Vietnamese property tycoon sentenced to death in $27B fraud case | Hacker News Reader

Vietnamese property tycoon sentenced to death in $27B fraud case

theguardian.com

270 pointsspxneo332 comments

The details of this are just wild: According to prosecutors, over a period of three years from February 2019, she ordered her driver to withdraw 108 trillion Vietnamese dong, more than $4bn (£2.3bn) in cash from the bank, and store it in her basement.

That much cash, even if all of it was in Vietnam's largest denomination banknotes, would weigh two tonnes.

Typically the bankers are also often in on this.

Eg. during India's infamous demonetization, it was rumored that lots of bank-managers had struck inside-deals with politicians/industrialists to turn large hordes of cash into 'white' money. It's likely that they also used the new low-overhead 'jan-dhan' accounts to turn cash into thousands of bank-deposits.

This is not just the 'developing-world' issue; the whole of UK economy is based on such scheming done everyday in the City (and the 'out-of-jurisdiction' isles of the Commonwealth).

All Economies work this way. See Pareto's Circulation of the Elites. It covers under what conditions Elites take each other down. And Elites go down only when other Elites want it to happen. Not because of any rule of law.

Would chairman Mao or comrade Lenin be considered elites in this case?

Of course, at least once they came into power. Violent revolutions can replace the old elites with new ones. It's still not rule of law that took down Tsar Nicolai or the early Republic of China.

In that case the original premise does not hold. If you only become an elite once you're in power, then it wasn't the elite who chose who gets to be in power... No circulation.

Yes, the previous poster was somewhat wrong. Elites can only lose power in two ways: either other elites want them taken down (the most common case by far), or a violent uprising takes them down (very very rare).

Their more important point is that the rule of law doesn't apply to the powerful. For example, a sitting president will never lose their office simply because they broke the law. They can break any law they want, as long as they have the other elites on their side.

> the whole of UK economy is based on such scheming

Excellent book on this:

Butler to the World - How Britain Helps the World's Worst People Launder Money, Commit Crimes, and Get Away with Anything.

https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250281937/butlertotheworl...

She is/was owner of one of the biggest banks there.

If I understood the figures I looked up correctly, she had about 8% of the entire printed/minted Vietnamese Dong currency in her basement (1,352,910 Billion VND in circulation).

There's a certain point between $5M and 4B where I wold just get out of dodge and buy a new identity.

5M (truthfully its probably a lot less) is about the number where it gets hard to participate with the rest of the world without leaving behind a easy to follow trail.

Buying a house needs a bank account and other things and then someone in the chain eventually asks "where did you get this money?" and unless your answer is "I have owned these sweet shops in central London and empty takeaway restaurants for decades and they unfortunately only deal in cash" then someone will catch you.

Once you reach a certain amount, there are plenty of advisers and ways to launder money.

There’s more than a few wealthy former corrupt officials having a nice comfortable life in countries in south america or countries like Malta, cyprus etc…

It’s harder if you don’t have much money (used to be relatively easy with a low amount of money but the oecd has been very efficient at tightening things for people with less than a few millions)

Many are the ways of money laundering. $5m is small change. A popular thing for Vietnamese is just sell some property unofficially offshore.

Russians buy houses in Cyprus. A lot of high end houses in London are owned by iffy money.

If you treated it like a full time for a year I'm sure you could clean the money though. Especially if you want to retire to a less developed country. Just open a low cost of entry business that accepts cash, and scale up from there.

Run a bar for a few years.

That’s where I got my first 4 billion too!

My head cannon is that Cristal exists only for money laundering.

She did try to renounce nationality

You need to stave off greed and the feeling of invincibility to get there. Which she obviously failed.

Holy shit. Now that’s a statistic. That’s a country of a 100 million people.

That's not the wildest part.

She stole 6.6% of Vietnam's yearly GDP in total.

That's like someone stealing $1.6 trillion USD in the US. Madoff only stole $35 billion for comparison.

Some might say that the death penalty is barbaric. But I read an opinion recently on this that said death seems like a better deal for this person than a lifetime in the worst prison possible.

Edit to my post above:

She actually stole 10.7% ($44b) of Vietnam's yearly GDP in total. The 6.6% figure was the amount that she couldn't return.

So it's like $2.7 trillion USD in the US.

Stealing this proportion of a country's money by one person is simply unprecedented.

Is there a reason she couldn't return that much? Was it already spent or locked in offshore accounts? Or given to other accomplices?

What you just said. Some of the money left the country. Her husband was a Hong Kong businessmen. No doubt a lot of money was “lost” through there.

>But I read an opinion recently on this that said death seems like a better deal for this person than a lifetime in the worst prison possible.

If that's the logic, then logically she should be presented with that choice. Otherwise, its a morally thin excuse (not yours but theirs).

Yeah. I still find it hard to visualize though.

A 1 meter x 1 meter x 1 meter container full of water would weigh about 1 metric ton. That’s how I usually think of 1 metric ton.

If I saw a 1 meter x 1 meter x 1 meter neatly densely packed bunch of money bills on top of a euro pallet. I would have no idea if I was looking at the equivalent of some hundreds of thousands of dollars, or billions or what.

I went through this exercise a while back randomly sitting on my couch wondering how much it would cost to fill my house with $100 bills.

For your purposes, assuming $100 USD bills, 1m cubed is roughly 71 million USD.

A 2000 sqft house with 8 foot ceilings, 42 billion.

Why is it that every site with a similar headline is reporting a different amount of billions? Wonder if they are all converting it differently and then using the wrong countries units or something.

Because most western news outlets are crap at Tieng Viet.

The BBC headline is correct (as they hired a lot of Vietnamese speaking journalists, some of whom have been targeted for assasination and kidnapping by the Vietnamese govt [0]).

The amount stolen was $44B. She needs to return $27B to not be executed.

[0] - https://www.theguardian.com/media/2022/sep/30/bbc-accused-of...

>The amount stolen was $44B. She needs to return $27B to not be executed.

Ah, that's the context I was missing.

OP's article states:

>A total of $12.5bn (£10bn) was embezzled, the equivalent of almost 3% of Vietnamese gross domestic product, but prosecutors said on Thursday the total damages caused by the scam now amounted to $27bn.

Yes, that's the point of contention being discussed. E.g. https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-68778636

> My Lan was convicted of taking out $44bn (£35bn) in loans from the Saigon Commercial Bank. The verdict requires her to return $27bn

> The amount stolen was $44B.

Quite funny that you forgot to denominate the currency here. As a non-US reader (we actually exist on the Internet!), it wasn't $44B in my currency.

I assume it is US$ ?

This is really so obvious that it doesn't merit a discussion.

Yes, it is US dollars.

Why should you assume $ refers to USD?

Because the US is the global superpower. Trade and banking reserves overwhelmingly use USD.

No other currency, and certainly none that use the $ symbol, even come remotely close to the USD.

In my opinion, it is always better style to write US$ or USD than just $ - it is only a couple of extra characters, and it helps avoid any potential confusion

I particularly hate businesses which sell stuff internationally who put $ on their website rather than US$ / AU$ / etc. You can’t assume that just because it is an American company that $ means US$, because some (but far from all) American companies detect the customer is coming from Australia/Canada/whatever and automatically display localised prices. And don’t get me started about the websites that seem to be offering too-good-to-be-true deals on Australian hotels until I realise they are actually showing US dollar prices, but $ instead of US$ makes that non-obvious

All that international trade and banking you talk about refers to it as USD or US$, not $.

To 95% of the world, the relevance and influence of USD isn’t remotely close to their own currency’s. Sure, it’s relevant to some industries and to the larger economy – that makes it like CNY or EUR are to you, nothing more.

I do think a USD assumption is reasonable, but only because the statement was made on HN, which is predominantly American. USD does not own the $ symbol outside of the US.

It absolutely does. If a French person or Japanese person or Brazilian or Russian or Chinese person sees a $ sign in relation to international news, I can assure you they will assume USD.

Of course, a Canadian or Australian, or New Zealander, or Rhodesian, or Zambian, whose local currency also uses the same symbol, will tend to assume their local currency instead. But they are a minority of the world's population.

Why not be explicit if there is room for misinterpretation or confusion, which this thread clearly demonstrates?

Especially on a thread specifically talking about currency conversion.

> All that international trade and banking you talk about refers to it as USD or US$, not $.

That is not true. For example on foreign exchange markets "Dollars" means USD. If you want AUD it's "ozzie", and if you want CAD it's "Loonie"[1], and NZD is "kiwi".

[1] I don't make the rules - FX markets are weird. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loonie

> This is really so obvious that it doesn't merit a discussion.

It does merit discussion. This has been demonstrated. The parent shouldn't be downvoted for pointing out the ambiguity to an actual global population that exceeds the United States of America by some margin. It's not about being a "superpower" it's about clarity of communication and eyeballs.

Just like the date 04/10/2024. Is that a few days ago, or in a number of months? Wheras 2024-10-04 makes it explicit (in a sane way that denotes a clear hierarchy of values).

I'm guessing 100% of the downvotes are from the "global superpower".

Is it? The dollar sign typically refers to USD if not otherwise specified.

