In the past few minutes, a court in Vietnam has sentenced a wealthy property developer to death for defrauding a bank of billions of dollars.

Sixty-seven-year-old Truong My Lan was found guilty of embezzlement, bribing state officials and violating bank lending regulations.

After she used her hidden ownership of the Saigon Commercial Bank to channel $44 billion of loans to her own companies. It's been described as one of the greatest bank frauds in history.

Well, for more on this, we can go straight to Bangkok and join our Southeast Asia correspondent Jonathan Head.

First of all, Jonathan, if you could just tell us a little bit more about what the court said today and the background to this case.

Well, the court's been giving enormous amounts of detail about this case through its five weeks.

Everyone in Vietnam knows a lot about it.

That's quite unusual there.

They've wanted the public to know about this case.

It is extraordinary.

The amounts of money are absolutely staggering.

We're talking about a significant chunk of Vietnam's GDP that this woman was able to siphon off over 11 years through these secretly channeled loans that went through a whole bunch of front companies and proxies to her own companies.

The prosecutors believe that of that $44 billion, perhaps $27 billion may never be recovered.

That is a staggering loss and will be very, very tough for the state bank to make up in terms of saving the bank.

Really, the authorities have sort of blamed Truong My Lan and have talked about the way in which she was bribing officials and the kind of sophistication of this network.

And really, it is part of an ongoing anti-corruption campaign that's been going for several years led by the communist authorities who say they're determined to stamp it out.

But of course, it does raise a lot of questions, which is, how was it that this woman, she's very high profile, she's one of the biggest property owners in Vietnam, how was she able to do that for 11 years?

And of course, officially, the authorities say, well, she was paying off this person and that and hiding this and that.

But it is extraordinary that it went on for 11 years without being stopped.

And I think those questions still hang over whether the Vietnamese authorities are capable of reining in this kind of fraud.

And Jonathan, you say that this was a trial that was followed by so many people in Vietnam and Truong My Lan is a well-known property developer in the country, but now she faces the death penalty.

That itself is extraordinary.

Normally, the death penalty is not usually handed down on women, but I think this case was so exceptional in terms of its scale and the damage it's done to Vietnam's finances, they probably felt they needed to make an example of her.

They may also be trying to encourage her to give as much money back as they can get her to do.

This is something the other 80 defendants in court today have largely done.

They're all more minor, of course, but these are all the people accused of conspiring with her, including, for example, a chief inspector at the state bank who was bribed $5 million, according to prosecutors, in order to look the other way.

They've all pleaded guilty and offered to bring back as much money as they can.

I think the state believes that Truong My Lan must have far more assets that she can return to the state to try and make up this massive hole in this bank's finances.

OK, Jonathan Head in Bangkok, watching that huge trial in Vietnam and that verdict for us, thank you very much.

And Jonathan's written an analysis piece on the BBC News website with more background to that.