HCMC – Ministry of Public Security (MPS) investigators have detained Chu Xuan Dung, vice chairman of the Hanoi City People’s Committee, on alleged charges of taking bribes in the Covid-19 repatriation flights case.

Lieutenant General To An Xo, office chief and spokesperson of the MPS, told the local media today, December 22, that the investigators at the ministry had issued a decision pressing charges against and detaining Chu Xuan Dung, who served as deputy head and then head of the steering committee for Covid-19 prevention and control in Hanoi City at the height of Covid infections.

Dung’s arrest came as the MPS had expanded an investigation of bribe giving, bribe taking, bribery brokering, abuse of powers while on duty and fraud at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and in Hanoi City and other provinces.

Since the Covid-19 repatriation flights scandal emerged in January this year, the MPS has filed charges against and arrested 37 individuals, many of them at the Foreign Ministry, the Ministry of Health, the Ministry of Transport, and the Immigration Department at the MPS.

, former deputy foreign minister, is among these individuals.

Today, the Executive Board of the Hanoi City Party Committee called a meeting to consider disciplinary action against Chu Xuan Dung, who is also member of the Hanoi City Party Committee and of the Party Civil Affairs Committee of the Hanoi City People’s Committee.

The Executive Board found that Dung showed degradation in political ideology, morality and lifestyle; and abused his powers to break regulations in the process of giving approval to businesses to conduct flights  to bring home Vietnamese nationals stranded abroad due to the Covid pandemic and place them in quarantine facilities in Hanoi. He was also found to infringe the Party Central Committee’s Regulations 37-QD/TW of October 25, 2021 on the don’ts for Party members.

Therefore, the Executive Board voted in favor of sending an official request to the higher authority to expel Dung from the Party.