I would consider it ambiguous only if used in a Canadian or Australian context. (Or other country that uses $ for their currency).

Only in the US, just as the NZ$ is implied in NZ, AUD in Oz etc

Certainly when the local media here reports on how much Donald Trump has to pay they convert from US$ to NZ$

I think in most of the world, $ implies USD unless otherwise specified. The only exception are the few other countries that use dollars, where naturally $ is assumed to mean their local $.

Imagine how insane it would sound if I went to a Ukrainian news website and insisted they label their currencies because "some of us are from America (yes we do exist!) so I don't know if this is USD or the hryvnia!"

You'd tell me to pull my head out of my ass, right?

The Vietnamese newspapers are actually using dollars for their local audience for this case when written in Vietnamese.

The actual number in VND is hard to reason about, even for the vietnamese locals. When 1 million VND is 40 dollars, that's not helping.

America is not the only country to use the $ symbol and therefore it is necessary for the purpose of clarity to ensure you demoninate which dollar you are referring too.

The location of the news website is irrelevant.

I dunno

I'm Canadian, I live in Canada, I earn CAD, My whole economic life is in a context of non-US dollars

But if I see $value in an unknown context online I assume it's USD

I think it would be really goofy to assume otherwise

You’re being intentionally obtuse here, we’ve already established that the context is sufficient to make non-USD assumptions absurd and you’re attempting to further the argument by restating points that have already been stated and refuted

Fine, change Ukrainian to Australian and my point still stands.

In my personal experience, Australian journalists are generally pretty careful to distinguish Australian dollars from US dollars from other dollars when reporting on international stories, at least in the article body (headlines less so, but the journalist normally has no say in the headline). Of course, for domestic news, it goes without saying that “dollars” means the local currency

USD (and Euro) is widely used in UA. You actually have to specify what currency you will pay with. Foreign currency may get you a better deal on gas station and other shops.

The person in question is indeed very guilty but death sentence in 21st century? What kind of an archaic system allows it?

Civilizations that prioritize the overall safety and wellbeing of society over "individual rights" tend to have more harsh penalities to safeguard society and it does work, and rarely needs to be executed.

More "liberal" countries have real societal problems that cannot be solved because "individual rights" stands in its way.

Are you saying that systems with the death penalty are less corrupt? That's a funny take especially coming in under an article about one of the largest fraud cases worldwide where the perpetrator gets the death penalty.

What societal beacons of moral rectitude were you having in mind?

She's executed only if she does not return at least $27b of the $44b stolen.

I used to think the same until contemplating how many destroyed families the drug trafficking penalties of Singapore have prevented.

I hope you also contemplate how many innocent people (usually undocumented migrant workers) have been scapegoated in drug trials and executed…

I used to support the death penalty, but inevitably it is used by the state against the vulnerable, poor, and politically weak. If there’s even the possibility of one innocent person being killed, it is a perverse justice.

That certainly doesn't seem to be the case here.

Having drug trafficking laws to prevent (potential) destroyed families is one thing (though I think all drugs should be legal and no government should have right to dictate what you can put into your own body, but that's not the point at this thread), but regardless of the extent of the crime, I think death sentence is unacceptable in any civilized justice system.

You really did not give any arguments for why it is unacceptable.

Cause innocent people are sometimes wrongly convicted, and sentenced to death. Life behind bars without the possibility of parole achieves pretty much the same effect for public safety, while still giving the wrongly accused a chance to live. There are also rare cases in which new evidence overturns their conviction decades into their sentence. If they're put to death, they never get that chance.

Context is important here.

Considering Asia's history with drugs (European imperialists growing drugs in their colonies and then selling them to China to destroy their population), it is completely understandable and a societally acceptable trade off.

I think after a few more generations of escalating drug use harming our societal well being, we may resort to similar measures.

U mean like, people why had a few grams on weed on them?

Nobody is getting executed by having a few gr of weed on them, one needs to actively distributing it and in large amount (500 gr). Singapore is very strict but they’re not executing their citizens for consuming drugs.

Where would you cut off be?

They don't cut off in Singapore. It's death by hanging.

How many exactly?

How many families have the Singapore government's authoritarian policies prevented from even existing, given it's got the third lowest fertility rate in the world; hardly evidence of a place where people feel comfortable to raise families.

Hans Rossling's talk, "The best stats you've ever seen" had something to say about this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hVimVzgtD6w

Urbanization and education are the two most effective ways of getting a population to have fewer children. Singapore is a highly educated and urbanized country.

I am pretty sure cost of living is #1 reason and certainly not education.

I just hope their population will be replaced by the Indians and Indonesians working to sustain their economy. Same goes for Dubai.

If that happens, it will come to resemble an Indian or Indonesian city.

This is a bit of a weird comment about Singapore because a significant part of their population is and always has been ethnically Indian (Tamil)

The authoritarianism isn't why sg has a low fertility rate anymore than it being the reason the birth rate is below replacement in the west which isn't considered authoritarian.

How many people died indirectly based on her actions? She stole 6.6% of the yearly Vietnam GDP.

Maybe some families were saving up money for a cancer treatment? To start a new family by buying a house?

A death sentence is reasonable in a lot of cases. Nothing archaic about it.

I think every civilized society should execute one of its billionaires once in a while, pour encourager les autres.

I'm against the death penalty for anyone. But this is one of the least bad reasons to have it.

Well, many states in the United States for one, but point taken.

Then justice system in those states are just archaic as this one too.

probably more so, they only kill poor people

I'm not against the death penalty, in principle, but applying it risks both the moral and, slightly more more important, the judicial legitimacy of the system. Therefore, if it is to be considered and applied then moral care and sound judicial logic are paramount. Whatever the amount of stolen money, currency theft on its own it will never rise to the objective moral and logical base-level required to apply the death penalty. If the governments of developing nations want to be seen as other than basketcases, they need to be more judicious than this.

> Whatever the amount of stolen money, currency theft on its own it will never rise to the objective moral and logical base-level required to apply the death penalty

If we take it as a given that people spend large parts of their lives, mostly forced (as in they would not work if they didn't have to), we can see money as being a direct representation of human life.

If someone stole X dollars, you could extrapolate it to entire lives that were stolen. How many suicides happen over money for this very reason?

Making a case for the death penalty given those priors is not hard, especially for stealing from the impoverished.

Why are financial crimes morally exempt in a way that, say, violent crime is not, even if the aggregate damage from the financial crime is greater? Unless you’re arguing that this isn’t possible?

I agree. In my corner of the universe (the US) I think the sec, Finra, doj, fbi need the pendulum to swing back 35% to correct for being too nice.

What would happen if we had two kinds of c-corps? One fairly if strictly regulated leading to fines, civil cases, and criminal cases in exceptions

And option two ...

Very light regulation but if a regulatory agency or fbi finds malfeasance only criminal charges, jail time, loss of lawyer license, inability to serve at public companies and more ie. hardball.

Maybe the elites should choose their risk level. I think it'd say a lot.

HN here delivers again. I’m voraciously consuming all this commentary. It’s very fascinating. I’m learning things I never knew about Vietnam. Props to Alephnerd and others for such intensely interesting commentary.

Some commentaries are heavily biased and borderline conspiratorial.

I am Vietnamese, currently still living in the Vietnam, and I believe the VCP is doing what they are saying on the can: purging corruption (rather than this being political purge).

Just as concrete counterexample on why it is not merely political purge: In the past 3 years, the last two Presidents of this term both had to resign due to corruption, the first one related to covid testing kit was from the Northern faction. The last two Chairman of People’s committee of Hanoi (basically Hanoi’s mayor/ governor) were also removed and arrested for corruption.

Someone below was wondering what the trigger for this was, so here is it: people were tricked into buying bonds by SCB (My Lan’s bank) when trying to opening saving account. Some lost their entire life saving to the bullshit bonds, and to this day I still occasionally see protester in front of Vietnam’s state bank (it is on my daily commute).

I am not saying there weren’t political infighting, but past few years weren’t it

>> Some commentaries are heavily biased and borderline conspiratorial.

yeah, just want to echo what NhanH said above. Please factcheck or ask for citations. Some comments are borderline conspiracies.

hrmm perhaps i got swindled by one who can speak so confidently -- either way -- i will have to collect all inputs (thank you all who responded) and use my best judgement and perhaps own research to confirm. it's too easy to be swindled these days and even my critical thinking might be not strong enough

> Props to Alephnerd and others

Be careful with some of the comments, and commenters, here. Just yesterday Alephnerd was confidently proclaiming there are no tuk-tuks in Thailand anymore. This is just.. completely, easily provably false and it's baffling why anyone would make such a claim. Source: me, who lives there. Fact-gathering methodology: looking out my window.

I would take anything from these commenters with astounding tales of the "inside scoop" with more than a pinch of salt. When there's a story with a bunch of mostly unverifiable claims, and the part that is verifiable turns out to be total nonsense, it makes me more than a little suspicious about the rest of it.

> Just yesterday Alephnerd was confidently proclaiming there are no tuk-tuks in Thailand anymore.

That's not true. He claimed there are no tuk tuks outside of tourist centers. Tuktuks are mostly used by tourists and getting phased out by the government as they are deemed unsafe.

