Nguyen Duc Kien, whose unexpected arrest Monday evening shocks soccer
fans and bank investors alike, has been one of the most powerful figures in
Vietnamese soccer in the last 12 years.
Popularly known as “bau Kien” or
“[soccer] manager Kien”, the 48-year-old multi-millionaire is a founding member
of Asia Commercial Joint Stock Bank (ACB), one of Vietnam’s largest private
banks.
Kien sparked a buzz last year by
publicly attacking the Vietnam Football Federation (VFF) for its ineffective
organization and management of the local top-flight soccer competition
V-League, which many say has been dominated by violence, match fixing, and
problematic refereeing for years.
Football revolution and Kien’s footprints
The tycoon, also a major
shareholder in several other commercial banks such as Kien Long Commercial
Joint Stock Bank and the Vietnam Export-Import Commercial Joint Stock Bank,
then succeeded in demanding a historic change: a transfer of the league together
with the First Division to club owners.
He immediately worked with a few
club owners, who are moguls in timber and real estate, to found a company, the
Vietnam Professional Football, to organize and “purify” the two competitions,
as he once said.
He was next involved in a
high-profile ‘war’ with another media magnate over the telecast rights of
V-League and the First Division after managing to control the running of the
duo.
The banker and his associates won
the ‘war’, which has earned the leagues a considerable amount of money from TV
rights.
But at the microcosmic level,
Kien is not as successful.
First entering soccer in 2000,
Kien took over a First Division club from the Vietnam Railways, a state-owned
corporation, and named it after his primary bank ACB.
ACB was promoted to V-League two
years later before being relegated in 2003.
Kien transferred the relegated
team to the Hanoi Football Federation and received another V-League club once
sponsored by national flagship carrier Vietnam Airlines in 2004.
His newly acquired club, Hanoi
ACB, played in V-League for four years and was downgraded until 2010 when it
got back to the top league. The club was again demoted one year ago.
Kien’s current V-League club,
CLBBD Hanoi (Hanoi Soccer Club), was taken over from another industrialist who
said he had grown tired of Vietnam soccer.
With his conquering ambition,
Kien poured huge bucks into the club, including the signing of national squad
striker Le Cong Vinh, in hopes it would climb high on the table.
The Hanoi Soccer Club eventually
managed to avoid relegation in 2012, by a small margin though.
Economic successes
Nguyen Duc Kien, who was born in
1964, studied at the Military Technical University, under the Ministry of
Defense, from 1980 to 1981, before moving on to enroll for four years at the
Zalkamate Military Technical University in Hungary.
Kien, along with his friends,
founded Asia Commercial Joint Stock Bank in 1994 after working for the Vietnam
General Garment-Textile Corp for eight years.
In recent years, ACB has invested
in other banks, such as Eximbank, VietBank, and Dai A Bank.
The entrepreneur and his wife are
believed to hold more than VND1.9 trillion (US$91.2 million) in ACB shares,
placing them among the Vietnamese stock market’s 20 richest people.
The magnate reportedly stood
behind the scenes when Eximbank, a major local lending institution, acquired
another Vietnamese lender - Sacombank - in May this year.
He also invests in many other
areas such as tourism and garment, in addition to his previous posts as
chairman at the Caltex Lubricants Joint Venture and vice president at KFC
Vietnam Joint Venture.
Last year, the banker was crowned
“Entrepreneur of the Year” by VnEconomy, a leading Vietnamese business journal.
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