Lawyers ask court to ‘spare’ Truong My Lan’s life

"If Lan were allowed to live, stagnant property projects will be revived," Giang Hong Thanh, one of the five lawyers of the Van Thinh Phat chairwoman, who is appealing her death sentence for embezzling SCB, said.

Major projects such as Amigo and Mui Den Do in HCMC, if restarted, would contribute substantial amounts of taxes to the state’s coffers and create thousands of jobs, he said.

Lan’s other lawyers said by their calculations the value of the confiscated assets, and the VND323 trillion ($US12.7 billion) she had submitted, should be enough to compensate SCB for the losses she caused it, and this should be adequate to grant her celemency.

They said Lan has been unfairly punished twice for the same crime committed in 2012-22, one for violating banking regulations and the other for embezzling.

They requested the court to therefore reconsider the embezzlement verdict to reduce her sentence from death to life imprisonment.

Prosecutors last week urged the appeal court to uphold Lan’s death sentence saying no new developments at the hearing warranted its commutation.

She had been awarded the sentence in April for embezzling money from SCB over a 10-year period, causing it losses of VND677 trillion ($27 billion).

Last month, in a separate trial, she was awarded a life sentence for "fraudulent appropriation of assets" through bond issuances and illegal cross-border money transfers among other crimes.