung my land's pocket with this setup Lan now had billions of dollars in customer

deposits to play with imagine finding out that each time you deposit money 93 cents out of every dollar disappears into one woman's personal piggy bank to do whatever they please in the decade leading up to arrest Lan lent herself $44 billion in illegal loans so how on Earth does no one notice that much money missing well it turns out that people did Lan was a household name in Vietnam her position at Saigon Commercial Bank held her in great esteem but her never-ending access to liquid Capital meant that it was pretty obvious that she was up

to something her Shady dealings were an Open Secret yet she passed audits from Big names like de white and KPMG with flying colors even if a regulator became suspicious and decided to dig deeper Lan would hand out bribes like candy take the Chief Inspector of Vietnam State Bank do Nan who accepted a $5 million bribe this was the largest bribe ever recorded in Vietnam and it was delivered in Styrofoam boxes to put this bribe into context top government officials in Vietnam ear around $1,000 per month a $5 million bribe could set the inspector and her

family up for life but instead life in jail is all she received it gets even crazier over the course of 3 years Lan instructed her driver to withdraw 108 trillion Vietnamese Dong from the bank and store it in her basement this was the equivalent of $4 billion us even if he withdrew all of that cash in Vietnam's largest bank note denomination it would weigh 2 tons moving this kind of money without anyone noticing seems unlikely but that's the thing in a country when so many people are struggling to get by a bribe to look the

other way can be life-changing that's why so many people accepted L's hush money and why she could get away with it for so long however her luck was about to run out and her Empire was about to collapse Vietnamese authorities were undertaking a scorched Earth policy on corruption [Music] the thing about Vietnam is that it's a one- party state so there's not always an incentive or competition to keep those in power honest however since 2013 one of Vietnam's most powerful politicians n Fu Chong had been leading an anti-corruption campaign called blazing furnace trong realized that

corruption within the Communist party was actually a threat to their power and in order to regain the trust of the Vietnamese people they needed to create an image of a clean government for years the Blazing furnace campaign focused on public sector corruption in Vietnam talk of cracking down on corruption wasn't new and probably fell on a lot of deaf ears including those of Mrs Lan so while Lan was busy bribing and siphoning cash the Communist Party began to take corruption in the private sector more seriously as the US China trade War raged on companies scrambled

to find new manufacturing locations the Communist Party knew this and through the Blazing furnace campaign they promised to make Vietnam a cleaner and safer place to do business foreign business investment poured in and companies like Samsung LG and apple pumped billions into high-tech manufacturing the anti-corruption drive was paying off and Vietnam became Apple's biggest manufacturing Hub outside of China but there was a flip side to this anyone found to be corrupt was going to be in hot water and the more corrupt you were the hotter the water and trong my landan was the most corrupt

of all in October of 2022 Lan was arrested and less than 2 years later she was sentenced to death it sounds wild I know but the reason for this punishment is both surprising and not so surprising hang tight I'll explain in a bit but for now the initial Fallout from Lan's arrest was huge police identified around 42,000 victims Bond holders and ordinary people who trusted SCB with their life savings the court trial was televised and was a spectacle like the country had never seen the 104 boxes of evidence presented in the trial weighed 6 tons

land's Empire was so massive that it brought a once strong housing market to its knees property firms shut down in record numbers and authorities seized over a thousand of lands properties highrises across Hanoi and hoim Min City now sit empty post arrest even Vietnam Central Bank had to step in to prevent a financial meltdown they pumped $24 billion in quote special loans into SCB to avoid a bankr run the government also turned to foreign investors to help stabilize the situation quote without lending SCB will collapse if the lending continues the national treasury will gradually dry

up end quote ironically some analysts think that the arrest backfired and made foreign investment skittish right at the time when Vietnam was poised to be the next Global manufacturing hub in April of 2024 Trang Myan was sentenced to death for embezzling $ 12.5 billion and that's just the amount the authorities could prove to put that into perspective that's like someone in the United States stealing $ 7632 billion land's arrest shocked the nation but the death penalty verdict even more so capital punishment in Vietnam is relatively common but it's rarely applied in cases of financial crimes