I don't know what you guys are playing at. He said Thailand had "transitioned", past tense, to cars. And I walk, ride or drive past tuktuks outside of tourist centres almost every single day. The government is starting to try and phase out ICE tuktuks, because of noise and pollution concerns, and new electric ones are being introduced to replace them. They are not being phased out because they're deemed "unsafe".

Literally everything you said is wrong. Trivially, provably, wrong on all counts. Why are you making these type of comments?

Yes. They even talk about ghost cities in India. That alone makes me doubt everything they say.

I watched these three videos were pretty informative on the case:

https://youtu.be/GmAcpqZPrMQ?si=7JUYg7itjba_uGaN

https://youtu.be/KudcZvoP3C0?si=tF1DKfFoJmolGn5m

https://youtu.be/jv-j5AS3Fz0?si=lzRg0XhyNqtS3q9V

There’s other cases namely flc group

That much money is less about getting caught but more about falling out with someone.

I've travelled to Vietnam a lot over the past couple years for work and my SO's family, and there is a lot of rot in the VN economy that has finally caught up to it.

Most of the growth could be attributed to Korean, Japanese, and Chinese conglomerates spending a LOT of money moving factories from China to VN in the 2014-22 period after China started trade wars with Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, and the US.

While this lead to massive capital expenditures, the average Vietnamese person's life didn't change too drastically, as most of the investments were located in Hanoi (Chinese) or HCMC (Korean+Japanese) and only captured by the capital owning class. While there are more FMCGs and brands now, almost everything has a luxury tax on it or is imported from the US, Thailand, or South Korea, and even Temu quality clothes cost as much as they would in the US, and furthermore - rent is insanely high in HCMC and Hanoi, so 50-60% of your income is spent on rent alone.

Furthermore, party apparatchiks decided to maximize the graft they could partake in by investing heavily in boondoggle hotel and apartment projects (similar to the Ghost cities you see in China and India).

When the COVID pandemic happened, the gravy train ended.

Vietnam followed a zero-covid policy that caused migrant workers to return to their hometowns, and there was a massive corruption scandal around COVID testing infrastructure and repatriating Vietnamese migrant workers from abroad.

This was also around the time an internal conflict began brewing between the Northern VCP (supported by the VinGroup billionaire who is also from Vietnamese Military royalty), Southern VCP (supported by this billionaire), the Army (they own Vietnam's largest telco and most of the PSUs), and the Ministry of Public Security (they have the dirt on everybody and are the actual enforcers in Vietnam).

Basically, the MPS backed the Northern faction and won this round, and the Army stayed out of this fight in order to keep making money.

That said, all this upper level turmoil (under the guise of a corruption purge) dented investor confidence recently, along with some very prominent infrastructure collapses like the power outages and the internet slowdowns.

For example, this past Tet people didn't spend as much on fireworks or red money compared to the 2023 Tet, real estate projects have started slowing down, and it's not uncommon to see abandoned construction projects once you leave HCMC or Hanoi.

If you're part of the expat Bui Vien/D1/Thao Dien scene you wouldn't notice this kind of stuff (they're too busy huffing balloons/nitrous despite it being banned in VN leaving surgeons to physically restrain patients), but once you go to "real" Saigon (eg. D10, D8) let alone outside of HCMC/Hanoi/DaNang/DaLat these issues become very prominent.

This is a fairly good overview of some of the changes I've (or moreso my SO) been noticing - https://asialink.unimelb.edu.au/insights/vietnam-the-purge

I was all with you until you mentioned,

"similar to the Ghost cities you see in China and India"

I don't think India has ghost cities in the way you mean.

> I don't think India has ghost cities in the way you mean.

"Ghost city" in this context almost always means "ghost district" or a bunch of ghost projects located in close proximity. I'm not sure about India, but in China, this is mostly the pattern (e.g. the new-town Kangbashi district of Ordos, or Tianjin's Yujiapu). We are not talking about actual ghost cities (Ordos and Tianjin would not qualify as such).

> I don't think India has ghost cities in the way you mean

There are plenty. Lots of Indian developers collapse due to corruption tangles or inability to secure financing, for example Jaypee Wish Town in NOIDA [0] or the New Chandigarh project in Punjab [1]

Builders will take down payments from buyers and start construction, but might run out of money, get caught up in some corruption scandal, or fail financial compliance checks now that India has been cracking down on bad loans after the IL&FS almost collapsed in 2018.

Luckily, India had UChicago and Harvard trained economic policymakers like Raghuram Rajan, Arvind Subramanian, and Krishnamurthy Subramanian (guys who if they decided to take American citizenship could have become head of the IMF or WB like their peers Ajay Banga and Gita Gopinath) reform the entire banking and finance sector in India. (And in all honestly, it looks like India might hit a similar bust in the next couple years now that the CEA is politically selected backbenchers now)

Vietnam has hit the exact same hurdle India's economy hit in the 2010-17 stagflation and China during the 2015-16 financial crisis - high capex spending but very low consumer spending leaving it open to backlash caused by FDI variability.

Lots of middle class Vietnamese have purchased condos or houses, but the builders collapsed or are in receivership. SCB (Truong's bank) is one of those banks financing these projects.

Unlike China or India, the backbench of experienced policymakers in Vietnam is kinda empty, as most development in the 1980s-2000s was done by international development agencies, and the rest was basically privatized and done by Korean, Japanese, and Chinese companies (eg. The incomplete subway systems in HCMC and Hanoi built by Japan and China respectively). And unlike China, Vietnam is still fairly early in the value chain with major players like Intel considering leaving [2], and unlike India, Vietnam doesn't have a strong consumer or tertiary sector that can cushion the blow [3]

A similar stagnation hit China in the 1990s after the Tiannamen Square massacre, but was resolved by allowing laisse faire capitalism and rolling out the red carpet for foreign and local investors, but the winning faction in this battle is much more skeptical of the anarcho-capitalism that arose in Vietnam in the 2010s.

[0] - https://www.thequint.com/my-report/i-dont-know-if-ill-get-ou...

[1] - https://www.gmada.gov.in/en/new-chandigarh

[2] - https://www.reuters.com/technology/intel-shelves-planned-chi...

[3] - https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NE.CON.PRVT.ZS?location...

> There are plenty. Lots of Indian developers collapse due to corruption tangles or inability to secure financing, for example Jaypee Wish Town in NOIDA [0] or the New Chandigarh project in Punjab [1]

Builders scamming isn't infrequent. But surely the scale is no where near that high to be comparable with Chinese ghost towns[1]? From where I am, Bangalore, I do come across a buildings half constructed or abandoned, but that's completely different from whole towns half/fully built but totally unoccupied. What am I missing here?

[1] https://interestingengineering.com/culture/chinas-ghost-citi...

There are abandoned city projects like Amravati, Lavasa and others. The scale and reason behind ghost cities in India is different. Most stop construction mid way due to financial or regulatory constraints.

Oh I wasn’t aware that Lavasa was abandoned. Though it had run into a host of challenges from the beginning.

Did Rajan try and stop demonetization?

Rajan and Arvind Subramanian were opposed. Krishnamurthy Subramanian (Rajan's former doctoral student from decades ago and now Executive Director at the IMF) supported it. My hunch is Krishnamurthy's support came because he worked closely with Luigi Zingales when they were at UChicago, and Zingales' economic philosophy strongly supported these kinds of shocks, plus it allowed Krishnamurthy to climb up the ladder.

Demonetization was brutal, but at least it pushed hundreds of millions from being unbanked to banked, thus making it easier to enforce taxation (while also converting black money into white money).

A similar shock will be needed for both India and Pakistan to revoke the Land Acquisition Act (the British holdover which has held back both countries), as well as to do a judicial overhaul.

This is a good overview of the economic reforms India needs to do to actually become a competitive economy - https://indiareforms.csis.org/

I had the exact same reaction as d3vmax - and quoting one paywalled article about a failed builder does not make “ghost cities” a thing in India. Yes there are fraudsters who cheat people and never build anything, but India does not have the same kind of ghost cities that China does.

Jaypee Group is not a small builder.

It used to be the largest builder in North India, but they were very close to Akilesh Yadav and the Samajwadi Party.

After BJP won the Uttar Pradesh state elections in 2017, Jaypee (which was already struggling with finances) lost a number of tenders in NOIDA, loans were called, and they along with other similar builders caused IL&FS to become insolvent.

It's very similar to the Ghost Cities you'd see in China in the 2000s

Also, India has Google Street View. Go explore OMAXE New Chandigarh, Sector 128, Kharar, etc.

Lots of half built buildings in middle India.

And this is why PMAY-U is being pushed so hard by all parties in India - it's an easy way to bail out builders without breaking financial laws.

You are very focused on the Noida scene. That's an outlier in the Indian real estate situation right now. Almost everywhere, there is a "shortage" of housing, forget about ghost cities. Also after RERA, a lot has changed. You seem very confident in your analysis but honestly you need to look up more.

The backbenchers are doing a better job than mr Rajan, growth numbers are easy to judge for all.

> Lots of half built buildings in middle India.

