VN news (July 8)

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

Vietnam to send deputy foreign minister to emergency Asean meeting
Vietnam Visit to Warm China Ties 
Vietnam's Minh Phung scandal still spreading 
Vietnam says overseas Vietnamese coming home 
Hanoi has no plans to evacuate Vietnamese in Cambodia 
Man executed in Vietnam for corruption 
Vietnam Urges all Parties in Cambodia to Exercise Restraint 

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Vietnam to send deputy foreign minister to emergency Asean meeting

Hanoi, July 8 (AFP) - Vietnam will send deputy foreign minister Vu Khoan
to Kuala Lumpur for the emergency meeting of Asean foreign ministers
called to discuss the factional fighting in Cambodia, a foreign ministry
official said on Tuesday.

The emergency meeting on Thursday has been called ahead of a scheduled
meeting of foreign ministers in Kuala Lumpur on July 24-25 at which Cambodia,
Laos and Burma are scheduled to be brought into the Association of Southeast
Asian Nations.

The Vietnamese foreign ministry did not specify why Khoan would attend
in place of Foreign Minister Nguyen Manh Cam.

Vietnam has not indicated whether it would support a move to delay the
admission of Cambodia into Asean, which currently groups Brunei, Indonesia,
Malaysia, Philippines, Singapore, Thailand and Vietnam.

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Vietnam Visit to Warm China Ties 

BEIJING, July 8 (UPI) - Vietnam Communist Party Chairman Do Muoi will
visit China next week to boost trade and political ties between the former
rivals.

Once close communist allies, relations between Hanoi and Beijing soured
after Vietnam invaded Cambodia in 1978.

China retaliated by launching a bloody but poorly-executed attack on
north Vietnam.

Ties remained cool until 1991, when Do Muoi and Vietnamese Premier Vo
Van Kiet visited Beijing.

Trade has flourished since normalization, but a host of border and maritime
disputes continue to threaten further friendship.

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Vietnam's Minh Phung scandal still spreading 

Hanoi, July 8 (Reuter) - A senior state prosecutor in Vietnam's Ho Chi
Minh City has upped the amount of debt owed by scandal-plagued conglomerate
Minh Phung to nearly $430 million, significantly worse than previously
thought.

Tuesday's Tuoi Tre newspaper quoted Dang The Hong, Ho Chi Minh City's
chief prosecutor, as saying delays by banks in reporting and dealing
with the troubles surrounding loans to Minh Phung had exacerbated the
problem.

"The debt owed by the Minh Phung company is put now at 5,000 billion
dong ($428.4 million)," he said. "The recovery of that money, owed
by Minh Phung and its subsidiaries, is unlikely."

Previous estimates of the debt owed by the company, given to police by
its director Tang Minh Phung, were put at $370 million.

He was arrested in March, together with the head of another major local
firm EPCO on fraud charges, as a scandal surrounding shady and interrelated
borrowing to finance vast property deals surfaced.

The company is alleged to have used contacts and influence to obtain
huge loans from both state-owned and private commercial banks, mostly
through letters of credit.

The scandal has sent shockwaves through Vietnam's domestic banking system,
which has been left counting the costs.

But the affair has also adopted more sinister overtones following the
grisly death, shortly after the case emerged, of a Minh Phung deputy
director on the premises of one of the banks involved.

The Tuoi Tre newspaper quoted a senior city official on Tuesday as calling
for a probe of another major conglomerate, Huy Hoang, in order to prevent
a recurrence of the scandal.

"The public are very concerned by the real situation of another big
private company, Huy Hoang," said Le Hieu Dang, a social and cultural
department official.

"A financial check of the situation at this company should be carried
out soon...to prevent a recurrence of the situation at Minh Phung and
Epco."

Huy Hoang has previously denied problems.

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Vietnam says overseas Vietnamese coming home 

HANOI, July 8 (AFP) - Vietnam has seen an influx of returning overseas
Vietnamese during the first six months of the year, an official said
on Tuesday.

According to an official at the National Committee for Overseas Vietnamese,
some 131 overseas Vietnamese, or "Viet Kieu," returned during the first
six months of this year, compared with 900 who arrived between 1975 and
1996.