especially with someone with no prior convictions so what's the story behind the move well there's a lot of perspectives for One Time Magazine published Vietnam sought to make an example out of Lan end quot and this makes sense considering the verdict the defendants actions eroded people's trust in the leadership of the Communist party and state end qu but the question is was L sentencing more about politics than the justice for a victims potentially some experts think that the Communist party used her as a human sacrifice just to show the world that they were taking corruption

seriously if Lan had just received a live sentence the story probably wouldn't have made Global headlines and authorities wouldn't be able to push their narrative others speculate that the whole thing could just be a ruse a method to terrify Lan into giving up more of her stolen assets and accompli they think that if she settles the outstanding debts of $28 billion maybe she'll be spared in the end land pled not guilty and blamed her subordinates she admitted that she was involved in the restructuring of the bank but did not misappropriate its funds she also told

the court that by her getting into the banking industry without sufficient experience and quote a lack of understanding of legal matters got her into the situation the courts didn't buy it and all in all 855 people were charged including Lan's husband who was sentenced to 9 years in prison and Lan's niece who was sentenced to 17 years two former Executives of the SCB Bank have fled the country and are still on the run before we continue let's hear a quick word from today's sponsor ground news Apple has made Headway towards its first unionized store in

the US it's interesting to see how this news is covered by different outlets and that's where today's sponsor ground news comes in ground news is a website and app developed by a former NASA engineer she was on a mission to give readers an easy data driven objective way to read the news using this apple story as an example we can see that 54 news outlets from around the world covered the story The biased distribution chart shows me the political leanings of those outlets and I can get a summary of how the issue was being framed

the left tended to be more favorable to the Union's perspective emphasizing workers voices and future gains meanwhile the rot focused on the deeper historical significance of the agreement referring to previous Union activities and Strikes for other more politically charged stories ground news is helpful to get the full picture of different perspectives scrolling down I can compare every single news article on the topic with convenient tags these showing me more context about the source like how factual it is and who owns it so ground news is a fantastic tool for getting International views sifting through misinformation

and identifying media buas they provide you with all the tools you need to be a critical thinker today we're offering 40% off Advantage subscription this comes with a feature called my news bias so you can even check how your news viewing habits change over time I also love their blind spot feed this shows you stories that are under reported by one side of the political aisle for example if you are on the right you probably missed the story about Elon Musk sharing a doed video of Camala Harris potentially violating ex's guidelines go to ground. news/

coldfusion to get started thank you now back to the video to Vietnam where a property Tycoon has been sentenced to death in the country's biggest ever financial fraud case 10% of a country's GDP and nobody noticed but you're saying she bribed people but she must have bribed an awful lot of people for that to go either unnoticed or unchallenged I'm sure the officials knew about that but uh they were just they they just pretended to look the other way because uh her main Patron used to be a very powerful man he was the party chief

of hoim City and a member of the powerful poit Bureau of the Communist party so he was one of the top 15 or so uh leaders of the country so he was so powerful and he was uh ruling hoim Min City like his own fif the 2008 financial crisis showed us just how much we rely on banks to be run fairly it revealed the devastating impact of unchecked greed on society but this case was different it made it very clear that even the very wealthy aren't immune from consequences the bottom line here is this trong

Milan had every opportunity to stop she was already wealthy before the scheme but she didn't stop at $100 million $1 billion or even 10 billion it seemed like no amount of money was ever enough and she paid the ultimate price but I'll leave the question up to you do you think that this is too harsh of a punishment what counts as a fair consequence for stealing 3% of a country's GDP in fraud that's something that we all have different takes on and that is the story of how one lady scammed $44 billion so thanks for

watching my name is deogo and if you're new here feel free to subscribe to Cold Fusion okay so I'll see you again soon for the next episode cheers guys have a good one [Music] [Music] [Music] cold fusion it's new thinking