A Vietnamese court handed a former government spokesperson a suspended prison sentence for graft, state media said, an accusation that has seen dozens of senior officials jailed.
Thousands of people, including top officials and senior business leaders, have been caught up in the South-East Asian country’s “blazing furnace” crackdown.
On Monday the court in Hanoi handed Mai Tien Dung, former government office chairman and spokesperson for the Cabinet, a 2.5-year suspended jail term, according to state-controlled news site VNExpress.
He was found guilty of “abusing power” and taking bribes related to a US$1bil (RM4.4bil) eco-resort and urban project.
Eight other government officials were handed jail terms ranging from a suspended two-year sentence and 6.5 years in prison for similar charges linked to land rights violations over the Dai Ninh real estate project in Lam Dong province.
Businessman Nguyen Cao Tri was jailed for three years for offering bribes worth more than seven billion dong to officials in the government inspectorate and to senior Lam Dong province officials.
As a result of the cover-up, the state could not retrieve 3,600ha of land, “causing land wastefulness and facilitating 24 cases of illegal forest soil destruction”, state media said.
“The defendants contributed... to reducing the prestige of the party and the administration,” VNExpress said, quoting the verdict.
However, the court noted the “positive cooperation” of several defendants in the case, VNExpress said.
During the four-day trial, Dung – who was the government’s spokesman between 2016 and 2021 and charged with taking 200 million dong in bribes – admitted that his behaviour was wrong.
In 2024, Vietnamese police handled 825 corruption cases involving 1,676 people, an increase of more than 16% compared to 2023, according to the public security ministry. — AFP
