A mission to unlock a mystery
WASHINGTON - Yen H. Nguyen, a Potomac resident who emigrated from Vietnam in 1975, borrowed money from her family this fall to raise $85,000 to bail her Vietnamese American husband out of a government detention center outside Hanoi.
Hoan D. Nguyen, 57, the general director of an international school in the Vietnamese capital, has been held since April on charges of embezzlement, allegations he denies.
A month after Yen paid the government through an intermediary, Vietnamese authorities told the U.S. Embassy in a diplomatic note that they would not release her husband. The money wasn't bail, they said, but was intended to "overcome" the funds Hoan is accused of stealing.
Yen's attorney in Hanoi told her that by paying an additional $250,000, she could win her husband's freedom. Yen, an elegant woman of 53, says she doesn't have that kind of money.
"It does seem like clear extortion," said Rep. Chris Van Hollen (D-Md.), whose staff is monitoring the case. The State Department said Hoan is one of 14 U.S. citizens detained in Vietnam.
Through a spokesman in Washington, the Vietnamese government said its investigation of Hoan is being carried out in a "transparent manner and in compliance with the Vietnamese laws."
The impasse leaves Yen little choice but to seek publicity even though she worries that it could offend the Vietnamese government. On the other hand, she said, "if I keep quiet and don't come up with the money, they'll keep him in there."
She said her husband, an international businessman with degrees from George Mason and Vanderbilt universities, is proud of the school he helped to create. Sitting in her spacious kitchen, surrounded by Asian art and a plasma screen television, she said he might have underestimated the difficulty of doing business in a country run by communists. "He doesn't know the jungle law," she said. "They can use the jungle law to do anything to you."
Early Problems
Hoan Nguyen and a group of U.S. investors entered into a joint venture with a Vietnamese government agency to establish the Hanoi International School in 1996. The investors provided a little more than $2.4 million in cash and loans, and their Vietnamese partners provided a 20-year lease, valued at $272,000, to a property in Hanoi's embassy district, according to notes prepared by Hoan before his arrest.
The joint venture had problems from the beginning because of disputes between the American and the Vietnamese sides. It took the intervention of Vietnamese ministries to prod the Vietnamese side to yield the land as promised, the notes say.
Afterward, problems continued. One of the Vietnamese partners "told the board that I should not go to school, because he thinks my security was threatened," Hoan wrote.
Government agencies have investigated the school in recent years. One report, issued in January, found that the school's board and managers "have committed many serious transgression[s]," including unsubstantiated or unjustified expenses charged to the school's accounts.
On April 6, Vietnam's Ministry of Public Security arrested Hoan and has held him at a detention center known as B14. There has been no full accounting from the government of the charges against Hoan. He has had no formal legal proceeding, Yen said, although a Vietnamese diplomatic note to the U.S. Embassy said he is accused of abusing his position by taking funds for personal use and "committing corrupted acts against school assets."
U.S. Embassy officials saw him two weeks after his arrest, and he told them to tell his family not to worry. Because the detention center provides only cooked rice and greens twice a day, Yen has arranged to have a driver make deliveries of food, medicine and reading materials.
"I always maintain my innocence," Hoan told embassy officials during a June visit, according to an e-mail the officials sent Yen. She said his only visitors have been embassy officials, who have seen Hoan once a month since his arrest, and his attorney, who has seen him twice, but only briefly. Yen said Hoan never feared arrest and detention because he thought his conduct had been correct.
Vietnamese authorities have asked Yen to travel to Vietnam for questioning, but she will not go. "I understand their tactic is to put me in there, too," she said, meaning detention.
Other Investors
Despite the turmoil, the school appears to have prospered. Enrollment is at a maximum of about 255 students, who attend kindergarten through 12th grade, an investor said. Graduates have gone on to Harvard and Stanford as well as prestigious universities in Europe and Asia.
As an investment, the project's success is less clear. Michael Arnouse, a Long Island, N.Y., resident who chairs the board of the private equity firm Wharton Capital Partners, said he invested $500,000 in the project and has received a single dividend payment: $60,000 in January. "I just want my principal back at this stage," he said.
Like other investors, he said the deal's Vietnamese partners "want to steal" the venture, in part because the land that the school occupies could be re-leased for millions of dollars.
James Chau, a Vietnamese American fund manager in Fairfax who assembled the school's financial backers, said he is open-minded about the government's charges. "I'm like a blank sheet of paper," he said. But the investors' deal with Hoan includes a profit-sharing provision that kicks in once the investors have been paid back, and Chau said he cannot understand why Hoan would have done anything to jeopardize that arrangement.
Yen and Edwin Lynch, a family friend who served with Hoan on the George Mason board of visitors in the early 1990s, question why Hoan's detention continues without trial or due process as Americans know it. Vietnamese officials told U.S. diplomats during a visit to Hoan on Nov. 30 that his detention could last as long as 16 months.
The core of Hoan's troubles appears to be a business dispute among the partners of the venture, Yen and Lynch say, that should be solved in a manner different from the Vietnamese government's approach.
Lynch has mounted a Web site, http://www.freehoannguyen.com, that demands that Hoan be freed, the criminal charges dropped, the $85,000 returned -- and the dispute handled through arbitration. "This is how real businessmen resolve their disputes," the Web site says.
By Cameron W. Barr - The Washington Post - December 10, 2006.
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