A verdicts in one of the biggest bank frauds the world has ever seen.

Live from the BBC World Service, this is the Marketplace Morning Report.

I'm Luke Wilson in Fleeanna Byrne. Good morning. A court in Ho Chi Min City has sentenced property

developer Tron-Mieland to death after she was found guilty of taking $44 billion from one of Vietnam's largest banks over a period of 11

years. The BBC's Jonathan Head has been following the trial and joins us from Bangkok.

Hi Jonathan. Hello. So this is eye-watering sums of

money. Has it been as big a trial as we imagine in Vietnam?

It has been big and I think that is a deliberate

strategy of the authorities. Remember it's a one-party state there is no freedom

of media everything's tightly controlled and yet in the early stages of the

trial the prosecutors unloaded every

imaginable detail about the case which the Vietnamese media reported at great

length and so it seems the authorities want this to be a big deal. They want this to be an example.

And remember, this country has been experiencing years now of an official anti-corruption campaign

launched by the sort of hardline Marxist leader of the Communist Party,

a veteran leader called Wenfu Chong.

He calls it blazing furnaces to try to counter the corruption that's endemic in official in business circles.

And the attention very much seems to have been on Tron-Meeland, but as you say, she's not the only

one on trial here.

She's not, though I think she's definitely being built up to be the

villain of this story. There are 86 people in total on trial, 80 of them alongside

Trung-Mielandis. This includes people who worked under her in the bank, some of her relatives in her business, but also state officials, including one of the chief inspectors of the Central Bank, who's been charged with taking a five million dollar bribe in order to

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