Sand, Land, Test Kits and Trees
An anti-corruption cornucopia
Hello, and welcome to all new readers - this is the Vietnam Weekly, a newsletter written by reporter Mike Tatarski. Today’s edition is exclusively for paying subscribers and covers a wide range of recent anti-corruption news. I intended to cover ongoing energy-related developments, but need more time to put that together. If you haven’t already, you can upgrade to a paid subscription to access this along with all future and past exclusive stories for US$5/month or US$50/year.
On to the news.
Even with the repatriation flight scandal and ensuing trials out of the way, there is no shortage of news related to the anti-corruption campaign - and just corruption in general. (Do all corruption cases fall under the anti-corruption campaign? I genuinely don’t know.)
The sheer variety of graft and greed is quite something: from sand mining in the Mekong Delta and illegal land use on Phú Quốc to COVID-19 test kits across the country and planting trees in Hanoi, there’s a case for everyone.
We’ll go through each of those today, starting with the Mekong Delta which, as I’ve discussed before, faces existential risks exacerbated by rampant sand mining.