That's not usually what we mean by "Ghost cities". I just checked wikipedia to be sure, for both "ghost cities" and "under occupied developments in China"[1] which leads with:

     Under-occupied developments in China are mostly unoccupied property developments in China, and frequently referred to as "ghost cities" or ghost towns.

Half-built structures aren't comparable to the common understanding of the term "ghost cities".

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Under-occupied_developments_in...

That's what they mean in China as well.

The same way you book a flat from DLF and wait for them to build the shell, that's the same process if you buy a flat from Evergrande or Wanda (tbt)

Jaypee Group's failure is not the same as ghost cities of China. Ghost cities of China were fully built but people refused to move in. India has the opposite problem. Most people want to move in to the projects but the builder defaulted and could not complete the project.

India's half built cities are more of a financial fraud problem rather than people problem.

Not the same as China.

lot to unpack here but what i been told by my vietnamese coworkers is that this is "vietnamese pig butchering" (not like the one you hear about involving Tether).

They let fraudsters (pigs) accumulate capital by any means. Then they butcher it for political and financial capital. Government looks like a hero and they are able to keep the lights on.

In China, this has been going on for a while (ex. evergrande, HNA, Silicon Valley Bank, Tether) and online sleuths have uncovered crypto projects/funding from China are also another "western pig butchering".

SBF, Do Kwon are similar to Truong My Lan in that they are also "useful pigs" with many smaller "pigs" below them pulling capital into a "jurisdiction tor network". Some pigs are on the spectrum and do not require greed as motivation, simply the fame and recognition from having created "something" for other pigs is enough.

> They let fraudsters (pigs) accumulate capital by any means. Then they butcher it for political and financial capital. Government looks like a hero and they are able to keep the lights on.

Pretty much. This makes To Lam and Nguyen Phu Trong's faction look like saviors. Nguyen Phu Trong is too old to take the top seat, so this is basically paving the way to make To Lam the leader of VN by gaining public sympathy AND destroying any potential opposition from the Southern VCP and their affiliated oligarchs.

This is literally Xi's corruption crackdown in 2016 all over again, except Vietnam in the 2020s is nowhere near as rich as China was in the 2010s, so all this backstabbing bs has scared foreign investors away (even I backed out of funding an interesting VN product because of this - ik how China and India use the CCDI and ED, VN ain't worth that level of headache).

Are these northerners or southerners? Who are the "ruling elite" of Vietnam?

In South Korea, one particular region has produced 20 out of 22 presidents.

> ruling elite

There are 4 main factions:

Northern VCP - the original VCP founded by Ho Chi Minh, and ruled Hanoi since 1956. The current GenSec of the Vietnamese Politburo is from this faction and from that era.

Southern VCP - the more business minded and ethnic Chinese/Hoa cadre of the VCP. The last president and most of the purged cadre are from this group.

PAVN - the Vietnamese Army. they have been mollified by being given control of all the key sectors of the Vietnamese economy. Viettel (Vietnam's Telco) is owned by them and VinGroup's founder and CEO is the son of PAVN royalty

MPS - Vietnam's KGB. they hold the actual cards in Vietnam. whenever you go to any town, village, or city in Vietnam the biggest building is always the MPS building (even the local VCP's building is smaller).

The SCB chick was close with the Southern VCP faction, as was most of the leadership in Vietnam from 2012ish-2022. Due to the COVID slowdown and public anger against corruption, the Northern VCP decided to step in and cut the oligarchs and business minded types back to the ground. The PAVN kept out of this fray because they're making a lot of money, and the MPS backed the Northern faction.

> MPS - Vietnam's KGB. they hold the actual cards in Vietnam. whenever you go to any town, village, or city in Vietnam the biggest building is always the MPS building (even the local VCP's building is smaller)

I noticed this when visiting.

Go through a smaller town and you'll see old beat up buildings from decades ago, beat to crap roads or just unpaved, a bunch of small stores and restaurants, then suddenly a massive property (10-20x the side of a typical home lot) with a massive parking lot, fancy imaculate building that looks like it's pressure washed every morning and look up and it's the MPS.

You can pretty clearly see who has the money.

i would definitely watch netflix series on this, its fascinating!

Kdramas, JDramas, CDramas, Turkish Dramas, Indian OTTs, and HBO Eastern Europe (Umbre, Aranyélet) touch these kind of themes a lot.

It's a common problem in developing and newly developed countries

The region in question (Gyeongsang-do, split into two provinces in modern South Korean administration) was also the home ground of the Kingdom of Silla, which was arguably the first polity that unified the Korean peninsula, almost 1400 years ago. It shows how sticky these things can be.

Silla (East, Gyeongsangdo) destroyed Baekje (West, Jeollado) forcing migration en masse to Japan around mid 6th century then they finished off the militarily superior Goguryeo (North Korea) with the help of Tang (China) to create a single state for the first time. immediately started attacking Tang to reclaim old borders

Election results from yesterday reflect regionalism. Gyeongsang-do always votes conservative right, pro-US, pro-economy and Jeolla-do always votes socialist left, pro-China/NK/Russia with a leader who was a former defence lawyer for organized crime groups including his gangbanger nephew who murdered his girlfriend and her mother after a slight. He's next in line to be the president.

Korea has had 13 presidents. Out of those, the first 2 weren't from 경상도, 김대중 wasn't from there either and neither is the current president. 박근혜 moved out of the region to Seoul when she was 1 year old so hardly "produced" by the region. That makes for 8 out of 13, still a majority but nothing like 20 out of 22.

When I see pig butchering I thought of Cambodia/Myanmar. Mostly doing telephone/electronic scams while also kidnapping people to work for them and sell underperforming employees to human traffickers.

Who's "they" in this context?

This sounds wildly conspiratorial:

If governments don't crack down on corruption, they are enabling corruption.

If they do crack down on corruption, they are "pig butchering".

Most of the above are not true, or just outright conspiracies.

- There is no clear separation of North and South. Samsung, BYD, Apple etc all have factories in the North. These factories are labor-hungry and workers get better wages than let's say Nike's factories. Btw Nike has 155 factories all across Vietnam.

- Ms Lan & SCB case isn't that uncommon in Vietnam. It happened in the past with other banks at a smaller scale. Regulations for financial institutions are not strong here. Rich bank owners use bank as a facade to collect money from a lot of people to invest in usually real estate development projects. All is good until the market crashes and people find it hard to withdraw money. It's when state banks come in to take over, together with investigations. It happened to Ocean Bank, Phuong Nam Bank and others.

- The economy is bad right now. Vietnam economy is quite integrated to the global economy, and as factory country, it relies on mass orders from richer countries. When the West stop spending, people here lose their jobs.

- Real estate market bubble bursted last year. Many top developers are going under, including Van Thinh Phat (Ms Lan's company), Novaland, and potentially VinGroup if they don't course-correct it.

- War on corruption is real. 2 presidents (one of the four most important figures of the Pary) had to step down in the last couple of years . Several ministers, vice prime ministers, several Generals, and other members of the Pulitburo stepped down in the last several years as well.

Btw I'm a Vietnamese, and I'm not a member of the Communist Party :)

This is the kind of insider comment HN needs more of!

weird, this thread no longer appears on the front page...so i guess we won't hear anymore insider comments like this on Vietnam

Thanks for this awesome breakdown. I was wondering why this suddenly came by.

It's a system flaw which allows certain people to come into possession of such large amounts of money to begin with.

Ayn Rand said that when those who are receiving most of the money are dealing in favors instead of goods and services, that's when you know your society is declining.

The reason that billionaires and celebrities are monopolizing most of the money is because the monetary system has made the entire global economy about social connections. Although many people have the skills necessary to invest money efficiently in a just monetary system, because we don't have such a system, that skill is worthless and instead, in the current system, the money MUST go to politically connected people in order to get a return. The pool of politically-connected individuals is tiny as politicians can only deal with a limited number of individuals and cater to the needs of a limited number of corporations. That's why we have such extreme centralization and fragility.

Everyone laughs at (their meme-based strawman model of) Ayn, but she warned us about this.

Lots of her ideas were indeed simplistic if not downright dumb, but not all of them.

>> Ayn Rand said that when those who are receiving most of the money are dealing in favors instead of goods and services, that's when you know your society is declining.

She said that in 1957. So your argument is that society has been declining since 1957. And I have to admit that I find that argument rather hard to believe.

Society has, to me, obviously not been declining since 1957. It has been declining since 1959 (the year Buddy Holly died).

Ayn Rand fled the USSR to come to the US. I assume this nugget of wisdom came out of that experience.

Don’t take that Ayn Rand too seriously…

Death penalty for corruption? That seems barbaric.

Then I read there are a few countries that impose capital punishment for non-violent crimes: China, Indonesia (some acts of corruption which "damage national economy or finances"), Morocco, Thailand (bribery), Vietnam (bribery).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capital_punishment_for_non-vio...

I kind of see it as the opposite of barbaric. Someone stealing billions of dollars has caused far far far more net harm than someone committing a one off violent crime. I guess roughly tying consequences to harm caused seems less barbaric to me

Poverty kills people. (Statistically - you can't say "that person died from poverty", but you can say that a certain number of deaths were due to poverty.)

$27 billion is a lot of people in poverty who otherwise wouldn't be. How many people died (or will) from that? Died from lack of food, lack of shelter, lack of medical care, lack of hope?

