The former chairman of Vietnam’s state oil company Nguyen Xuan Son, was on Friday sentenced to death for fraud, state media reported.

Xuan Son, who chaired the board of PetroVietnam from 2014 to 2015, was sentenced to death in a Hanoi court after being found guilty of stealing 13.6 million dollars from Ocean Bank, which was partially owned by PetroVietnam, the Vnexpress news site reported.

The bank’s former Chairman, Ha Tham, was sentenced to life imprisonment for violating rules on both economic management and lending.

He was found to have given illegally generous deposit rates to favoured customers, including PetroVietnam.

Tham was accused of causing losses of around 70.4 million dollars owing to the violations.

The Ocean Bank case, which has already involved 51 other defendants, is among the biggest economic scandals in Vietnamese history.

PetroVietnam has been hit with series of corruption scandals in recent years.

Trinh Thanh, former Head of the PetroVietnam Construction Joint Stock Corporation, a subsidiary of PetroVietnam, was accused of embezzling 150 million dollars in 2016 in a separate investigation.

Germany has accused Vietnam of kidnapping Thanh in Berlin, where he had sought asylum, in July.

Vietnam denies the accusations, maintaining that Thanh returned home and turned himself in of his own accord. He currently awaits trial. (dpa/NAN)

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