Vietnam Sentences Lan to Death Over Fraud.

Last Week, the Vietnamese real estate magnate Troung My Lan was sentenced to death after being found guilty in a massive financial fraud trial. Vietnam is a country that has been plagued by corruption, particularly in and around the COVID-19 pandemic. According to an AP report, Lan was illegally involved with the Saigon Joint Stock Commercial Bank and set up 2,500 loans, which caused the bank to lose $27 billion. Lan grew famous in Vietnam by founding the real estate firm Van Thinh Phat. The Ho Chi Minh City court leveled such a harsh sentence because Lan was at the head of a well-organized criminal network, and there was no chance of her repaying the court-ordered $26 million to the bank. According to Al Jazeera, her lawyers have 15 days to appeal the death sentence.

Vietnam’s Ongoing COVID Corruption Scandal.

In recent weeks The Vietnamese government has been conducting a widespread anti-corruption crackdown. The head of the communist party, Nguyen Phu Trong, is driving this crackdown. According to an article by The Washington Post, two deputy prime ministers in Vietnam have resigned because their staff members have been detained on corruption charges. The allegations involve taking bribes during the COVID pandemic. One staff member was alleged to have taken bribes while purchasing COVID test kits, and another staff member was alleged to have taken an illegal payment from a transport company repatriating Vietnamese citizens who lived abroad. This is on top of a former deputy health minister being sentenced to four years in prison for being involved in a counterfeit medicine scheme.

Recently, an article by Aljazeera reported that the President of Vietnam, Nguyen Xuan Phuc resigned from his post after an internal Communist Party investigation. Phuc was said to have “taken political responsibility as leader when several officials, including two deputy prime ministers and three ministers, committed violations and shortcomings, causing very serious consequences .” An article in The Guardian stated that Phuc’s resignation might also be tied to political infighting in the Communist Party. It was also reported in an article by Radio Free Asia that the head of the agency related to vehicle registration was arrested on charges of taking bribes from the directors of regional vehicle registration centers across the country. It is clear that more high-profile names will likely be caught up in this mess.

Going Bust: The Troubles of Michelle Mone

Recently, Baroness Michelle Mone, a member of the House of Lords in the United Kingdom, has been facing allegations that she and her family have unethically profited from government contracts awarded at the beginning of the pandemic. Mone is well known in the UK for founding Ultimo, a designer lingerie brand, leading to the nickname in some quarters of the UK media as “Baroness Bra.” On November 23 of last year, The Guardian published an exclusive saying that Mone and her children received £29 million ($36 million) from the profits of a company called Medpro PPE. Medpro was given a £200 million contract to provide Personal Protection Equipment (PPE) through the so-called “VIP lane,” where the government appeared to hand out contracts to companies with close links to people in government. Some of the PPE Medpro provided to the government proved defective and is currently sitting in warehouses.

In the case of Mone specifically, according to a follow-up article in The Guardian, it is clear that the Baroness had a much less stressful pandemic than most people. She and her then fiancé, a businessman named Douglas Barrowman, bought a luxury yacht called the Lady M. It is alleged that Barrowman received 65 million pounds in profits through the same scheme and then passed 29 million pounds of that on to an offshore trust that Mone and her children control. recently, The Guardian published an article saying Mone is taking a leave of absence from the House of Lords to try and clear her name. It is unclear what will happen next, but it appears that Baroness Mone has some explaining to do about how she may have profited off the misery of millions.