Verdict on former railway officials announced

Accordingly, Pham Hai Bang, former Deputy Director of the Railway Project Management Unit (RPMU) under the Vietnam Railways Corporation (VNR), will spend 12 years in jail. 

Nguyen Nam Thai, former head of project implementation section 3 under the RPMU, will stay behind bars for 11 years. 

Pham Quang Duy, former Deputy Director of the RPMU, will be held behind bars for eight years and six months. 

Tran Quoc Dong, former Deputy Director General of the VNR and former Director of the RPMU, and Nguyen Van Hieu, former RPMU Director, both will spend seven years and six months in prison. 

Meanwhile Tran Van Luc, former Director of the RPMU, will be sent to prison for five years and six months. 

According to the verdict, the six defendants repeatedly asked the Japan Transportation Consultants, Inc. (JTC), which involved in the city's Urban Railway Construction Project (Line 1), for financial support, which they spent on various purposes for both collective and individual benefits. The spending was not documented. 

They failed to monitor the implementation of the contract as well as the quality of the project and the provision of related documents, the verdict said. 

While the workload has yet finished half of the volume mentioned in the contract, the officials still signed disbursement documents and paid a total of 15 invoices for the contractor, which violated bidding regulations and hindered the project’s progress. 

In this case, Bang was identified as the mastermind, who was aided by Thai who directly filed and signed the contract, and sent emails detailing money transfer requirements to the Japanese partner. 

Duy sought to put JTC under pressure to give financial aid to the Vietnamese side while Dong, who was RPMU Director for two consecutive years, turned a blind eye to Bang’s actions and allowed the disbursements when the work was half done.

Hieu, former RPMU Director, ignored what Bang and Thai did during his three-year tenure. He did not inspect the contractor’s operation and received VND50 million (US$2,241). 

Luc, RPMU former Director, took no action to stop Bang from committing a crime and on the contrary, he got VND100 million from the under-the-table deal. 

At the court, the defendants claimed that the undocumented VND11 billion were spent on joint activities of the RPMU. However, as this financial aid was not given on a voluntarily basis, it will be retrieved for the State coffer. 

Apart from seizing a number of assets of Bang, Thai, Hieu and Dong, the court fined them VND30 million each which will be added to the State coffer and prohibited them from taking on any management posts within 3 years since they are released. 

The verdict also stressed that the ex-railway officials violated regulations stipulated in Vietnam’s Law on Anti-Corruption and affected the relationships between Vietnam and Japan and other countries, in a direct or indirect manner. 

In March last year, the Japanese-newspaper Yomiuri Shimbun reported that JTC's President Tamio Kakinuma had admitted to paying "kickbacks" to foreign civil servants in Vietnam, Indonesia and Uzbekistan in return for five ODA projects. 

The scandal prompted the arrest of the six railway officials of Vietnam and the Japanese government suspended ODA funding to Vietnam temporarily. It was later resumed in July last year.