After eight days of trial, the Ho Chi Minh City People’s Court on Wednesday handed down sentences to 14 defendants involved in the US$5.7 mln swindling case at Agribank’s Tan Binh Branch. Accordingly, Tran Huynh Nghia, 49, of Ho Chi Minh City, the former director of Cat Phuong Nam Company and former chairman of the Truong Phat Dat Co Ltd, was sentenced to 20 years in jail on charges of “swindling to appropriate assets.” Previously, the local prosecutor’s office proposed that Nghia be given a heavier sentence of life imprisonment.

On the same charges, Huynh Cong Phuc, 44, a former building worker in Hue, received 14 years in jail while the other five defendants got from three to eight years. Phuc is the husband of Nguyen Thi Phuong Hoa, the instigator of the case, who has fled after appropriating VND120 billion from Agribank Tan Binh, and is being hunted. The eight remaining defendants were given sentences of 32 months and 19 days to 12 years in jail.    Of the 14 convicted, five were released after the court announced their sentences, as the jail term is equal to the time in which they had been detained pending trial. Hoa is the former vice director if Reetech, a subsidiary of Refrigeration Electrical Engineering Corporation (REE). According to the indictment, in the 2005-2008 period, Hoa and Nghia asked Nguyen Tam, who was the former director of Agribank Tan Binh, to give them loans worth hundreds of billions of dong to make investments in REE. After Tam agreed, Nghia and Hoa made fake contracts, documents, invoices and other papers to make loan files and submitted them to Tam. Without checking the loan files, Tam directed his employees to facilitate the granting of loans to Hoa and Nghia and also to Phuc. As a result, the three people got a total VND200 billion from the branch. Hoa later appropriated VND120 billion and fled. The remaining VND80 billion was recovered after the case was uncovered. As Tam died when the scandal was discovered, police stopped investigation into his offenses.