Vietnamese police have arrested three more suspects as part of a widening scandal in the country’s shipping industry, an official said yesterday.
The deputy director general of state-owned shipping giant Vinalines, 53-year-old Bui Quoc Anh, was detained on Friday for embezzlement along with two others including a state auditor, a company official said.
Local media reports identified the third suspect as an executive at a subsidiary of Vinalines, which is the country’s biggest sea shipping group, operating a fleet of oil tankers, container ships and other vessels.
The arrests were based on investigations involving one of nine former top executives at scandal-tainted shipbuilder Vinashin jailed last month for intentionally violating state regulations, the official said.
He gave no further details, but the official Thanh Nien newspaper reported yesterday that the three new suspects pocketed “billions of dong [tens of thousands of US dollars] for personal gain” when buying a container ship.
The scandal at Vinashin — which almost collapsed in 2010 under billions of US dollars of debt — sparked investor fears of wider problems at state-owned firms, a key pillar of Vietnam’s economy.
Former Vinashin chairman Pham Thanh Binh was last month jailed for 20 years, while eight other former executives at the shipbuilder were handed sentences of between three and 19 years.
The executives were accused of losing more than US$43 million, mostly from the procurement of an Italian-made high-speed passenger boat as well as two electricity plants.
Some loss-making sea transport projects at Vinashin have been transferred to Vinalines.
State-owned groups, many of which are widely regarded as badly managed, control two-thirds of capital and assets in Vietnam and enjoy cosy relations with officials.
Stephen Garrett, a 27-year-old graduate student, always thought he would study in China, but first the country’s restrictive COVID-19 policies made it nearly impossible and now he has other concerns. The cost is one deterrent, but Garrett is more worried about restrictions on academic freedom and the personal risk of being stranded in China. He is not alone. Only about 700 American students are studying at Chinese universities, down from a peak of nearly 25,000 a decade ago, while there are nearly 300,000 Chinese students at US schools. Some young Americans are discouraged from investing their time in China by what they see
MAJOR DROP: CEO Tim Cook, who is visiting Hanoi, pledged the firm was committed to Vietnam after its smartphone shipments declined 9.6% annually in the first quarter Apple Inc yesterday said it would increase spending on suppliers in Vietnam, a key production hub, as CEO Tim Cook arrived in the country for a two-day visit. The iPhone maker announced the news in a statement on its Web site, but gave no details of how much it would spend or where the money would go. Cook is expected to meet programmers, content creators and students during his visit, online newspaper VnExpress reported. The visit comes as US President Joe Biden’s administration seeks to ramp up Vietnam’s role in the global tech supply chain to reduce the US’ dependence on China. Images on
Taiwan Transport and Storage Corp (TTS, 台灣通運倉儲) yesterday unveiled its first electric tractor unit — manufactured by Volvo Trucks — in a ceremony in Taipei, and said the unit would soon be used to transport cement produced by Taiwan Cement Corp (TCC, 台灣水泥). Both TTS and TCC belong to TCC International Holdings Ltd (台泥國際集團). With the electric tractor unit, the Taipei-based cement firm would become the first in Taiwan to use electric vehicles to transport construction materials. TTS chairman Koo Kung-yi (辜公怡), Volvo Trucks vice president of sales and marketing Johan Selven, TCC president Roman Cheng (程耀輝) and Taikoo Motors Group
New apartments in Taiwan’s major cities are getting smaller, while old apartments are increasingly occupied by older people, many of whom live alone, government data showed. The phenomenon has to do with sharpening unaffordable property prices and an aging population, property brokers said. Apartments with one bedroom that are two years old or older have gained a noticeable presence in the nation’s six special municipalities as well as Hsinchu county and city in the past five years, Evertrust Rehouse Co (永慶房產集團) found, citing data from the government’s real-price transaction platform. In Taipei, apartments with one bedroom accounted for 19 percent of deals last