Decades after the liberalisation of Vietnam ’s banking sector, private banks remain tightly controlled by a handful of owners, many of whom use their banks to funnel cheap loans into their other businesses. This practice, which dates back to the early 1990s, was laid bare by the case of Truong My Lan, who became the first private businessperson in Vietnam to face capital punishment for embezzlement after she was convicted of siphoning billions from Saigon Commercial Bank (SCB) and leaving it – and Vietnam’s financial system – in a precarious position. On December 3, an appeal court in Ho Chi Minh City upheld a death sentence for Lan, the majority owner of SCB and former chairwoman of the property developer Van Thinh Phat Group. For almost a decade, Lan treated
