Vietnam President Vo Van Thuong Resigns Amid Anti-Corruption Campaign

Vietnam President Vo Van Thuong resigned after a little over a year in the job, the Communist Party said today, making him the latest senior official to leave office amid an intense anti-corruption campaign.

The Central committee has approved the resignation and said that the “violations by Vo Van Thuong have left a bad mark on the reputation of the Communist party.”

Thuong, 54, became president in March 2023, two months after his predecessor Nguyen Xuan Phuc resigned to take “political responsibility” for corruption scandals during the pandemic.

The president is largely ceremonial in Vietnam.

Since 2016, the governing party in the country — the Communist Party — has been on an anti-corruption campaign in which a large number of graft cases have been reported in which senior government ministers and officials have been forced to resign.

In November last year, the ministry of public security, which looks into crime prevention alleged that Truong My Lan, the chairperson of real estate developer Van Thinh Phat Holdings Group, had embezzled $12.4 billion from Saigon Commercial Bank.

According to the government, My Lan operated a network of over 1,000 domestic and foreign subsidiaries along with shell companies that took $43 billion in loans from the bank. A third of these loans went to ghost companies which she and her family created.

The government officials probing the case recommended the prosecution of 85 people, including 24 government officials and associates of Van Thinh Phat Holdings Group and Saigon Commercial Bank.

This could be the largest corruption scandal in Southeast Asian history, easily surpassing the scandal in Malaysia where $4.45 billion were stolen from the country’s sovereign wealth fund.

The latest scandal has started affecting the business confidence of private companies as a host of companies were investigated for corruption allegations last year. In recent years, Vietnam has become one of the biggest economic success stories in Asia. Foreign direct investment rose to over $23 billion in 2023, up 3.5% from the previous year.

With inputs from Associated Press