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| An appeal court on Friday ruled in favour of Đinh Mạnh Thắng (first left), the younger brother of former Politburo member Đinh La Thăng, reducing his sentence for corruption to seven years in prison.– Photo vnexpress.net |
HÀ NỘI – An appeal court on Friday ruled in favour of Đinh Mạnh Thắng, the younger brother of former Politburo member Đinh La Thăng, reducing his sentence for corruption to seven years in prison.
The Hà Nội High-level People’s Court decided to cut two years off Thắng’s initial sentence handed down by a February court this year. The court still found Thắng guilty of embezzlement at the PetroVietnam Power Land JSC (PVPLand) - a real estate subsidiary of the State-owned oil and gas behemoth PetroVietnam.
The corruption scandal at PVPLand involved eight people, including the instigator Trịnh Xuân Thanh, from different companies who agreed to undersell more than 12 million shares of PVPLand in Xuyên Thái Bình Dương company to a private construction company, Minh Ngân.
The loss to the State coffers, or the difference between actual price paid - VNĐ34 million (US$1,500) for every sq m for the Nam Đàn Plaza project owned by Xuyên Thái Bình Dương - and the contract price at VNĐ52 million for every sq m in the transaction reached up to VNĐ87 billion.
Those involved split the illicitly gained VNĐ49 billion among themselves, with Thanh taking the lion’s share of VNĐ14 billion.
The appeal court, taking into account that Thắng “honestly confessed his crime” while he also “had several achievements during his career and his family’s mass contribution to the revolution”, decided to reduce his prison sentence.
The Friday court also gave Thái Kiều Hương, former deputy general director of the Vietsan Investment Co who acted as a broker for the illegal transaction, eight instead of ten years behind bars. It took into consideration Hương’s family financial difficulty and their contribution to the revolution.
The court, however, denied the appeals of Nguyễn Thị Kim Thoa and Huỳnh Nguyễn Quốc Duy. Their sentences were kept the same at six and 10 years in prison, respectively. — VNS
