30-month jail sentence upheld for Le Quoc Quan

 Le Quoc Quan at the court of appeal in Hanoi on February 18, 2014.VNA

A court in Hanoi on Tuesday rejected the appeal of Le Quoc Quan and upheld the 30 month prison sentence against him on tax evasion charges.

Quan was arrested in December, 2012 on accusations of attempting to avoid corporate income tax at the Hanoi-based Vietnam Solution company he founded. The man, in his 40s, was found guilty of tax evasion and was sentenced to 30 months in jail at the first-instance court last October.

The judge of the appeal court on Tuesday said Quan’s jail term officially began on December 27, 2012 which means he has already served more than half of his jail term.

In addition to paying a fine of VND1.29 billion (US$61,157), Quan is also requested to hand in more than VND645 million ($30,578) that his company evaded in 2010 and 2011 to tax authorities in Hanoi’s Cau Giay district.

According to the indictment, the Vietnam Solution company, whose main business is to update, search, store, and process data, had its business registration certificates changed 13 times in total.

Investigators said Quan directed his staff to contact a number of officials and economic experts to learn of their personal information. They would then sign fake contracts with those experts ostensibly to hire them as consultants and collaborators to raise the company’s operational costs, thus having to pay less corporate income taxes.

Local police also suspected that in 2010 and 2011, the company used the bills of seven companies with the invoice amount totalling over VND825 million ($39,000). However, no real trading between Quan’s firms and the seven companies took place and the bills were used to only legalize the declaration for value added tax deduction.

Initial investigations carried out by local police revealed that the 41-year-old Le Quoc Quan has dodged some VND437.5 million ($21,000) in taxes.

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