Vietnam arrests 4 railway officials in alleged $780,000 Japanese bribe scandal A part of the Yen Vien-Ngoc Hoi railway line in Hanoi, which belongs to the Hanoi urban railway project. Tuoi Tre Vietnamese police have detained four officials of the state-owned Vietnam Railways Corporation (VRC), including Tran Quoc Dong, a deputy general director of the VRC, for their involvement in an alleged bribery case, in which the leader of a Japanese consultant firm said it had paid over US$780,000 in kickbacks in exchange for an ODA-funded project order in Vietnam.  Dong has been charged with “negligence of responsibility, causing serious consequences” under Article 285 of the Penal Code. He was appointed director of the Railway Project Management Unit (RPMU) under the VRC by the general director of the corporation on October 1, 2009. Before the appointment, Dong was head of the VRC’s international relation board. On June 1, 2011, the VRC’s Board of Management named him deputy general director of the corporation. The three other detainees are Pham Quang Duy and Pham Hai Bang, who are deputy directors of the RPMU, and Nguyen Nam Thai, head of the corporation’s project office 3. All these three have been charged with “abusing positions and/or powers while performing official duties” under Article 281 of the Penal Code. Searches were also carried out at the four officials’ offices which were then sealed when everything was finished. All the arrest warrants for the officials had been approved by the Supreme People’s Procuracy. Before the arrests, the investigation agency had summoned these officials for questioning and all of them generally admitted their lawbreaking acts. The alleged bribery case was uncovered when Japan’s Yomiuri Shimbun newspaper reported in March that Tamio Kakinuma, president of Japan Transportation Consultants, Inc. (JTC), had admitted allegations that the firm paid ¥80 million ($782,640) in bribes in return for an ODA (official development assistance) project order worth ¥4.2 billion ($41,088,600) in Vietnam. In two articles published on March 20 and 21, the Japanese newspaper alleged that JTC bribed civil servants in Vietnam, Indonesia, and Uzbekistan from February 2008 to February of this year with ¥130 million ($1,271,790) in order to receive orders for five Japanese ODA-funded projects in these countries. Tuoitrenews