Vietnam tackles its Hydra-headed corruption

Vietnamese prosecutors hauled 68 defendants into courts in Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh City on Monday alone, part of a vast corruption crackdown that the ruling Communist Party has deemed essential to improving governance.
In a Hanoi court, 22 executives of state-run PetroVietnam, including a former member of the inner-circle politburo, were put on trial. In HCM City, another 46 defendants faced charges of banking fraud. The separate sets of trials are expected to shed light on the corruption, mismanagement and nepotism plaguing state-owned enterprises at the core of Vietnam’s economy.
A score of officials and executive have been arrested across the energy and banking sectors. Some have already been tried and sentenced for wrongdoings. The most senior figure arrested is former PetroVietnam chairman Dinh La Thang, a former member of the politburo. Another is also an executive of the same firm, Trinh Xuan Thanh, who Vietnamese operatives allegedly abducted from Germany last year to bring to justice. 
Thang, Thanh and 20 other officials in the Hanoi court on Monday are accused of costing the state US$5.2 million in losses through PetroVietnam’s investment in the construction of a thermal-power plant. PetroVietnam is a tangled enterprise of 15 direct units, 18 subsidiaries and 46 affiliates in which it holds smaller stakes. Hundreds of millions of dollars in losses have been racked up at units ranging from banks and construction firms to power plants and textile mills.
The scandals at PetroVietnam are connected to the banking sector through a deal in which the oil firm lost $35 million in an investment in Ocean Bank. The lender’s former chief executive – a previous PetroVietnam chairman – was sentenced to death.
Vietnam’s anti-graft crusade has been going on for years. Accused wrongdoers also hail from many levels of government agencies. Corruption is meanwhile growing in the private sector, which must deal with state agencies.
There are many grey areas to Vietnamese governance, however. The case of Phan Van Anh Vu, a senior secret police officer, is a complex story. Vu was deported from Singapore last week after attempting to cross into neighbouring Malaysia. While Vietnam wanted him for allegedly disclosing state secrets, he was also reportedly involved in high-profile corruption cases. But a lawyer in Germany has said Vu might also have information about the kidnapping of PetroVietnam executive Thanh from Berlin. It’s difficult to determine how this “secret agent” was involved in corruption. There are more questions than answers to the story.
Corruption is spreading like a cancer in Vietnam. Transparency International ranks the country 113th among the 176 nations on its corruption index, worse than Thailand and the Philippines. But as much as a crackdown is needed, party chief Nguyen Phu Trong must overcome suspicions that it’s a pretext to eliminate his political opponents, notably factions under former premier Nguyen Tan Dung.
The crackdown will certainly succeed in curtailing corruption among officials, but the problem will not be extinguished unless it’s tackled at the roots, which lie in cultural as well as political soil. Administrations that prefer to remain more opaque than transparent are aiding and abetting corruption. Crackdowns will bring the problem to a halt only in the short term and only in particular areas. The leadership in Hanoi needs to consider another sweeping reform of the entire system that includes sustainable means to halt and prevent more graft.