Vietnam police to punish "billionaire monk"
HANOI - Vietnamese police are to prosecute a self-proclaimed monk and medicine man who claimed he had $2.5 billion in cash, gold and diamonds stolen from his house, state media reported on Thursday.The 46-year-old showed reporters $400,000 in cash as proof of his claims that thieves had broken into his Hanoi home and made off with the loot, which would amount to more than 5 percent of the communist southeast Asian nation's economy.
According to the Lao Dong daily, Vietnamese police were not taken in and, on probing his past to unearth the source on his extraordinary wealth, discovered he had been illegally operating as a doctor.
They found that some patients had sued the man, who never finished high school, for mistreatment and overcharging -- in some cases as much $50,000.
The paper said the man gained the trust of patients by claiming to have cured world figures including U.S. First Lady
Laura Bush during a recent trip to the White House.
However, the man had no passport and had never left Vietnam, police said, adding that they had also found no evidence of the missing $2.5 billion.
Reuters - October 20, 2005.
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