Over the past few years, Vietnam’s anti-graft drive has taken down a slew of top Communist Party leaders, including presidents, deputy prime ministers and Politburo members. But that hasn’t stopped foreign investors from pouring in cash.
The resilience of foreign investment into Vietnam shows that the party has mostly been able to contain the fallout of a period of prolonged political infighting spurred by questions over who will succeed Communist Party General-Secretary Nguyen Phu Trong, the 80-year-old leader who has held the nation’s top job since 2011. Truong Thi Mai, once believed to be a rising star, became the latest Politburo member to fall after her removal from the party on Thursday.
If anything, the “blazing furnace” anti-graft drive is viewed by many domestic and foreign investors as reducing corruption, said Adam Sitkoff, executive director of the American Chamber of Commerce in Hanoi. Vietnam’s ranking in Transparency International’s corruption perceptions index has risen to 83 as of last year from 113th in 2016.
The jockeying for power among individuals isn’t expected to change Vietnam’s economic or foreign policies, which are set by the Politburo and Central Committee, according to Alexander Vuving, a Southeast Asia expert at the Daniel K. Inouye Asia-Pacific Center for Security Studies in Hawaii. One energy company executive said the investigations and abrupt departures of top leaders is making it harder for his and other foreign companies to proceed with business plans. That’s because government workers, wary of probes, won’t approve legal documents or process anticipated new regulations, said the executive, who asked not to be identified so as not to offend the government.
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