The official Vietnam News daily on Tuesday carried a page one story attributing
the influx to a law passed last November which broadened the immigration
sponsorship limitations to include extended family members.

That report, however, said 500 people had returned so far this year,
a figure equal to the total number arriving between 1975 and 1996. An
official later said the newspaper's figures were inaccurate.

Previously, only those with immediate family members living in Vietnam
could be sponsored to return from abroad to become permanent residents.

There are more than two million Vietnamese living abroad, the bulk of
whom left the country after the Vietnam War.

Since opening its economy in 1986, Vietnam has been eager to gain access
to the investment and education of overseas Vietnamese, who are concentrated
in the United States, Canada, France, Germany and Australia.

But despite official efforts to woo them home, most of these people still
feel uneasy about returning permanently to a country they fled.

Overseas Vietnamese have often been regarded with suspicion by the government
as many were linked to the former South Vietnamese regime before reunification
in 1975. There were over 300,000 visiting Viet Kieu to Vietnam last year,
but so far only a trickle of them have actually returned permanently.

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Hanoi has no plans to evacuate Vietnamese in Cambodia 

HANOI, July 8 (AFP) - Hanoi said Tuesday it did not intend to organize
an evacuation of Vietnamese living in Cambodia, a foreign ministry official
said.

The Vietnamese government "did not have this project for the moment,"
the official said in response to press queries on a possible evacuation
of Vietnamese nationals.

Thailand on Tuesday launched an airborne evacuation of its nationals
as well as other foreigners, including Americans, from Cambodian capital
Phnom Penh where fighting between forces loyal to the country's two feuding
co-premiers has left at least 16 persons confirmed dead.

There are no official figures on the number of Vietnamese living in Cambodia
but estimates put their numbers in the hundreds of thousands, with many
believed to have immigrated there illegally.

Vietnam invaded Cambodia in December 1978 to topple a Khmer Rouge regime,
which is believed to have been responsible for the deaths of up to two
million Cambodians, and resettled many Vietnamese in the neighbouring
country.

Hanoi backed another government under Hun Sen and withdrew the last of
its troops from Cambodia in 1989.

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Man executed in Vietnam for corruption 

HANOI, July 8 (AFP) - A Vietnamese man has been executed for economic
crimes after embezzling 140,000 dollars from a state-owned company, a
court official said on Tuesday.

Nguyen Nhan Tai, a bookkeeper at the state-owned Agricultural Technology
and Services Co. in the southern province of An Giang, was executed on
June 29 for "misappropriating socialist properties", a provincial official
said.

Tai is believed to be one of the first Vietnamese executed for economic
crimes. Since 1993, 10 people have been sentenced to death for economic
corruption, but executions are rarely reported officially.

The official confirmed reports of Tai's death which appeared in the official
Nhan Dan newspaper on Tuesday.

Tai absconded to Cambodia with a banker's order for 140,000 dollars that
was to be used to buy fertiliser. He spent 18 months on the run in the
neighbouring country before being caught and extradicted.

He was sentenced to death last July and failed in his appeal attempt
in September.

A total of 113 people were executed in Vietnam in 1996, up from 104 in
1995.

Executions in Vietnam are carried out by firing squad who fire five shots
to the body and one coup de grace to the head.

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Vietnam Urges all Parties in Cambodia to Exercise Restraint 

HANOI (July 7) XINHUA - Vietnam today urged all parties involved fightings
in Phnom Penh to exercise restraint and find peaceful solutions for the
current crisis.

"Vietnam has followed with keen interest what recently happened in Cambodia,"
the Vietnamese News Agency quoted a Ministry of Foreign Affairs statement
as saying.

While regarding it as the internal affairs of Cambodia, the statement
said, Vietnam wishes all parties of Cambodia to "control themselves"
and make efforts to find peaceful solutions.

The statement was referring to fightings between forces of the People's
Party led by Cambodia's Second Prime Minister Hun Sen and the FUNCINPEC
Party of First Prime Minister Ranariddh.

Fierce fightings from Saturday morning to Sunday evening reportedly left
at least 10 people killed and more than 50 others injured in the Cambodian
capital of Phnom Penh.

Vietnam respects independence and sovereignty of Cambodia and stands
for non-interference in Cambodia's internal affairs, the official Vietnamese
statement noted.

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