Vietnam official held over sand mining as sinkholes spread

The head of a Vietnamese province was arrested by police for allegedly helping a company illegally mine sand, in part blamed for shoreline erosion and sinkholes across the Mekong Delta — the nation’s rice bowl.

Nguyen Thanh Binh, chairman of An Giang province, was accused of assisting Trung Hau Investment JSC to use local mines to extract the construction material beyond the permitted quantity and gaining “a significantly huge amount of money,” the public security ministry said late Monday. It didn’t provide more details, Bloomberg reports.

Binh couldn’t be reached on phone for comment while three calls to his office went unanswered.

The arrest is the latest in an ongoing crackdown on corruption ordered by the nation’s Communist party since 2021, which has claimed top politicians and corporate executives. In August, a deputy of Binh was held in a related case as sinkholes spread across the Mekong Delta, prompting Premier Pham Minh Chinh to term it as very serious.

The delta has seen the appearance of more than 120 sinkholes this year through mid-June, nearly the same number recorded in 2022, state-run Vietnam Television reported. Sinkholes and erosion in the delta have risen in terms of number, speed and scope, Deputy Agriculture Minister Nguyen Hoang Hiep was quoted as saying at a conference this year.

Trung Hau was permitted to mine about 1.5 million cubic meters of sand to supply to four road projects, but it ended up in extracting nearly 4.8 million cubic meters of sand, pocketing about 253 billion dong ($10.4 million), the security ministry said in August.

Leaders of Trung Hau Investment and more than a dozen other individuals were arrested as part of the widening probe, the government said in a separate statement on December 26.