Nguyen Duc Thai, former chair of the member council of the Vietnam Education Publishing House, and three others were prosecuted and arrested on February 13.

The four individuals have also been found colluding with their partners to inflate the prices of paper and input materials in order to appropriate the state’s money.

The other three are Nguyen Thi Thanh Thuy, former head of the marketing planning department, Dinh Quoc Khanh, former head of the marketing planning department, and To My Ngoc, chair of Phung Vinh Hung Paper JSC.

According to agencies, in 2014-2019, Phung Vinh Hung won a bid to provide 83.1 percent of the total volume of paper to the publishing house, worth VND1.89 trillion. 

After checking some contracts, the agencies discovered that the paper price at which the company sold to the publishing house was 1.7 times higher than the import price, which meant an inflated amount of VND210 billion.

People are calling this a ‘Viet A case in education’ (In Viet A case, the company inflated Covid-19 test kit prices).

Parents have been angry for months about high textbook prices. They cannot understand why price inflation has just been discovered, though the problem has been mentioned many times before, and National Assembly deputies had raised the problem in discussions at NA meetings.

It was the Ministry of Education and Training’s inspectors which said the discount rate of textbook sales was high, 25 percent, which was unreasonable compared with other exclusive and essential goods.

The investigation agency found that in 2014-2018, problems occurred during the process of building textbook printing bid packages, resulted in parents having to buy textbooks at high prices. The gap between the prices parents had to pay and the right prices was VND85 billion. 

Thai abused his position and power to purchase paper for textbook printing, and together with other three defendants broke regulations on ensuring fairness and transparency in bidding activities, thus causing serious losses to the state. After the bids, Thai and Thuy received material benefits from To My Ngoc.

Ha Phan