A Vietnam court on Tuesday rejected an appeal by tycoon Truong My Lan to have her death sentence revoked. 

The chairwoman of the real estate development firm Van Thinh Phat Holdings Group has been on death row since April for her role in the country's largest-ever financial fraud case.

She was convicted of embezzling $12.5 billion (€11.9 billion) an amount equal to almost 3% of Vietnam's 2022 GDP.

Fraud that hit Vietnam's entire economy

"The consequences Lan caused are unprecedented in the history of litigation and the amount of money embezzled is unprecedentedly large and unrecoverable," said prosecutors according to state-run news outlet VietnamNet.

"The defendant's actions have affected many aspects of society, the financial market, the economy," they said.

Lan is perhaps the most famous target of the communist government's recent anti-graft campaign known as "Blazing Furnace." She was accused of illegally running the Saigon Joint Stock Commercial Bank (SCB) from 2012 to 2022, pushing through some 2,500 loans that cost the bank $27 billion in losses.

The reverberations were felt across the banking sector and hit the entire Vietnamese economy hard. It also spooked foreign investors at a time when Vietnam was trying to move away from reliance on China and promote its domestic business opportunities.

Who is Truong My Lan?

Born in what is now Ho Chi Minh City in 1956, Lan took advantage of shifting economic policies towards free markets in the 1990s to set up Van Thinh Phat Holdings. From there she and her family came to control vast swaths of real estate across the country, including residences, shopping centers, business properties, and hotels.

In 2011, she organized the merger of SCB with two other lenders. According to prosecutors, she used SCB to pay loans to "ghost companies" as a way to cover up the money she was paying in bribes.

The scale of the crimes was such that she was put on two separate trials. In October, she was given a life sentence for stealing $1.2 billion from some 36,000 investors by illegally issuing bonds from several of her companies. 

In her appeal, her lawyers had argued that there were mitigating circumstances to the case that would take the death penalty off the table. However, the judges in Ho Chi Minh City disagreed. It is still possible for her death sentence to be commuted to life in prison if she manages to reimburse three-fourths of the money she embezzled.

es/ab (AP, AFP, Reuters)