For a brief moment I want to discuss the capital markets of Vietnam, mainly the stock market, and what a person can expect from a company prior to listing. The Law on Securities 2019, includes a list of certain requirements that must be met before a company can issue shares to the public. Public offerings [...]
After the uproar concerning the cancellation of Tan Hoang Minh Group's nine bond issuances and the arrests of several members of their management, I wanted to look a bit more into the matter. As a result, I asked one of our legal assistants to prepare an article about what's going on. The article below, written [...]
Again this week a Vietnamese e-commerce company is in the news for receiving multiple millions of dollars in funding from international Venture Capitalists. Fika, a dating app targeted at female users (see TechinAsia story here) was funded with one and a half million. The founders, while not Vietnamese, live and work in Vietnam and their [...]
The Ministry of Industry and Trade (MOIT) under the Vietnam Competition and Consumer Authority (VCCA) has recently issued its report on economic concentration activities in Vietnam over the period from July 2019 to July 2021. (You can access the report in English on the MOIT's website here.) This article will briefly review some of the [...]
Special Purpose Acquisition Companies, or SPACs, are all the rage at the moment. In 2020, SPACs raised $83 billion in proceeds from their IPOs and already in the first quarter of 2021 they raised $88 billion. This is big money and many companies, particularly offshore companies, are keen on being acquired by an SPAC as [...]
A little over a month ago Vietnamese venture capital firm Do Ventures released the Vietnam Tech Investment Report 2019--H12020, a report on the state of investment in Vietnam's tech industry during the first half of 2020. This report came to my attention a couple of weeks ago, but due to other time sensitive topics I wasn't [...]
Ever since the stock exchange opened in the late 1990s, the procedures for private share placement in Vietnam have been divided between public companies and privately held companies. For publicly held companies the process has always been somewhat onerous in an effort to dissuade them from conducting private share placements. It has always, however, been [...]
I'm excited. As of a couple of hours ago, Vietnam has gone over 40 hours without a new case of Covid-19. That means it took only a month for the country to effectively control a second outbreak of the virus. Here's to hoping the trend continues. But with that in mind, there is a lot [...]
Recently, we prepared a long chapter on employment law issues in Vietnam. One of the questions we addressed involved legal protections for whistleblowers--employees or individuals who reported instances, specifically, of harassment in the workplace, but also of other legal violations committed by their employer. Vietnam's employment law does not provide for whistleblower protections and, except [...]
As we have just celebrated the 25th anniversary of diplomatic relations between the United States and Vietnam, I thought it would be a good opportunity to review the procedures and requirements for Vietnamese investors seeking to invest overseas. This is more complicated than one might expect—particularly in light of the need to obtain FOREX to [...]