Vietnam's parliament in session in October 2022. Vietnam's National Assembly voted on Jan 5 to dismiss two deputy prime ministers. - AFP
BANGKOK/HANOI, Jan 15 (The Straits Times/ANN): The fallout from Vietnam’s Covid-19 pandemic-related graft scandals came to a head on Jan 5, when its National Assembly voted to dismiss two deputy prime ministers and approve two replacements.
One of the deputy prime ministers let go was veteran diplomat and former foreign minister Pham Binh Minh, who was also a member of the Communist Party of Vietnam’s politburo – a position he was also forced to vacate.
The other was Mr Vu Duc Dam, who headed the country’s Covid-19 task force. Their seats were taken up by Minister of Natural Resources and Environment Tran Hong Ha and the party chief of Haiphong province, Tran Luu Quang.
Unlike the related rash of sackings, arrests and prosecutions in 2022 that swept up senior officials like then Health Minister Nguyen Thanh Long and Mr Vu Hong Nam, the former ambassador to Japan, Mr Minh and Mr Dam were allowed to resign.
While no official reasons were given for the deputy prime ministers’ departure, it was widely attributed to the bribery and exorbitant airfares that Vietnamese nationals had to pay when scrambling to get on repatriation flights during the pandemic, as well as the alleged private-public sector collusion that inflated the prices of Covid-19 test kits and involved some 800 billion dong (S$45 million) worth of kickbacks.
Corruption is endemic in Vietnam, which ranks a lowly 87 out of 180 countries and territories in Transparency International’s 2021 Corruption Perception Index. Yet, few doubted that the fallout from both scandals would have been severe, given the uproar they triggered among the pandemic-weary Vietnamese.
The difference this time is the way in which the two deputy premiers were ousted. Neither was disciplined by the party before resigning. They are also unlikely to face criminal prosecution, say analysts, given that there has been no evidence so far directly linking them to the scandals. Rather, they were made to take responsibility for wrongdoing that took place under their leadership.
This marks an inflection point in party general secretary Nguyen Phu Trong’s “blazing furnace” of an anti-corruption campaign.
Dr Le Hong Hiep, a senior fellow at ISEAS – Yusof Ishak Institute in Singapore, told The Straits Times: “Now the party is trying to create a so-called ‘culture of resignation’, so that when you are found to have made a mistake or be responsible for a scandal that happened under your watch, you are expected to resign. You don’t wait for the party to take action against you.
“This would create a culture of accountability and more flexibility within the party’s personnel mechanism.”
It may take some time for this practice to be normalised within the party, but “this is a step in that direction”, he noted.
However, the vague terms of their departure may have unintended effects, noted Ms Futaba Ishizuka, a researcher at Japan’s Institute of Developing Economies.
“The party-led, top-down approach to fighting corruption has been effective in achieving a record number of cases revealed and persons disciplined and prosecuted. On the other hand, compared to a judiciary-led approach, the party-led approach tends to be less accountable to the public.
“The judicial system in Vietnam has its limitations, but still we can see the reasons for which someone is prosecuted, and assess whether the sentence matches the level of criminal liability, for instance.”
Noting that the reasons for their resignations were not spelt out, she said: “It is widely assumed that they ‘resigned’ due to their involvement in the two large-scale scandals, but we can only guess how they were involved in these cases. In that sense, the potential appeal of the resignation to the public as a responsible act might be offset by speculations on the political motivation behind the scenes.”]
Emeritus Professor Carl Thayer at Australia’s University of New South Wales said the latest departures have nothing to do with internal power struggles, even though Mr Trong, 78, is expected to retire as general secretary by the end of his unprecedented third term in 2026.
Rather, the recent departures have more to do with how the party, under Mr Trong, has widened the scope of accountability for wrongdoing to include politicians who have vouched for or supervised the wrongdoers, Prof Thayer said. This makes them liable for dereliction of duty.
“They are going after networks, so it’s much more extensive.”
Vietnam is poised to rebound faster than most of its regional counterparts from the pandemic, with its economy forecast by the Asian Development Bank to grow by 6.3 per cent in 2023.
With the party’s emerging system of attributing responsibility, it is anybody’s guess as to how many more will fall by the wayside. - The Straits Times/ANN