Mind you, I'm not sure that the death penalty is the right answer. But if you accept the death penalty for murder, it's not completely absurd in this situation.

Not necessarily agreeing about this case, but a relevant quote:

> “Do you understand what I'm saying?" shouted Moist. "You can't just go around killing people!"

> "Why Not? You Do." The golem lowered his arm.

> "What?" snapped Moist. "I do not! Who told you that?"

> "I Worked It Out. You Have Killed Two Point Three Three Eight People," said the golem calmly.

> "I have never laid a finger on anyone in my life, Mr Pump. I may be––all the things you know I am, but I am not a killer! I have never so much as drawn a sword!"

> "No, You Have Not. But You Have Stolen, Embezzled, Defrauded And Swindled Without Discrimination, Mr Lipvig. You Have Ruined Businesses And Destroyed Jobs. When Banks Fail, It Is Seldom Bankers Who Starve. Your Actions Have Taken Money From Those Who Had Little Enough To Begin With. In A Myriad Small Ways You Have Hastened The Deaths Of Many. You Do Not Know Them. You Did Not See Them Bleed. But You Snatched Bread From Their Mouths And Tore Clothes From Their Backs. For Sport, Mr Lipvig. For Sport. For The Joy Of The Game.”

-- Going Postal by Terry Pratchett

And if I remember correctly, Mr Lipvig got the death penalty as well.

He was just given the, um, "choice", of taking the leap into the death penalty, or becoming the virtual prisoner of an extremely powerful "guardian angel". Who was in actuality more of a ruthless probation officer.

The message was clear, we should not be blind to the harm that indifference to corruption metes out on the larger society.

No sir, that was the late Alfred Spangler, and while hanging was rather excessive, at least he wasn't put into the scorpion-pit like a mime.

But slightly-more-seriously, I wouldn't read too far into the surface of the Ankh-Morpork dictatorship and criminal-justice system as a direct moral signpost for our times, since sometimes a plot device is just a plot device.

You will always get a +1 from me if you quote Mr Pratchett

Shades of Rimmer being prosecuted by the Inquisitor.

This sounds like an argument for revenge justice.

I think of the death penalty as a way to remove someone from society who is dangerous and where there is no foreseeable path to freedom. When their freedom means others are likely be assaulted and killed if they are allowed to go free again.

It's an argument for example setting, that this is the consequence of causing such an enormous amount of harm to society, including indirect and possibly direct deaths, for nothing put personal material gain. Deterrence. And the amount of damage these acts cause mean that even a 1% improvement in reducing the rate at which this happens, is worth it. The general problem with the death penalty is the risk of wrongful convictions, which is indeed a huge problem when applying it for things such as simple murder, as parts of the US have shown time and time again. Luckily, when talking about this kind of case, that's pretty much not an issue. "Whoops, we got the wrong person who stole $27 billion, it was actually someone else from a different town who looked similar!" is not something you'll hear. Framing someone in this way to get them killed is also a hilarious hypothetical, a less efficient way to get rid of someone is hardly imaginable.

I'd go as far as to say it's outrageous to argue that someone capable of the above is not dangerous to society and how they would have a foreseeable path to freedom. Their freedom would indeed come at a big risk of repeat grave harm to society. Another problem with imprisonment in cases like these is that these are exactly the cases which end up getting pardoned X years from now because parts of the power structure that they built up are still in place and will at some point come in politically handy for an opportunist.

>When their freedom means others are likely be assaulted and killed if they are allowed to go free again.

"Made to commit suicide" should be equivalent to killed here, and that is the case.

She owned more of a bank than she was supposed to, and used that bank to get bigger loans than she would normally be able to get, and then she bought commercial real estate with those loans.

Where does the net harm come in here? I guess other mega rich property developers were prevented from acquiring the commercial real estate...maybe a few hundred millionaires were harmed by this billionaire. Is there anything more than that?

Not entirely. She used almost 1,000 fake loan applications to to appropriate the $12.5b from the bank. Then 3 employees at the bank committed suicide from October 6th-14th in 2022 which resulted in a bank run.

There are 82 other defendents, many of them being leadership at the bank, with 5 of them in hiding.

> Where does the net harm come in here?

The harm comes from the possible worlds where the loans don't get paid back. That's the reason why there are loan limits in the first place.

Also if banks are loaning money to her, that's money that's not being loaned to other people.

There is some efficiency loss: capital was deployed less efficiently than it would have otherwise been, and that costs money, which means it costs lives.

Depending on the particularities of the corruption/fraud, that could be in the millions, could be in the billions. So anywhere from one human life to thousands. It's just diffuse, so we can't pinpoint a particular person who died due to it, just society at large.

(Not saying I support the death penalty for this.)

> Death penalty for corruption? That seems barbaric.

I find this a 'curious' pov. If financial fraud is affecting savings of many thousands of people, where savings = lifetime spent toiling, a view one may dare take is that there is little difference in killing someone (essentially robbing them of the leftover lifetime).

In a country like Vietnam, where about 13% of people pay into pensions at all [1], loosing your savings literally will shorten your life. Even if you're in those 13% btw, as you can't live off state-pensions[2].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pensions_in_Vietnam#Funding

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pensions_in_Vietnam#State_non-...

EDIT: I like to add that I am against death penalty under any circumstances.

But if you're in the US and are ok with death penalty there, I'd argue you should be, too, in the case at hand.

As someone else said, she stole 6.6% of the GDP

The equivalent in America would be 1.68 trillion dollars, which is 70 million dollars shy of the total amount of outstanding student loan debt in America.

I feel like if you only polled people who owe more in student loan debt than they make in a year if they would push a button to allow the single person who stole 1.68 trillion dollars to be executed by the state in exchange for 96% of their student loan debt vanishing into thin air (but being 1/(number of agreeing people) responsible for her death) then chances are they're pushing that button.

You’re leaving out a lot of countries that impose death penalties for non-violent acts that are victimless and not even crimes in the West.

For example adultery and apostasy:

“The following countries impose the death penalty for adultery: Afghanistan, Brunei,[1] Iran, Maldives, Mauritania, Nigeria, Pakistan[citation needed], Saudi Arabia, Somalia, Yemen, Sudan, Qatar.”

”As of July 2020, apostasy by Muslims (ridda) carries the death penalty in the following countries: Afghanistan, Brunei, Iran, the Maldives, Mauritania, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Somalia (implicitly), the United Arab Emirates, and Yemen.”

This is the height of state-sanctioned barbarism left in today’s world.

USA still has the death penalty?

The most recent execution by the federal government was 2021, after a gap of 17 years. A lot depends on who is president.

That sounded unbelievable, but Wikipedia supports it[0]. Last US federal execution in 2003-03-18 was followed by 2020-07-14. The first person executed in 2020 had been on death row for 21 years.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_people_executed_by_the...

It sounds unbelievable because its not correct[0]:

>Number of executions

>2025 —

>2024 5

>2023 24

>Total 29

[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_people_executed_in_t...

Those are executions by states, not by the U.S. federal government.

Yes, it does.

But criminal justice in the US is mostly dispensed at the state level of government, and many of the 50 states do not ever impose the death penalty:

https://dpic-cdn.org/production/images/StatesWithWithoutDP-M...

I am taking umbrage at your claim that adultery is a "victimless" crime.

However, definitely not death penalty worthy, even if anything ever was!

Who is the victim in adultery? The only injury is to some nebulous honor of the husband or wife. The actual problem is something the three people involved can sort out between themselves like grown-ups. No legal protections are needed.

We generally don’t have honor-based injuries in Western legal systems nowadays. Blasphemy, lèse-majesté, offenses against nobility privileges — these used to be serious crimes but not anymore. Penalizing adultery is part of that same outdated value system.

> Who is the victim in adultery?

Children. If there aren't any children, then sure, call it victimless.

But if there are children, an adulterer is directly harming them[1].

TBH, we often forget about children when dealing in family law. Another example that comes to mind is paternity fraud, where the argument is that there's no need to find the real father if the alleged father can be violently forced into supporting the child.

Everyone forgets that the child who is mislead about their father in that situation is the biggest victim. All the systems focus on the emotional well-being of the mother at the cost of the child's rights.

[1] Because, at this point in time, every single piece of evidence we have ever seen supports the assertion that children living through their parents divorce have worse outcomes.

I'm married with children. If my wife sleeps around and doesn't tell me (or the children), who was hurt? As far as I can tell, no one.

Yet laws prohibiting adultery would punish her for this activity with the assumption that I'm the victim even though I suffered no injury.

> I'm married with children. If my wife sleeps around and doesn't tell me (or the children), who was hurt? As far as I can tell, no one.

> Yet laws prohibiting adultery would punish her for this activity with the assumption that I'm the victim even though I suffered no injury.

I'm not following your argument.

If your wife sleeps around and doesn't get caught, how do the laws against this punish her?

If she does get caught then your children are harmed, in which case the laws will punish her.

I don't see how it is possible that she doesn't get caught and still gets punished.

As it happens quite often, you're mistaken about the apostasy part, don't know about the adultery one.

