Vietnam to sell tycoon's Hermès Birkin bags to offset fraud losses

Two Birkin bags and a luxury yacht are among the assets belonging to embattled tycoon Truong My Lan that Vietnamese authorities are now trying to sell as part of efforts to offset the billions she embezzled.

The disgraced tycoon is serving a life sentence for embezzling from a major Vietnamese bank and has been ordered to return $27bn (£19bn) in reparations.

Ho Chi Minh City's Civil Judgment Enforcement Agency said this week that it was seeking experts to appraise the value of two crocodile skin Hermès Birkin bags seized from Truong My Lan, local media reported.

Meanwhile her yacht is set to go on auction next month with a starting price of 49.3 billion Vietnamese dong ($1.9m; £1.4m).

Truong My Lan was sentenced to death in April 2024 after a court found that she had secretly controlled Saigon Commercial Bank, the country's fifth biggest lender, and taken out loans and cash over more than 10 years through a web of shell companies, amounting to a total of $44bn.

Prosecutors said $27bn of that sum had been misappropriated, and $12bn was judged to have been embezzled - amounting to one of the largest financial crimes the world had seen.

Truong My Lan denied the charges and tried unsuccessfully to appeal her death sentence - though that was commuted to life in prison last June, after Vietnam abolished the death penalty for a range of crimes.

More than 80 people - including her husband and niece - were tried with her and were all convicted.

Her trial, the most dramatic one in Vietnam's fervent crackdown on corruption, captured the attention of the country and beyond.

The mogul's assets are now at the centre of official efforts to compensate her victims and offset the billions lost to fraud. Authorities have seized more than 1,200 of her assets, including her company holdings and real estate, local media reported.

This week, Ho Chi Minh City Civil Judgment Enforcement Department said it had seized several of Truong My Lan's assets - including the two Hermès bags, clothes and a watch.

During her trial, Truong My Lan had tried to hold on to her two Hermès bags, telling the court that she had bought one of them in Italy and the other was a gift from a Malaysian businessman. She said she wanted to leave the bags as "keepsakes" for her children and grandchildren.

But her appeal was rejected by the court, which ruled that the bags were ill-gotten.

Hermès' exclusive Birkin bags can be worth up to hundreds of thousands of dollars.

Last October, one of Truong My Lan's properties in the heart of Ho Chi Minh City became the first of her assets to be successfully auctioned off, selling for more than 600 billion dong.

Earlier this month, Vietnamese authorities had tried to auction off her Reverie Saigon at 52.4 billion dong - but no one bought the yacht.

It will be up again for auction on 12 February with a reduced starting price, local media reported. Bidders would need to pay a deposit of 20% of the starting price to enter the auction.

Another two of Truong My Lan's boats will also be auctioned at 4.8 billion dong each.

Additional reporting by Thuong Le