A court in Ho Chi Minh City in southern Vietnam has found Tran Qui Thanh, 71, guilty of organising a $40 million (€38 million) credit fraud between January 2019 and November 2020. "The defendants were fully aware that their behaviour would be punished by law, but still deliberately committed the crime," said judge Huynh Van Truc, reading the verdict. The two daughters of Tran Qui Thanh, who heads the Tan Hiep Phat business group, also received lesser sentences for the same charge of "abusing credit to appropriate assets". Tran and his accomplices set up a scheme that allowed them to keep bank collateral put up by people who borrowed money from them, even after the loans had been repaid. Tan Hiep Phat sells its products – water, green tea, soya milk, energy drinks – in Vietnam and 16 foreign countries, according to the group's website. Vietnam's communist regime has waged a sweeping anti-corruption campaign since 2021, which has led to the convictions of more than 4,400 people, including political and business leaders. On 11 April, a Vietnamese court sentenced the chairwoman of a property company to death for fraud totalling €25 billion, the country's biggest-ever financial scandal. Truong My Lan – chairwoman of real estate giant Van Thinh Phat (VTP) and accused of swindling funds from Saigon Commercial Bank (SCB) over a decade – had "eroded people's trust in the leadership of the Party [and] the State", the jury said during the trial in Ho Chi Minh City, according to local media. Vietnam's then-president Nguyen Phu Trong resigned in March after being implicated in the anti-corruption investigations. VTP was among Vietnam's richest property developers, with projects including luxury residential towers, offices, hotels and shopping malls. Analysts said the scale of the fraud raised questions about other banks or companies that could have made similar errors, damaging Vietnam's economic outlook and unnerving foreign investors. The property sector has been particularly badly hit, with about 1,300 companies leaving the market in 2023 and developers offering discounts and gold to entice buyers, according to local media. In November, Communist Party General Secretary Nguyen Phu Trong, Vietnam's top politician, said the anti-corruption drive would "continue for the long term". Read Also: Vietnam. Company chairman sentenced to death for financial fraud (Portuguese version)