In February 2021, Le Hai Tra, who was a member of HOSE’s board of management, was appointed to the post of the exchange’s general director.

HOSE is the largest stock market in Vietnam, with the capitalization of $200 billion.

Tra, born in 1974, has a master’s degree in public management and financial market analysis from the Harvard Kennedy School. He also received a Hubert H. Humphrey scholarship from the US State Department to attend a training program on strategic and financial administration at Boston University in 2003.

After a period of working for an audited firm, in 1997, Tra returned to Vietnam and worked at the Securities Market Development Department under the State Securities Commission (SSC). He joined a taskforce preparing for the establishment of HOSE.

In 2006, Tra took office as deputy director of the HCM City stock transaction center, the predecessor of HOSE, and then became a permanent member of HOSE’s board of management. 

In July 2017, he was assigned to be in charge of the board of directors after Tran Van Dung left the post of HOSE president to become chair of SSC.

By the time Tra was appointed to the post of HOSE’s general director in February 2021, the post had been vacant for a long time. The appointment was made when the stock exchange was suffering from congestion, which caused frustration to investors (late 2020 and early 2021).

Tra was then considered a fresh breath of air in the leadership of the stock market. The most urgent task was solving the transaction congestion which peaked in early 2021.He suggested raising the required minimum lots of transactions to cut the number of transaction orders, thus indirectly helping to develop investment funds and fund management.

When the securities manipulation behaviors at FLC Group and members of the ‘Louis family’ were discovered, Tra stressed that in order to prevent manipulation behavior, the stock market management and monitoring apparatus must be given enough power and the behaviors must be strictly punished and handled as both civil and criminal cases.

At the time when the cases of Trinh Van Quyet of FLC Group and Do Thanh Nhan of the ‘Louis family’ were discovered, Tra told the press that share manipulation is always a risk in any stock market in the world.

Under Tra’s administration, in 2021, HOSE spent VND500 billion to supervise the stock market. The expenditures on market supervision accounted for the largest proportion of the total expenditures of the exchange, or 71 percent.

In 2021, HOSE saw revenue increase sharply and it paid VND2.3 trillion to the state budget, an increase of 4.6 times over the year before. 2021 was also the year when Vietnam’s stock market made a strong rise and led ASEAN countries in the growth rate of transaction value and capitalization. The VN-Index then reached a record high of 1,500 points.

By the end of 2021, HOSE’s capitalization had reached VND5.8 quadrillion, or $237 billion.

However, Tra could only stay as HOSE general director for a short time.

In May 2022, the Central Inspection Committee decided to expel Tra, the Party Committee Secretary, and HOSE general director and other individuals from the Party for violations of the principle of democratic centralism and working regulations; and lack of responsibility, lax leadership and direction, resulting in several organizations and individuals committing violations related to advising on building policies. 

After investigations, investors realized how "an elephant can go through a needle’s eye" in the scandalous case of FLC stock manipulation. This was the most serious case in the history of Vietnam’s stock market in terms of scale and repetition. 

The most serious aspect was the sale without notice of 74.8 million FLC shares by Quyet on January 10, 2022. Many subsequent selloffs caused shareholders to lose trillions of dong.

HOSE’s leaders knew about the behaviors, but they did not take any action, thus helping Quyet appropriate trillions of dong.

From April 2014 to September 2016, Quyet and his accomplices falsified documents about the increase of charter capital from VND1.5 billion to VND4.3 trillion, and appropriated VND3.62 trillion from securities investors.

Meanwhile, HOSE leaders agreed to list 430 million FLC Faros shares (ROS) created from the falsified capital increase.

Manh Ha