Once hailed as a national business icon, Trịnh Văn Quyết built a billion-dollar empire through real estate and aviation. But behind the scenes, he was orchestrating one of Vietnam’s largest stock market frauds
If you had said, fifty years ago, that one day there would be home-grown business billionaires in Vietnam, few would have believed you. Post-war poverty was severe – food stamps, power blackouts, trade embargoes and the struggle to rebuild a shattered nation. On top of that, the government was cracking down hard on the bourgeois class. The idea of ultra-wealthy Vietnamese moguls would have seemed absurd. And yet, here we are: Vietnam now boasts six billionaires, part of a new generation of bold, ambitious entrepreneurs.
Among these, Trịnh Văn Quyết stood out – once celebrated by Forbes magazine as a role model. His company was called “a rare story in the real estate sector.” But achieving extreme wealth rarely comes from hard work alone. In Quyết’s case, it wasn’t a lucky talisman or a sacred monk’s blessing – it was gross manipulation of the stock market. His case would become one of the most high-profile financial crimes in Vietnam’s modern history.
Writing for Luật Khoa, journalist Lê Giang meticulously lays out how the fraud worked and how it all ultimately unraveled. Quyết’s story begins with humble, entrepreneurial roots. At 14, he launched a tutoring company and sold second-hand phones. He later moved into legal consulting. He eventually built a reputation as one of the country’s most formidable businessmen, expanding into securities and real estate. He founded the FLC Group, credited with boosting tourism in central Vietnam and would go on to become a household name.
Among his ventures, none was more high-profile than Bamboo Airways. A symbol of his sky-high ambition, Quyết sought to build Vietnam’s first five-star airline and compete on a global scale. Under his leadership, Bamboo quickly dominated the domestic market, launched international routes and expanded its fleet with top-tier aircraft. For a time, it even appeared to eclipse the national carrier, Vietnam Airlines. And his empire was family-run – a Vietnamese-style chaebol.
But behind the success, cracks began to show. Whispers about questionable finances and opaque business practices turned into hard scrutiny. Authorities began to flag signs of market manipulation – specifically, suspicious stock transactions that appeared to inflate the value of his companies.
This wasn’t Quyết’s first brush with illegality. In 2017, he was fined 65 million VND for unauthorised stock sales. But that was just the surface. A far larger scheme was in motion.
Here’s how it worked: stock prices in Quyết’s companies would be artificially pushed up and shares then sold to other investment groups at a profit, manipulating the market for his benefit. He enlisted his eldest sister, Ms. Huệ, to make trades to bid up the share price. Between 26 May 2017 and January 2022, she executed over 27,000 stock purchase orders – averaging nearly 50 a day.
But the funds she used weren’t unconnected to Quyết’s business, they weren’t just her own investment – rather they had in turn been illegally siphoned off from one of Quyết’s own subsidiaries, BOS Securities Company, with help from his third sister, Trịnh Thị Thúy Nga. What looked like a hungry market for shares in Quyết’s business, was actually the beast feeding itself. To avoid detection, all the trades were placed at the start and end of trading sessions, between 9:00-9:30 a.m. and 2:30-3:00 p.m.
When the stock values peaked, the group then dumped a total of 1.34 billion shares on the open market, earning an estimated 17,000 billion VND. These transactions created fake cash flows and phantom debts on the books of FLC Faros, one of his listed companies. The goal? To legitimise forged financial statements, deceive investors and profit from shares created out of fictitious capital contributions.
On 27 March 2022, rumours surfaced online that Quyết had been barred from leaving the country. Two days later, authorities officially opened an investigation and detained him for “manipulating the stock market” and “concealing information in securities activities.”
Just as his rise had been a family affair, so too was his downfall. On 8 April 2024, the Supreme People’s Procuracy issued an indictment against Trịnh Văn Quyết and 49 others, including his sisters and extended family, for their roles in the scheme. He was sentenced to 21 years in prison and pledged to use all personal assets to help repay defrauded investors. At trial, his wife voluntarily contributed 203 billion VND toward the now-massive restitution, which has surpassed 600 billion VND (around $23 million).
Original article (“Trịnh Văn Quyết và vụ thao túng thị trường chứng khoán đi vào lịch sử”) by Lê Giang was first published in Vietnamese on 4 April 2025.
It’s available here.
Luật Khoa is a Vietnamese law journal that pursues independent and high quality journalism. It was founded in 2014 by Trịnh Hữu Long, Phạm Đoan Trang, Trần Quỳnh Vi and Trương Tự Minh. Their maxim is “fear no one, flatter no one”.
