Former General Director of Vietsovpetro Tu Thanh Nghia (Photo: tienphong.vn) Hanoi (VNA) – The Supreme People’s Procuracy has prosecuted Tu Thanh Nghia, former General Director of the Vietnam-Russia oil and gas joint venture Vietsovpetro, for “abusing position and power to appropriate assets”.
Aside from Nghia (born in 1962), former chief accountant of the firm Vo Quang Huy (born in 1961) also faces the same charge, which is under Article 355 of the 2015 Penal Code.
According to the indictment, Vietsovpetro began using the payment account services of and had some fixed-term deposit contracts with the Ocean Commercial Joint Stock Bank (OceanBank) in 2008.
By 2009, it had had many fixed-term deposit contracts and often maintained a large payment account balance at the OceanBank branch in Vung Tau city. This was in line with the direction of the Vietnam National Oil and Gas Group (PetroVietnam) – which represents the Vietnamese Government in contributing 51 percent (or 765 million USD) of Vietsovpetro’s charter capital – regarding the prioritisation of using financial services of OceanBank, to which PetroVietnam contributed 20 percent of the charter capital.
Meanwhile, then Chairman of the Board of Directors of OceanBank Ha Van Tham ordered that extra-interest which was not stated in contracts be paid to all clients who had deposited money at the bank.
From 2013 to 2014, then Director General of OceanBank Nguyen Minh Thu received money sent from the OceanBank headquarters through other people’s accounts at the Vung Tau and Ho Chi Minh City branches to pay the extra-interest to Tu Thanh Nghia and Vo Quang Huy.
The Supreme People’s Procuracy said as the then leaders of Vietsovpetro, Nghia and Huy decided to deposit the business’ money at OceanBank and received the money from Thu. While Huy received and appropriated 6.7 billion VND and 130,000 USD, Nghia took 1.5 billion VND and 30,000 USD.
The procuracy said there is sufficient basis proving that Nghia and Huy abused positions and power to appropriate assets. –VNA
VNA
