[Date Prev][Date Next][Thread Prev][Thread Next][Date Index][Thread Index]
VN News June 1-2
Headlines:
Vietnam gives state firms two years to shape up
Murder not ruled out in Vietnam Minh Phung scandal
Vietnam protests war memorial attack in Cambodia
Child kidnappers sentenced to jail in northern Vietnam
Vietnam praises anti-vice drive in former Saigon
Executive Director of troubled Vietnamese company found dead
Crime jumps in Vietnam's capital
Doing drugs is becoming a troubling way of life
Soccer-Tajikistan beat Vietnam 4-0 in World Cup qualifier
Vietnam gives state firms two years to shape up
HANOI, June 2 (Reuter) - Vietnam's communist government
announced new rules on Monday which it said gave loss-making
state-owned firms two years to shape up or risk being
dissolved.
A finance ministry official told Reuters the two-year limit
was one of several criteria which officials could use to close
a state firm, but gave no other details.
State media reported the axe would also fall on firms where
registered capital was lower than the prescribed legal capital.
Companies whose business licences expire and are not extended
would also be chopped.
The new rules follow a decree announced last August which
aimed at making Vietnam's massive and lumbering state sector
more profitable by setting out steps allowing for loss-making
companies to be declared bankrupt and dissolved.
The official Vietnam News Agency reported earlier this year
that "the majority of state trading companies are operating
with difficulties and running disappointing losses".
It said only 30 percent had returned profits during the
past five years, but did not define precisely what "state
trading companies" were.
Under communist party policy Vietnam's state sector is the
backbone of the country's economy.
However, economists say the sector is grossly inefficient
and unfit to compete with foreign and some private sector
firms.
Murder not ruled out in Vietnam Minh Phung scandal
HANOI, June 2 (Reuter) - Police in southern Vietnam said on
Monday they were not ruling out the possibility of murder
following the grisly death of a senior executive at
scandal-plagued conglomerate Minh Phung.
Nguyen Van Ha, the company's vice-director, was found dead
on Saturday in a lift engine room at the top of a high-rise
building in Ho Chi Minh City. His head was strapped by a metal
cord holding his face against an electrical circuit board.
Newspapers in the southern city said that other than burns
to his face there were no signs of a struggle.
Ha had been in charge of finance at Minh Phung. He was a
former official at the Ho Chi Minh City branch of Vietnam's
biggest state-owned commercial bank, Vietcombank.
Police in Ho Chi Minh City told Reuters on Monday they were
"examining all possibilities" surrounding Ha's death, including
murder.
Minh Phung is one of several major Vietnamese companies
which has been at the centre of a fraud scandal surrounding
efforts by a handful of players to compete for control of the
booming Saigon property market during the early 1990s.
The companies involved are said to have used power and
influence to secure vast loans from both private and
state-owned banks, which took dubious security collateral.
The firm's director, Tang Minh Phung, was arrested on fraud
charges in March. More than a dozen others have been arrested
since then.
The garments-to-property giant is one of Vietnam's largest
private sector companies and employs around 8,000 people.
Vietnam protests war memorial attack in Cambodia
HANOI, June 2 (Reuter) - Vietnam has condemned a bomb
explosion at a memorial for its war dead in Cambodia's southern
port town of Sihanoukville.
Government officials in Phnom Penh said the memorial was
slightly damaged by what appeared to have been a mine or a
grenade blast on Saturday evening.
The official Vietnam News Agency quoted a foreign ministry
statement in a late Sunday dispatch describing the event as an
act of sabotage aimed at destroying stability in Cambodia and
friendship between the two countries.
"This is an act of provocation aimed at sabotaging the
traditional friendship and cooperation between the peoples of
Vietnam and Cambodia," a foreign ministry spokesman was quoted
as saying.
The memorial was built to commemorate Vietnam's late 1978
invasion of Cambodia when Vietnamese troops and members of the
Cambodian opposition defeated Pol Pot's Khmer Rouge regime,
officials said.
The statement added that Vietnam wanted the Cambodian
Government to take urgent measures to stop such actions, and to
repair the monument as soon as possible.
Cambodia played down the incident.
"This is not a big problem. It's only damaged a little. The
local police are investigating," interior ministry spokesman
Sok Phal told Reuters.
The reasons behind the latest incident were not immediately
clear.
Attacks on ethnic Vietnamese citizens and property have
been a recurrent problem in Cambodia.
In early 1996 both sides protested after gunfire was
exchanged on the border between the two neighbours.
Vietnam invaded Cambodia in late 1978 toppling the
ultra-Maoist Khmer Rouge government and installing a
sympathetic administration. It withdrew its forces in 1989.
