It is not clear from what time in Vietnam when a customer denounces or points out faults of a product, he or she may face criminal charges as the producer asks police and court to punish. The producer or the distributor of the defective product will make false statements in the media that they are smeared, blackmailed, or lightly slanderous but never admit that their product does not meet the quality they have registered.
It will be difficult to forget the Tan Hiep Phat fly case when someone denounced that this company had bottled the dirt as a fly in the bottle, then the accuser Mr. Vo Van Minh, was arrested by the police for blackmail of VND500 million regardless of the fact that Tan Hiep Phat Company made an appointment and compensated him.
Public opinion outraged after Mr. Minh was arrested. The conviction that Tan Hiep Phat had told the police to silence Mr. Minh, even if Mr. Minh actually blackmailed, the method of setting up the trap of both the company and the police was against the law.
As Minh is a customer so he has the right to ask Tan Hiep Phat to compensate him. Unfortunately, he made a mistake in his way of speaking up to protect his rights, although a harsh 7-year sentence made people angry and as a result, Tan Hiep Phat immediately lost VND2 trillion.
The second “Tan Hiep Phat” appeared a few days ago, people were both curious, excited, and angry when this time it was a big company with the same expression as Tan Hiep Phat. Not like in the act of meditating and planning trick but bringing the police to intimidate people who denounce their products.
This dispute happened between carmaker VinFast of super-billionaire Pham Nhat Vuong which sold its VinFast Lux A 2.0 car to Mr. Tran Van Hoang, the owner of a YouTube channel called GoGo TV more than 450,000 followers.
Mr. Hoang posted on YouTube about the car he bought from VinFast with 10 big and small errors. He used to bring his car to Vinfast for warranty repairs many times but failed while his car only ran 8,000 km.
In response, on May 2, the official Facebook page of VinFast said that Mr. Hoang had published untrue information about the quality of VinFast Lux A2.0 cars, causing confusion for users and affecting the prestige of the company.
The article also admitted that although Mr. Tran Van Hoang had removed the above clips himself, VinFast saved all the evidence and sent the same denunciation to the police. The police received the denunciation and had a schedule to summon Mr. Hoang for interrogation.
At the end of the announcement, VinFast said “always listening and ready to check and handle all problems for customers in the process of operating our cars,” however “we are also determined to clarify the same wrong behaviors which affect our brand, and especially causes anxiety and confusion for the user community “and thinks” this is a way for VinFast to show respect and desire to protect the ultimate rights of sincere customers.”
Through the details mentioned above, it is not difficult to realize that VinFast is using its financial power to intimidate Vietnamese citizens, not just its customers. The reason it intimidated all Vietnamese citizens because the size of Pham Nhat Vuong’s company was hundreds of times larger than Tan Hiep Phat and its power put pressure on the investigation agency.
Vuong’s corporation owns houses, golf courses, apartments, land, resorts, supermarkets, hospitals, schools, cars … almost any important field belongs to the daily life of the people Vuong all reached out to. VinFast’s way of speaking when being complained about is no different from the police report before an arrest of a dissident … Vietnamese people, when using Vuong’s service, mean touching the fire and may get hurt at any time.
Although growing and having octopus everywhere, Vuong has a hard time covering social networks where more than 65 million people in the country and hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese experts around the world are silently watching. Tran Van Hoang and more than 450,000 people behind are certainly ready to speak up if there is a second fly incident.
Tran Van Hoang does not claim compensation, but only asks VinFast to quickly repair a damaged product, so VinFast sues Mr. Hoang based on the factor of spreading untrue information about quality, causing confusion for users and affecting the firm’s reputation will be difficult to be proved in court if it opens.
The car is still there, the fault is still intact and VinFast can hardly say that the error was made by Mr. Hoang for slandering VinFast.
Because believing in their money could make the law go round, Vuong and the information processing department thought that the threat would make people like Mr. Hoang retreat, but Vinfast forgot that today the people are different from the previous years when Tan Hiep Phat was able to manipulate the society. Mr. Vuong underestimates consumers so that what he gives them is a one-way law, a dimension of power, will not make them afraid. Could that fear turn into boycotts of his products?
Reuters recently announced that VinFast will be available in the US in 2022 and will go public on the IPO there. The Vietnamese in America must be eagerly waiting for it to appear, not happily welcoming it with Vietnamese pride, but happily throwing eggs and rotten tomatoes at it to let the locals know the true face of a private red corporation.
Thoibao.de (Translated)
Source: https://www.rfa.org/vietnamese/news/blog/when-vinfast-implements-law-05042021135945.html
