>Vietnamese property tycoon Truong My Lan has lost her appeal against her death sentence for masterminding the world’s biggest bank fraud.
>The 68-year-old is now in a race for her life because the law in Vietnam states that if she can pay back 75% of what she took, her sentence will be commuted to life imprisonment.
>In April the trial court found that Truong My Lan had secretly controlled Saigon Commercial Bank, the country’s fifth biggest lender, and taken out loans and cash over more than 10 years through a web of shell companies, amounting to a total of $44bn (£34.5bn).
>Of that prosecutors say $27bn was misappropriated, and $12bn was judged to have been embezzled, the most serious financial crime for which she was sentenced to death.
I think embezzlement is when you steal somebody else's money that you were entrusted to manage or were given for safekeeping. Misappropriation is when you use money that was intended for a particular purpose for something else.
There are probably blurred lines somewhere between the two.
