A Mission to Unlock a Mystery
Potomac Woman Speaks Out for Husband Being Held in Vietnam
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, December 10, 2006; Page C01
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.
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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.
