Nguyen Duc Kien denied the charges of fraudulent appropriation of property and conducting illegal business on the second day of his trial on May 21.

The trial reopened on May 20 after being delayed for more than a month due to the poor heath of Tran Xuan Gia, the former chairman of the Asia Commercial Bank (ACB), who was also involved in the case.

According to court documents, Kien, a former vice chairman and founding member of ACB, was charged with fraud when selling 20 million Hanoi ACB Investment Company shares to Hoa Phat Steel Company, although those shares were being mortgaged at ACB.

Kien told the judges that the share sale had been approved at a meeting of the board of directors.

However, members of the board said they were not invited to the meeting and the court found that there was no such a meeting.

During the hearing, a representative of Hoa Phat Steel Company said when the contract to transfer the 20 million shares was signed, the company was not aware that they were being mortgaged.

Besides fraud, Kien was also charged with three other counts of conducting illegal business, intentionally violating the State’s economic regulations on economic management causing serious consequences, and tax evasion.

According to the indictment, the six companies where Kien was chairman were engaged in unlicensed financial investments and gold trading worth nearly VND21.5 trillion (US$1 billion), a charge that Kien denied.

He said that Thien Nam, one of his companies, only invested in gold prices and did not trade gold as a type of goods, though acknowledging that the figures stated in the indictment were correct.