Child kidnappers sentenced to
jail in northern Vietnam
Hanoi Vietnam (AP) -- A woman convicted
of drugging and kidnapping a 5-year-old boy
in northern Vietnam was sentenced to nine
years in prison, state-controlled media
reported Monday.
The woman, Luong Que Tien, and two of
her sons nabbed the child with the intention
of giving him to Tien's eldest daughter, who
lives in neighboring China, the report said.
Tien's two sons were sentenced to seven and
two years in prison on related charges, the
Communist Party newspaper, The People,
reported.
The court in northern Lang Son province, on
the border with China, was told Tien
kidnapped the boy for her daughter, who has
not been able to have a child of her own.
Married women in Vietnam and China often
come under enormous pressure to bear baby
boys.
Tien initially tried to adopt the child, but
when his father refused she drugged the man
and his son with sleeping pills.
Police arrested Tien with the child as she
prepared to send him across the border to
China, The People reported.
Vietnam praises anti-vice
drive in former Saigon
Hanoi (Reuter) - Vietnam on Monday
catalogued the results of 15 months of efforts
to root out vice in Ho Chi Minh City and said
the streets were 70 to 80 percent cleaner of
``poisonous cultural activities.''
The Saigon Times Daily quoted a report
issued by the city's Culture and Information
Department as saying 48 brothels had since
been closed in the former Saigon and 40
brothel owners arrested. It said 120
prostitutes were undergoing re-education
and 62 ``pleasure seekers'' had been fined.
It went on to catalogue 32,803 investigations
which it said had resulted in nearly half a
million videos being confiscated along with
73,724 illicit books or periodicals, 483 video
recorders and 14 television sets.
``The investigation has been very efficient
and has stopped 70-80 percent of poisonous
cultural activities here,'' a culture
department official told Reuters. ``This
should and will continue.''
Ho Chi Minh City was known as Saigon until
the end of the Vietnam war in 1975, when it
was renamed after the late president of North
Vietnam.
It has retained a freewheeling reputation and
is still commonly referred by its former name.
Executive Director of
troubled Vietnamese company
found dead
Hanoi (AP) -- The vice director of
Vietnam's troubled Minh Phung textile
company was found dead on the top floor
balcony of a bank building in Ho Chi Minh
City, police said Monday.
Nguyen Van Ha's body was discovered
Saturday by Industry and Commerce Bank
employees who went to investigate a foul
smell in the building, a police spokesman
said on condition of anonymity.
Police are investigating the death, which
came amid an expanding fraud inquiry into
garment and textile manufacturer Minh
Phung. At least 23 executives from Minh
Phung and subsidiary companies have been
arrested, police say.
State-run Voice of Vietnam radio said
Monday that Ha's body was found seated
next to a wall with his face pressed against an
electric socket. A thin steel wire was wrapped
several times around his neck.
Ha, a former executive at the state-run
Vietcombank, joined Minh Phung as the
company's vice director in charge of financial
affairs. He used his banking connections to
help Minh Phung secure various loans, the
official Labor newspaper reported.
The focus of police investigations into Minh
Phung have centered on potentially forged
loan documents, misuse of loan money and
misappropriation of funds.
Days before his body was discovered, Ha had
gone to the Industry and Commerce Bank
with two colleagues for a business meeting.
After the meeting, the two colleagues left but
Ha stayed behind. Later he was discovered
dead on the top floor.
In recent weeks, authorities in Ho Chi Minh
City have arrested top Minh Phung
executives, charging them with a variety of
fraud-related crimes.
Ming Phung's chief executive, Tang Minh
Phung, was arrested in March and has been
accused of illegally using loans to make bad
property deals.
Debts from the loans have topped dlrs 26
million in recent months. Minh Phung is
under investigation to determine if company
directors falsified documents to take out
additional loans to pay off debts.
Although company founder Tang Minh
Phung was considered one of Vietnam's new
generation of enterprising business leaders,
his empire began to collapse late last year
under the weight of massive loan debts.
In the face of growing corruption and
business fraud, Vietnam's ruling Communist
Party has been eager to levy heavy penalties
on offenders. A growing number of
businesses are coming under closer scrutiny.
Courts in southern Vietnam have invoked the
death penalty in three separate cases of
corruption involving public funds and state
property since late last year.
Crime jumps in Vietnam's
capital
Hanoi (AP) -- Crime is on the rise in
Vietnam's capital, Hanoi, a city known for its
safe streets and law abiding residents.
During the first five months of the year,
serious crimes, including murder and armed
robbery, jumped 10 percent compared to
1996, state-controlled media reported
Monday.
Police recorded five murders during a two
week stretch in May -- an unprecedented
number of peacetime killings in Vietnam
under communist rule.
Petty crime, including pick-pocketing, is
also increasing with a 7.5 percent rise over
last year.
