02 December 2003 :

A court in Vietnam has sentenced a woman to death for embezzlement and said two former vice ministers of agriculture would both be jailed for three years after a trial that exposed state corruption.
La Thi Kim Oanh, director of a company run by the agriculture ministry, was sentenced "to death for embezzlement of state money and property", presiding Judge Nguyen Son told the court in Hanoi.
Former deputy agriculture ministers Nguyen Thien Luan and Nguyen Quang Ha, along with five other defendants, had been charged with abetting and benefiting from fraud and embezzlement that caused losses of $7.48 million to the communist government. They were convicted of "dereliction of duty" and jailed for that. All the defendants have the right to appeal.
The sentences, delivered after a day-long session, ended hearings that began on November 17 in a trial that was unprecedented with two former vice ministers in the dock at the same time and on the same charge.