VN news (June 2)

[Dam Son <son@fermi.phys.washington.edu>]

Vietnam gives state firms two years to shape up
Vietnam praises anti-vice drive in former Saigon
Murder not ruled out in Vietnam Minh Phung scandal
Vietnam protests war memorial attack in Cambodia


Vietnam gives state firms two years to shape up
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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.


Vietnam praises anti-vice drive in former Saigon
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Vietnam praises anti-vice drive in former Saigon
HANOI, June 2 (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.


Murder not ruled out in Vietnam Minh Phung scandal
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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
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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.