Apostasy itself isn't punishable; it's when someone "deflects" to the enemy side and colludes with them. At that point it's the 'treason' aspect that carries the punishment, not because someone says they don't believe in something anymore.

This is religious nonsense. Treason is about wars between states, not changing your religion.

Again, showing you don't know nothing!

I don’t know the specific of this case or what they do in East and South-East Asia. But we’ve had these discussions before. The point then is raised: say you have a white collar crime that downstream causes life-crippling financial misery for tens of thousands of people. On what grounds can one dismiss capital punishment for that crime as barbaric but then (presumably, by omission) not find that capital punishment for cold-blooded murder is barbaric?

Why is it more barbaric than death penalty for something like murder? How much damage would 27B in corruption cause to people and society?

Everyone steals in Vietnam.

Every time the communists change positions in the politburo, the new communist in charge arrests the previous one for corruption. And so it goes.

(Nguyen Xuan Phuc, the one who was hailed for zero covid previously, was later arrested for... stealing covid funds. Oh wow, who knew)

There is 0 trust between actual people for the party. People just shut up because the economy is doing fine and people have jobs.

I mean, if they're all corrupt, I don't really feel bad for them going after each other either.

My friend worked in Vietnam and Laos for several years. Every company had to hire a communist party member on staff who rarely showed up. When they did they would demand everyone go drinking, paid for by the company.

I own a company in Vietnam. I do not do this, and was never asked to do this.

To the best of my knowledge, neither have any of my other colleagues that own businesses.

I'm guessing because you don't have to.

A friend's fintech company in Vietnam (it's one that you know) was pretty much told to make room in the C-suite for a very well connected family member to the Northern power brokers. I agree there is no requirement to have a Communist Party member join the company, but someone with connections? Sure.

It matters whether it's a local versus foreign company. If it's run by Vietnamese (or Viet Kieu) or run by foreigners. It mostly depends on how much money is involved, as a small local business is small potatoes, but when you're talking about the companies raising $100M USD in a round, it starts to matter a lot.

And my friend's company wasn't exactly opposed to it, since it's a symbiotic relationship. Have a problem with getting a license? Having "that guy" call his uncle who sits on the regulatory body can expedite it. Of course, you have to share in the wealth so sweetheart investment deals get offered in return.

He told me you can't make it big (think the equivalent of Stripe in the US) without those connections because if you don't, your competitor will and suddenly you'll find that permit you were told would take 3 months has been "delayed".

Anyone who tries to get government approval for things like licenses, etc knows it's a painful process even for the routine stuff. Now image trying to do something "different". The usual response is "you can't do that". The system is pretty much set up to require a back channel to the people in the government who can make or break a company.

Yes, it’s amazing how naive HN is when it comes to these things. This place is super useful for technical knowledge but insanely useless when it comes to situations where lived experience differs from “official” ways the world (is supposed to) work.

> you can't make it big (think the equivalent of Stripe in the US)

Hehe. We might be 2nd or 3rd degree connects. Are they that fintech HQed near the crescent mall?

> The system is pretty much set up to require a back channel to the people in the government who can make or break a company

Exactly. Welcome to "emerging markets"

> when you're talking about the companies raising $100M USD in a round, it starts to matter a lot

Lower rounds too. Big reason I got spooked by the VN scene. It's exactly the same kinda shit you'd deal with in China, India, or Indonesia, but way less RoI.

Kinda sad honestly, there is a lot of talent, but leadership and policymakers there don't have the breadth needed to make the next Thailand or Malaysia (despite having the right fundamentals).

If they can attract the successful 2nd and 3rd gen Viet Kieus in the US, Canada, and Australia (the Harvard, UCLA, UNSW, UToronto grads) at the policy level, I think there is a lot of potential.

He worked at a few large companies with offices, and this is what he told me. Maybe you need to be big and legacy with a physical footprint. But this is what he told me. He has a lot of very interesting anecdotes. For example in Laos if you impregnate a woman as a foreigner, you have to marry her, under penalty of death. So his girlfriends were always trying to mess with his condoms, try to get him to have unprotected sex, and various oddities. So he claimed

We have those in the West, they're just called "team building exercises".

From what I've seen in south korea recently, that is pretty chill if all they want to do is go to KTV and drink.

Samsung was forced to hire a bunch of "socialist leaning/political victims" who wants to nationalize the company and turn it into their piggy bank (this will most likely happen after recent election results)

Communist parties sound like fun

Ain't no party like a Communist party. The Communists have the music.

You're yelling at the sky. All these HNers don't even know about To Lam's whole Saltbae scandal and how he still remains on top, let alone all the other grafts and political insider shit that happens.

Quite a few in that part of the world impose it for international drug smuggling, and we're talking mules rather than kingpins here. And if you really want to be appalled, look at the ones where adultery or homosexuality are potentially capital crimes.

Isn't wiping out 42,000 families livelihood or 3% of your country's GDP not barbaric?

Or is the exchange rate here not favourable to your standards?

Some US states would hand down a mandatory lifetime sentence to someone robbing three families, but no jail time for someone robbing 42,000.

I don’t know whether it’s warranted but corruption is the primary reasons a lot of these third world countries have such a hard time pulling themselves out of the hole. The damage they cause to millions of lives is probably way more impactful than some two bit murderer.

Death penalty seems inherently barbaric as in practice you cannot avoid executing people who are not found to be innocent until years or decades later. Even if you think guilt can be proven beyond any doubt, I know of no jurisdiction with an error-free record.

So you say it is barbaric not for executing someone, but for wrongly punishing someone. How is that different for a regular life sentence? Taking someone's liberties wrongly seems just as barbaric.

At least you can return their freedom and try to compensate them for the time unjustly spent in prison.

On one hand it's Vietnam where everyone bribes everyone. (Literally. Stealing country funds is a fact of life.)

On the other hand it's 21 billion.

Still rough.

Some people here do pay bribes. I do not. Neither do most people around my age that I know.

I immigrated here 12 years ago. I have a company license, a driving license, proper residency, and so on.

I got every last piece of it by filling out forms, and waiting a normal amount of time. I speak Vietnamese like a small child and have no Vietnamese heritage.

Perhaps some people will report something different, and perhaps they are also correct. However, this is my story.

We're Westerners so we're insulated from low level corruption because we can report to the Tourist Police and our local Consulate or Embassy, who will complain to that Quan's MPS.

The kind of low level corruption your mentioning impacts the working class or middle class (the kind living in a 1 bedroom apartment in D10 with a Honda motorbike) because they have no recourse.

That said, the mid-upper level corruption is very significant. How else do you see retired generals and senior party apparatchiks with a $50/mo pension eating steaks at the Landmark 81 and living in a villa in Thao Dien.

And this is why my SO makes it a principle to always speak in English so she doesn't get Vietnamese service.

> And this is why my SO makes it a principle to always speak in English so she doesn't get Vietnamese service.

That's a general recommendation for any overseas Vietnamese (Viet Kieu) to just pretend not to speak Vietnamese any time they interact with officials. They'll never get aggressive and will usually move onto easier prey.

But you are correct the low level corruption is common. A good story I heard was getting the household registration completed at the police station - bring in forms, call back "you forgot to sign this form", go back and sign the form, a couple weeks later you call "oh, it was actually the wrong form, come back", go back sign another form, a couple weeks later "it's not finished yet", a couple weeks later "you're missing one form".

Finally, they go in, finish that form and say "hey, you've been working hard, let me buy you a coffee" and you slip them the equivalent of $10 USD (about 20x the cost of a coffee). Poof, magic, it's done the next day and the cop will even swing by your home to drop off the paperwork.

A lot of the corruption is simply slow-rolling things until what the US Foreign Corrupt Practices Act calls "facilitation payments" are made.

Quick question, you talk about D1 / D10 etc.

Are those postcodes or suburbs or something?

Back when my family built our house a few years ago, we had to pay some bribe for a local officer to get our construction permission, otherwise it will get delayed for who knows how long. On paper, gov's officer's salary is <500usd a month, yet several provincial secretary own large houses and villas. Where does the money come from ? You see this stuff reported once in a while in Vietnamese newspaper, and stuff that are not reported could be worse. Amomg Vietnamese people, government's corruption is well known, happens at every level, and everybody I know is treating it as an open secret.

My very limited experience with Vietnam officials was that you could avoid bribes, but it was much more convenient to just bribe them.

I was going through the land border from Laos to Vietnam and was told to leave some "coffee money" in my passport on both sides of the border. I think it was either 20k or 50k Dong.

Apparently if you did not do this, you would get seen last and they would stamp it perfectly diagonally in the middle of a fresh passport page to try and ruin that page.

No idea if this was actually true because everyone just paid.

Stealing 6% of a large country's GDP causes more aggregate harm than murdering ten individuals (which would be an obvious death penalty case).

Death penalty serves multiple purposes

1. Remove from society, with no additional cost to society. 2. Signaling to dissuade new offenders.

You can go one step further and punish the family, parents, and friends. Seems to be happening in the US for underage mass killers.

It’s a simple, effective, and low cost way to deal with crime of the highest magnitude. Why should it be off limits for corruption?

Well point #2 is obviously not working, and it makes sense, how many murderers are making rational decisions?

