VietNamNet Bridge - After swindling partners and appropriating huge sums of money, a number of tycoons have fled abroad. Some of them have been arrested, while others have settled down in other countries.

Pham Thi Trang and Pham Cong Danh were involved in a forgery scam. Trang and his co-workers caused the loss of VND9.1 trillion to the Vietnam Construction Bank. However, the court could not receive Trang at the trial because she left Vietnam in July 2014.

The defendants said that Trang assisted Danh in many cases of forging documents to appropriate money from the bank.

Of the ‘seafood tycoons’ who went downhill because of huge losses, Lam Ngoc Khuan, former chair of Phuong Nam Food Processing JSC, is the best known.

Only in early 2012 did people realize that Khuan and his wife left Vietnam for the US in 2011 to ‘have diseases treated’. 

Khuan and his family members left a huge debt of VND1.6 trillion. At leadt 25 former senior executives from five banks were prosecuted for violating credit regulations.

Le Trung Kien, former director of the Hanoi Real Estate JSC, was once well known as a successful businessman and the husband of a runner-up at a beauty contest. 

However, later, people heard that the tycoon appropriated hundreds of billions of dong and fled abroad.

After swindling partners and appropriating huge sums of money, a number of tycoons have fled abroad. Some of them have been arrested, while others have settled down in other countries.

Kien was hiding out in Hong Kong and Macau and penetrated foreign stock markets. In early July 2015, he was arrested at Noi Bai Airport after taking a flight from HCM City to Hanoi.

Giang Kim Dat, former acting head of the business division at Vinashinlines, a subsidiary of Vinashin, the national shipbuilder, ran away before the Vinashin case was brought to the court.

The total state’s assets Dat embezzled were estimated at hundreds of billions of dong, all under Dat’s family members’ names.

He fled to Singapore, Thailand, China and other countries, where he spent a lot of money on tourism and properties. In Singapore, he bought a high-end apartment worth $3.6 million. 

In July 2015, he was arrested and brought to Vietnam.

In September 2014, the HCM City People’s Court handed down a life sentence for Ho Thi Ngoc Nga, born in 1964 and a 10-year jail sentence to Huynh Van Nga, her husband, on the charges of "abusing trust to appropriate assets".

Both of them, who were managers of Thien Son Phu Construction & Trade Company, swindled partners and individuals to appropriate VND136 billion.

In December 2009, Nga fled to Cambodia and then to the US. In November 2013, she was arrested at Tan Son Nhat Airport.

Luong Bang