A Mission to Unlock a Mystery

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.