Also, who would be deterred by the risk of execution, but not deterred by the risk of a life sentence?

Claiming harsh sentencing is a deterrent is a convenient cover for the real reason - it's about revenge. Because it very obviously isn't a deterrent, at least, not an effective one.

Unless US states that execute people have dramatically lower rates of murder than states that don't, in which case, I'm wrong and stand corrected.

Guess it depends which of rehabilitation or punishment you value most.

Any component of a punishment that is intended to deter is wrong. They hypothetical future offenders supposedly being deterred by the punishment are not parties in the defendant's case. Therefore they have no place in the sentencing.

Death penalty should be: take a life, pay with your life.

There is no need to consider deterrence in any shape or form.

The concept of deterrence being a reason for capital punishment only bolsters anti-capital-punishment arguments.

That's not right. Deterrence establishes a causal link between the punished and the criminals of tomorrow, who consider the likely outcome of their crime before committing it.

Punishments have a side effect of deterring. People don't wish to be punished so they don't transgress. It shouldn't be the focus of punishment. One problem is that the severity of punishment can be varied in order to vary the deterrent effect, whereas the punishment should fit the crime. That a certain fair punishment is not sufficiently deterring others is immaterial to a given defendant.

Fair punishments may deter insufficiently. The deterrent effect involves the probability of being caught and convicted. A law enforcement and criminal justice system that is not effective at catching and convicting can just crank up penalties to keep the deterrent effect high.

The prevailing opinion is that the death penalty was handed down to provide leverage and incentivize restitution.

That's always been my understanding as well. I recall some cases in the last few years where this resulted in quite a bit of the funds being recovered.

Sadly I cannot remember the specific cases.

Without this intending to be a comment on whether it is just or not, there's an interesting caveat to the law that might be of interest.

De jure, here's an amount that the guilty party can repay to avoid the death penalty. I recall it being 3/4 of the amount stolen.

> Death penalty for corruption? That seems barbaric.

Honestly, I think it's fine, but only if reserved for billionaires. That kind of economic power breeds arrogance, which needs something to keep it in check. The quantity has a quality all its own.

The death penalty is definitely not OK for low level people or the sums even a wealthy regular person could have. And I don't even think it should be an option for most violent crime, either.

Basically you are ok for death penalty strictly for other people? Seems quite convenient :D

I also am OK for 100% tax to anyone who's not me or my immediate family.

> I also am OK for 100% tax to anyone who's not me or my immediate family.

Then your money wouldn't be worth anything as no one will want to provide you with a service.

> Basically you are ok for death penalty strictly for other people? Seems quite convenient :D

Come on. Your objection is meaningless distraction, because it's so general it's an objection to any kind of punishment of anyone proposed by anyone who isn't themselves guilty.

Not really, if I am OK with death penalty for manslaughter, I put myself at risk (or someone I love) to be at the receiving end of that law: it happens to people without really wanting it.

On the other hand, becoming billionaire is both extremely hard, bordering impossible for most people, and it's also an active choice someone who's not already billionaire can make on their way there (so they can always be just enough away from being a billionaire).

That's why to me it's like being in favor for a law against martians: it really doesn't concern anyone of us, so who cares?

Oh, so you're saying tivert is only in favor of the death penalty for billionaire fraudsters because tivert isn't a billionnaire, not because tivert isn't, and doesn't plan to become a billionaire fraudster?

But how do you know? Is the idea that a billionaire wouldn't be posting to HackerNews?

> That's why to me it's like being in favor for a law against martians: it really doesn't concern anyone of us, so who cares?

What do you mean? A billionaire committing massive fraud definitely concerns us.

In places like Vietnam and China, billionaires aren't the "apex predators". The Party leadership is.

That is why they can get the death penalty.

Don't get it twisted man. At least in China, they kill party leadership too. In fact, just to make sure no one is holding out on them, they'll take out your wife and mistress too.

In China, the party is almighty, but it won't hesitate to eat it's young, it's parents, or even it's mate.

Honestly, I think these are the varieties of crimes where capital punishment should apply - while a violent offender might be one day rehabilitated, someone who feels it’s ok to loot billions at the expense of their fellow man deserves to suffer schaphism.

The harm is infinitely greater - and we seemingly live in a world where this behaviour is more often than not rewarded with high office and plaudits.

I have a different perspective.

If someone commits fraud to the tune of $27B, that mainly means they just outfoxed rich people out of their money.

A lot more harm lies in a legally made $27B.

Corruption is barbaric.

According to prosecutors, over a period of three years from February 2019, she ordered her driver to withdraw 108 trillion Vietnamese dong, more than $4bn (£2.3bn) in cash from the bank, and store it in her basement. The verdict requires her to return $27bn, a sum prosecutors said may never be recovered.

she stole around 2% of Vietnam's GDP annually.

You just can’t move this kind of money without the government noticing. She most likely fell out of favour for some other reason with the ruling party.

moreover, Viet Nam is a communist country. It may seem difficult for western capitalists to reconcile since "victimless" and "non-violent" are the litmus for most prosecutions but sentencing the bourgeoise to the death penalty for embezzlement is absolutely in keeping with the party line and doctrine. in 2008 the PRC had a tainted milk scandal, during which time it tried, sentenced, and executed two high level corporate executives for the fraud.

> 108 trillion Vietnamese dong, more than $4bn (£2.3bn) in cash from the bank, and store it in her basement

For personal curiosity, largest dong note is 500k , that's 208 million bills. Very lazy Theydidthemath attempt but 500k dong is ~$20 USD. If you look up visiualizations of how much 1B of 100 USD notes are, usually palletized, 1B USD is 12 pallets. 1T dong is 60 pallets. Her driver moved 120 pallets of dongs in her basement. ~480ft x 480ft / ~146m x 146m square tiled.

corruption or death penalty is barbaric?

> Death penalty for corruption? That seems barbaric.

I think one can make an argument that death penalties themselves are barbaric given miscarriage of justice is a thing. And let's be honest, the electric chair is gruesome in the day and age of Nesdonal & Norcuron.

To single out captial punishment for a capitalist crime as barbarism reeks of double standards just because there's no precedent for it in the West.

There we go again, a western "civilised" citizen calling a sentence barbaric because it was passed by a nation they don't like. It's called justice dude.

You seem to belittle 'corruption' but it's actually root of a lot of evil.

Do you think people’s retirement accounts, livelihoods, and service meant for society wasn’t affected by crimes like this?

I’m from a third world. We were victims ourselves of some asshole who took our money and disappeared. Even in US our first immigration lawyer stole 18k from us which is a big deal when my dad was only making 30k. “Just sue them” easy to say when you’re rich.

If you want to host these awful parasites at your house go ahead. But I bet you won’t. You probably never had to suffer so be glad.

As a member of society I think people should who don’t want to contribute to it by engaging in truly heinous crimes (and yes I believe destroying people’s livelihoods by stealing their hard owned money in a malicious scheme is as bad killing or r working someone) should not be allowed to further leech resources after their awful behavior.

Yeah Vietnam has a GDP of $408.8 Billion, a fraud of this magnitude is probably tantamount to treason.

It was over 11 years, so you'd compare to the GDP for the last 11 years.

Still huge, but not ~7% of GDP huge.

It was closer to ~0.5% of GDP per year for 11 years.

This is probably typical in countries without really strong institutions. Vietnam isn't exactly a 3rd world country...

The amount of fraud going on in 3rd world countries (as a % of GDP) is mind boggling.

I kept trying to figure out what does someone's Local Area Network have to do with this story, but after skimming the article I realized that "My LAN" is the name of the accused.

In my eastern EU country, following the fall of communism, a lot of fraudsters got wealthy over night by selling the state's(the people's) assets and pocketing the money themselves while the common people were wallowing in poverty worse than during communism.

Similarly, they all deserve the death sentence too but most of them haven't even served jail time.

Not sure (because I don't know Vietnamese names very well but I thought Truong would be her surname) but some communities write the surname / family name in allcaps for cultural disambiguation, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Personal_name#Eastern_name_ord...

This is the part of the conversation where I'll point out that Eastern name order is - in a sense - incorrect, because The Guardian is a UK publication.

I know why they do it, because Romanization[1] and transliteration[2] exist, but it still looks odd.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Romanization [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transliteration

Every organization that publishes (or at least has a style guide) has to make a decision about whether to put names in their "native" order or to standardize to their audience's expected order. I can see an argument for either way:

Standardize on audience expected order: we're a UK publication, we're going to write the way names are in the UK

Standardize on native order: we want to respect the cultures of the people in our publications

You can address native order by publishing in multiple languages.

The NYT has editions for Canada and "International" (both of which presumably use British spelling along with local expressions as appropriate), Spanish, as well as a version of the site entirely in Chinese.

To me, this seems like an easier -- read: less confusing -- way to address a diverse audience than ad-hoc changes to name order or other style conventions. Some might say that's exclusionary of certain groups, but localization exists to solve exactly that kind of problem, and doing both isn't nearly as hard as it used to be.

There is always possibiltiy to add little asterisk and disambugate with small text if you choose the second.

(Respecting one side and educating the other)

According to the article, she is called "Truong My Lan", perhaps the author's muscle memory or autocorrect was kicking in.