About 70 percent of the criminals arrested in
Hanoi are drug addicts, said a Hanoi Police
report published in the Communist Party
newspaper, The People.
Despite large-scale crackdowns on drug
trafficking in Vietnam, the number of drug
users increased between January and May,
the report said. There are as many as 6,000
habitual heroin and opium users in Hanoi,
The People reported.
Doing drugs is becoming a
troubling way of life
By Sangwon Suh and Ken Stier / Hanoi
Asiaweek
CALL IT A COMING of age if you like.
After years in the socialist wilderness,
Vietnam has finally joined the ranks of many
developed nations -- in having a serious
drug problem. Until recently, drug addiction
in Vietnam was usually associated with
ethnic minorities in the highlands, who have
been traditional smokers of opium and have
long cultivated it as an important cash crop.
Among the kinh (lowland majority), the
problem was confined to the marginalized
and the unemployed. Many have been former
South Vietnamese soldiers whose lives were
blighted by war injuries, years of
re-education and job discrimination. But
lately, drug abuse has shown disturbing signs
of breaking into the wider society.
Alarm bells were triggered last year when
more than 40 secondary-school students in
Lang Son, a small city near the Chinese
border, were found to be "seriously addicted"
to heroin, according to an official report.
Many were first introduced to the drug by
street vendors who offered them cigarettes
laced with heroin. Some students got started
as early as nine years old. Then, in Ho Chi
Minh City, a police raid on a shooting gallery
netted 100 young Vietnamese. More than
half of them were between 15 and 25 years
old, and most relatively well-to-do but
disaffected students. Heroin use has even
been discovered in primary schools,
including those in Hanoi's Ba Dinh district
where the presidential palace, the National
Assembly and the Communist Party
headquarters are located. Students have not
been the only ones getting hooked.
Investigating a high incidence of traffic
accidents involving taxis in Hanoi, police
discovered that at one taxi company, more
than half of the drivers were using heroin.
Experts attribute the rising incidence of drug
abuse to the steep increase in the amount of
narcotics passing through Vietnam. Because
increased police vigilance in countries like
Thailand and China has constricted the flow
of heroin through traditional routes,
traffickers have targeted Vietnam as an
alternative transshipment area -- and as a
market. "Drug dealers have a strong interest
in creating markets along the routes because
this facilitates the trafficking," says Jorn
Kristensen of the United Nations Drug
Control Program (UNDCP) in Hanoi.
The situation has clearly unsettled Vietnam's
leaders. Both Communist Party chief Do
Muoi and Prime Minister Vo Van Kiet have
spoken out forcefully against the scourge.
"The situation is critical now," warned Kiet
recently. "The sharp rise in drug-trafficking
is a red alarm for us." While the highest
levels of government seem determined to
attack the problem, they essentially face an
enemy within. On May 14, in a trial given
much exposure by state media, the Hanoi
People's Court sentenced eight people to
death for running a gang that brought an
estimated 400 kg of heroin and a slightly
larger amount of opium into the country
between 1992 and 1995. Another eight got
life imprisonment and a further six up to 20
years. Shocking fact: several were police and
Interior Ministry officials.
With bureaucrats themselves in-volved,
Hanoi knows it has to do more than just
react. And with the UNDCP's help, it has
come up with a drug-control master plan
focusing on areas such as law enforcement,
preventive education and crop substitution.
The government's new political will
notwithstanding, hidebound attitudes are
hard to change. Hanoi's insularity remains a
stumbling block in a campaign where close
cooperation with international authorities is
crucial. "Being more open and sharing
information go against the whole mentality of
the Interior Ministry," says one diplomat.
"They are trained for security and to be
suspicious, so getting more cooperation is a
slow process."
Perhaps the biggest obstacle is the sheer
lucrativeness of the drug trade. Most of the
offenders in the recent case had official
incomes of between $80 and $120 a month.
A kilogram of heroin can fetch $50,000 on
the street, so the temptation to dabble in
drugs is strong. The authorities are forming a
new anti-narcotics unit -- but have
difficulty finding willing recruits to even staff
it. Though the war against drugs has got
commitment, it will need a lot more
resources to ensure victory.
Soccer-Tajikistan beat
Vietnam 4-0 in World Cup
qualifier
Hanoi (Reuter) - Tajikistan beat Vietnam
4-0 (halftime 2-0) in their World Cup Asian
zone group 8 qualifying match in Ho Chi
Minh City on Sunday.
Scorers: Mouminov 6, La Xuan Thang 24
own goal, Avakov 68, Achourmamadov 75.
Standings P W D L F A Pts
Tajikistan 4 3 0 1 10 2 9
China 3 3 0 0 8 2 9
Turkmenistan 3 1 0 2 4 7 3
Vietnam 4 0 0 4 2 13 0
Playing later: China v Turkmenistan.
---------------------------------------------