Vietnam Set to Prosecute 54 Officials Over Repatriation Flight Scandal – The Diplomat

ASEAN Beat | Politics | Southeast Asia

Vietnam’s Ministry of Public Safety has advisable prosecuting dozens of principally senior officers in reference to an embarrassing corruption scandal involving government-organized COVID-19 repatriation flights.

In response to a report by Radio Free Asia (RFA), which cited Vietnamese state media, the ministry’s Investigation Safety Company has referred to as 54 individuals to be charged with giving bribes, receiving bribes, brokering bribes, “abusing titles and powers,” and appropriating belongings by fraud. The company stated that it had accomplished its probe of the scheme and submitted its findings to the Supreme Individuals’s Procuracy, which is able to perform the prosecutions.

The announcement follows a year-long investigation into the alleged extraction of extortionate charges for seats on flights organized to deliver dwelling Vietnamese residents stranded overseas in the course of the COVID-19 pandemic.

In response to RFA, the advisable expenses stem from a case in opposition to former Vice Minister of Overseas Affairs To Anh Dung, who reportedly accepted the plans to arrange repatriation flights, based mostly on proposals by the Ministry of Overseas Affairs’ Consular Division. Dung is accused of receiving 21.5 billion dong ($915,000) in bribes so as to add firms to a listing of suppliers of repatriation flights, of which the federal government finally organized some 400. These subsequently yielded appreciable “income” for these concerned with the scheme. Final June, the Ministry of Public Safety put this at a number of billion Vietnamese dong per flight. (1 billion dong is value round $43,600.)

The 54 defendants embrace a spread of senior celebration and authorities roles, together with former Vice Overseas Minister Vu Hong Nam, who served as ambassador to Japan on the time of the scandal, and is accused of receiving 1.8 billion dong ($76,600) as a part of the group of repatriation flights from Japan to Vietnam. The roster additionally consists of officers from the ministries of public well being, transport, and public safety, Communist Get together of Vietnam (CPV) officers in Hanoi and Quang Nam province, and the deputy director common of the Hanoi police power, who’s accused of taking bribes to guard two businesspeople from prosecution for his or her function within the grift.

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The flight scandal, which has believed to have generated an estimated $200 million in illicit earnings for these concerned, has already contributed to the resignation of Vietnam’s president and has prompted a spate of arrests, reprimands, and expulsions from the ruling Communist Get together of Vietnam (CPV).

It was one in all two COVID-19-related graft instances – the opposite concerned overpriced COVID-19 take a look at kits – that prompted the pressured resignation in January of President Nguyen Xuan Phuc, and the cashiering of two of the nation’s 4 deputy prime ministers, together with former Overseas Minister Pham Binh Minh. It additionally led to a purge of the Ministry of Overseas Affairs, wherein consular officers posted to embassies in Russia, Malaysia, Angola, and Japan had been sacked and expelled from the CPV. Different officers, together with the present ambassador to Malaysia, the previous ambassador to India, and the consul common in Fukuoka, Japan, had been reprimanded.

The mass arrests, resignations, and sackings marked a crescendo within the years-long “burning furnace” anti-graft marketing campaign waged by CPV Basic Secretary Nguyen Phu Trong. The advice of expenses means that the CPV, led by Trong’s assault canine within the Ministry of Public Safety are eager to shut out the case and march ahead into an period of putatively cleaner and extra upstanding rule underneath a brand new era of CPV leaders. Nonetheless, the truth that such scandals proceed to happen, seven years after Trong first launched his anti-corruption campaign, means that that is unlikely to be the final high-profile graft scandal to taint the celebration’s blood-red façade.