HANOI (Reuters) – Police in Vietnam have arrested a former environment deputy minister and four other senior officials accused of violating mining regulations, following a wider investigation into wrongdoings at a rare earth company in northern Vietnam.
Nguyen Linh Ngoc, who was the deputy minister of Natural Resources and Environment in 2010-2018, was accused of “deliberate violations of state economic management regulations, causing serious consequences”, the police-run Ministry of Public Security said in a statement.
Other former senior officials of the ministry’s mining department were arrested on the same charges, the ministry said, without giving further details.
Those arrested were not available to comment and calls to the environment ministry went unanswered.
Police last year arrested several senior officials, including the chairman from rare earth company Thai Duong Group, which operates a mine in the northern Vietnamese province of Yen Bai, for allegedly forging value added tax receipts in rare earths trading.
The Ministry of Public Security said it was carrying out further investigations to retrieve state assets that had been lost.
Vietnam has the second-largest deposits of the critical minerals – used in making electric cars and wind turbines – after China, according to United States Geological Survey estimates.
The authorities have also intensified a clampdown on illegal rare earth mining from neglected or abandoned pits in recently.
(Reporting by Phuong Nguyen; Editing by Michael Perry)
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