No, it's just the silly HN parser that automatically changes the case of some words in titles based on an obscure internal rulebook dictionary and also removes other words that sound click-baity.

I'm still baffled HN hasn't opensourced their stack.

It's Lisp. I suspect there is no copy of the source code, they've just kept adding to the running program.

Just kidding but that does sound like a fun art project to see how complex you could get...

Hacker News auto-"fixes" some keywords in story titles, it could be that.

This entry from Wikipedia was impactful:

"Lan's embezzlement of $12.5 billion equals about three percent of Vietnam's total GDP for 2022."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tr%C6%B0%C6%A1ng_M%E1%BB%B9_La....

King Lear comes to mind:

As flies to wanton boys are we to the gods;

They kill us for their sport.

Note that she got a death sentence for fraud. It's... rough. (In my opinion.)

Statements like this ignore the victims:

- 3% of vietnam's GDP

- Roughly the equivalent of an entire city losing their livelihood to one person

- The trauma and ruin people around the victims will feel

- Orphaned children, suicides, intragenerational trauma that will last for many rebirths.

It's the same cavalier attitude I see towards victims of SBF on this forum. "Its their fault", "they were asking for it".

You have compassion for the perpetrator but not the victims who are dead and are going to end up dead.

I only pray that you will not experience the pain of being manipulated and scammed. It's truly awful because I experienced it.

I know some religions/SF bay cults try to justify it but at the end of the day its the lapse in responsibility and compassion, the same disregard for others but your own.

I recognize that they’ve done a LOT of harm, but death is a harsh punishment under almost any circumstances. The death penalty seems like one of those ideological issues where people fall on one side or the other, and they pretty much stay on that side.

My perspective is: if the point is to dissuade people from committing crimes like this, it seems like a lengthy prison sentence would achieve the same thing. The harm has already been done, and killing them doesn’t fix anything. Death is just so damn final.

I'm sort of ambivalent about the death penalty, and I'm more than skeptical about punishment-based behavior mitigation in general.

That said, whatever the severity of penalty you assign to direct forms of (mass) murder ought to apply to the indirect forms when they're scaled up far enough.

Like, that capital represents the real possibility of avoiding starvation for a certain percent of the population (many of them children).

Similarly, I look at folks like the Sacklers and think that whatever we do to a school shooter ought to be done to them. They knew full well what the impact of their behavior was going to be and thought, "fuck 'em. Let 'em die". That's just as bad if not worse than a troubled teen picking up an assault rifle.

> I look at folks like the Sacklers and think that whatever we do to a school shooter ought to be done to them.

Sometimes I wonder why it’s mostly poor people who are executed in the US. One reason is, we don’t punish rich people crimes with the same severity. If you look at the list of capital crimes in e.g. California, most of them involve specific circumstances around single murders. It’s not hard to imagine white collar crimes which cause an order of magnitude more damage to society.

Whether these crimes need to be punished with the death penalty is a different question I think you and I would not agree on, but I would concede if it meant stricter punishments for white collar criminals. The Sacklers are far more evil than most of the men sitting on death row now.

It’s actually far simpler.

If you’re rich, you can afford to confer with attorneys before, and afford pretty good defense attorneys afterwards. They also typically are major contributors to the community in some way (taxes, as an employer, etc.).

Poorer folks learn ‘the law’ from TV or their cousins or whatever, and often just get a public defender with an excessive case load. They typically don’t clean up well, and won’t come across well to a jury.

Who do you think the prosecutor is going to throw the book at to pad their resume?

In banning the death penalty for rape, the US Supreme Court explicitly... in black letter text... left open the possibility of executing major drug traffickers. We should use that door more often.

It is harsh and meant to be, a message to all opponents and general population about strength of regime. All dictatorships do it regularly, iran, saudi arabia, russia etc.

Naw, the death penalty is much harsher penalty (seeing as how almost all death row inmates use every means possible to avoid it). Particularly so for white collar people who never thought they would be tied to a tree and shot 10 times in the heart. Just the thought of that happening can deter a lot of people, and even if it doesn't, it's what she deserves.

The whole anti death penalty is such a L take.

It’s always bad people who want to feel good who do these exercises imo to signal how “pure” they are to defend rapists, killers, corrupt fraudsters, etc.

Imo. Always some of the fakest people.

I recently had a discussion with my partner about this and it was quite insightful as we fall on different ends of this spectrum. I do like the Scandinavian model of all life is precious and reforming criminals rather than punishing them. But she’s from india and the moral calculus is very different.

There are people who commit incredibly atrocious crimes, and then get away with a slap in the wrist. India _has_ the death penalty but it is very rarely enforces it. And according to her, the existence of it keeps people at least a little bit in check, as if they do something massively bad (killing swaths of people for example) they could face real punishment. Cause people with money can get away/live in comfort in prison quite successfully.

Also, poverty is so prevalent that there are plenty of people for whom prison would be a step up in comfort and living conditions from where they are.

As you’ve so eloquently put, we didn’t change each other’s positions but at least I understand much better now how some parts of the world could justify it.

You need to realize that non-zero people probably committed suicide becomes of lost money, right?

The line of death being harsh punishment in any circumstance is simply not true.

I.e., by contraditory, if it is true that "death is too harsh" is true, then it should reasonably deter "bad guys".

Did that happen?

It did not happen in history, now; and it wont happen in any foreseeable further

It could have also been score settling, and her corruption (because they are all corrupt) was magnified to slaughter a chicken to scare the monkeys, so to speak.

How many percentage points of an entire country's economy would you say you need to steal before it's deserving of the highest form of punishment?

That's not the point

Death should not be the highest form of punishment

You think it should? Then why stop there? What about death, but after weeks of gruesome torture? How many percentage points of an entire country's economy should warrant that?

You're also missing the point. I'm not in favor of the death penalty, but I'm also not Vietnamese, and I recognize that capital punishment is their highest form of punishment. On a scale of "the most lenient punishment" to "the highest form of punishment", this is obviously at the end of that spectrum. Whether or not I believe that's a good punishment is immaterial.

What does matter is that they chose, on that scale of least to most, the most. The actions of the accused surely have and will continue to lead to death (at that scale of fraud, the downstream consequences are going to be vast and devastating to the victims). If murderers can deserve the death penalty, the abstract consequences of someone committing physical violence are remarkably less bad than the abstract consequences of the criminals in this case, so why wouldn't the same be appropriate?

Separate from the issue of whether capital punishment is moral, it's on the table whether you or I like it. At what point is the maximum punishment appropriate?

Friends don't let friends become Vietnamese billionaires!

Companies are switching China for Vietnam, India, Indonesia.

One of the reasons is fear of this sort of thing.

Makes me wonder if the same problems will pop up in the new destinations.

> One of the reasons is fear of this sort of thing.

Good? If you're planning to embezzle tens of billions of dollars, you probably should be scared of consequences.

These are the standard kinds of problems that happen in every developing country.

So long as it's out in the open it's not a big deal.

Most Western commentators had a decent view of what's going on in China because there is a lot of business reporting there.

In Vietnam's case, most foreign business reporting I've seen is in Korean, Japanese, and Mandarin, as SK, Japan, Taiwan, and PRC are the biggest FDI sources in VN.

For Korean and Taiwanese investors, this isn't a big deal, as most dealt with similar stuff in 1970s-2000s Korea and Taiwan, as did Japanese who invested heavily in Korea, Taiwan, and PRC.

Western investors on the other hand, will be much more skittish, and won't invest until the regional investors from the countries mentioned above are more established in VN.

They could also avoid this sort of thing by not doing fraud.

So a human life is worth somewhere between $0 and $27B in Vietnam. Useful to know.

Many countries actually have established value of life measures: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Value_of_life

This is especially apparent in societies with public healthcare, where it can become controversial, since individuals may not be able to access medical care they feel they deserve: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quality-adjusted_life_year

Anywhere in the developing world. Life is worthless. This is why my parents immigrated to America.

Yeah, they found keeping inmates alive is lucrative:

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2022/jun/15/us-prison-wo...

Try dealing with Vietnam or Indian police as a Westerner "carrying" drugs.

You better pay up or you might find yourself with a bullet in your head in a ditch.

Oh, and body cams are not a thing.

Many of these countries have extremely harsh punishments for drug offenses, AND have corrupt law enforcement where bribery is normal, but I challenge you to provide a single example of where a Westerner refused to bribe police and were subsequently shot in the head and dumped in a ditch. That makes little sense on multiple levels.

Edit: Ironically, searching for examples of such an incident only brings up examples of Indians and Vietnamese folks getting shot by police in America.

Even in Midnight Express, it is the American who kills the Turk in the end. And one of the antagonists helping to enforce the draconian law is an American.

You really need to appreciate the difference between an average person living under a corrupt communist regime, and a country where jail conditions aren't all that nice after you commit a crime. Even the numbers in this case are 3% of Vietnam's GPD embezzled by one, or less than 0.1% of the US GDP produced by prisoners collectively (according to your link). I'm tired of seeing these one-line dismissive "zingers" that have taken over the internet.

Note that the GP is doing Whataboutism, which is actually an old Communist tactic: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whataboutism#Soviet_Union_and_...

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