n 24 April 2023, the Justices of the Supreme Court of Vietnam (the Supreme Court) hosted an online seminar to tackle some issues that arise in the courts’ trial practice. Official Letter no. 196/TANDTC-PC issued by the Supreme Court on 3 October 2023 (the Official Letter) documents the results from the online seminar in April. The Official Letter contains mainly the clarification and interpretation of the Supreme Court of the existing legal provisions across various areas of law, including penal, civil, commercial, and administrative. Although these clarification and interpretation are non-binding, they constitute an important source of interpretation for the court system to rely on.

In this post, we will discuss some clarifications from the Official Letter that we find interesting or noteworthy:

1)         The subjects capable of committing the crime of “Intentional public disclosure of false information or concealment of information in securities activities” (Article 209 of the Penal Code 2015) are the natural persons or commercial legal persons responsible for public disclosure of information regarding securities, and not the parties to a securities transfer transaction.

Our comments:

The clarification for the Supreme Court is not clear since under the securities regulations, sometimes parties to a securities transaction must make public disclosure about the transaction (e.g., sale or purchase of shares by a major/inside shareholder). So it appears that this crime only applies to a person who violate the disclosure obligations under securities regulations but not to a person who fails to disclosure information under its contractual obligations.