A Maybach luxury car and two white Hermes handbags that belonged to imprisoned Vietnamese real estate developer Truong My Lan were sold at auction last week for more than $1 million, part of an effort by Vietnamese authorities to recover funds linked to his multibillion-dollar fraud.
Lan, who headed the Van Thinh Phat real estate company, was sentenced to death in 2024 on multiple counts of corruption, violating banking regulations and embezzlement. She was found guilty of using “thousands of ghost companies” to embezzle 304 trillion dong ($12.54 billion) from Saigon Commercial Bank (SCB), causing total losses of $27 billion between 2012 and 2022.
Although Lan’s sentence was later commuted to life in prison after Vietnam removed the death penalty for certain criminal offenses, authorities spent months trying to recover assets lost in the case.
According to a report in Vietnamese state media, three vehicles were auctioned by the Ho Chi Minh City Asset Auction Service Center on Friday. The first was a white four-seater Maybach luxury sedan manufactured in 2011. Despite lacking wheels, door panels and interior floor covering, the car sold for 16.65 billion dong (about $640,000) after attracting 56 bids. Two additional vehicles – a BMW and a Lexus – were also offered for sale but attracted no bids.
The car sales came a day after a pair of rare white Hermès handbags that belonged to Lan were sold at auction for more than $500,000. One of them sold for around 2.5 billion dong ($98,000), while the second – a “size 25 white Hermès handbag with white diamonds on the lock and hardware” – was in high demand, ultimately selling for more than 11.6 billion dong ($456,000) after 119 bids.
The disgraced tycoon had asked the court to return the rare handbags, saying she bought one in Italy and received the other as a gift from a Malaysian businessman and that they were “memorabilia” she wanted to return to her family. However, an appeals court later determined that the two seized handbags were proceeds of crime or assets obtained through illegal activities, and should remain in custody to ensure enforcement of the judgment.
The bags were among 1,200 assets seized from Lan after his arrest in October 2022. Other assets included residential real estate and an agricultural processing factory in Tay Ninh province.
Lan’s trial was one of the largest corruption trials in Vietnamese history and a landmark event in the Communist Party of Vietnam’s long-running anti-corruption campaign. The case involved 85 additional defendants, including Lan’s husband and granddaughter, and the trial documents weighed six tons. The trial was expected to involve 2,400 witnesses and other experts, including 40 lawyers, although the conviction and sentence were handed down more than two weeks ahead of schedule, in April 2024.
Lan was ordered to compensate victims and has so far paid more than 12 trillion dong ($455 million) to bondholders, according to Vietnamese government statistics cited by the AFP news agency.