A court in HCMC is finally set to give judgment in a lawsuit brought by a Vietnamese-American businessman 13 years ago to reclaim his properties from his supermodel ex-wife.
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Ngoc Thuy model. Photo of Tien Nguyen |
On August 18, the HCMC People’s Court will decide whether 61-year-old Nguyen Duc An can recover assets worth VND288 billion ($12 million) that he bought “with his own money” from Ngoc Thuy, 43 years old.
It would have taken the court 13 years to hear the case because it “had to obtain documents related to the properties in dispute”.
Assets include shares, cars and dozens of apartments, villas and land in HCMC and the coastal town of Phan Thiet, said to be registered in the name of Thuy’s mother, Truong Thi Be.
An and Thuy got married in September 2006 after only a week of knowing each other. They divorced in March 2008.
An filed a lawsuit claiming that Thuy had failed to return the properties he had purchased with “the money he had earned before the marriage”.
As a foreigner, he “had to register the properties in the name of Thuy”.
The California Superior Court in his native United States had ruled that Thuy should return the properties to him because they “had been bought with his money. [and not related to Thuy]“, he had submitted to the HCMC court.
He said his children would be “allowed to own the properties” if Thuy returned them.
But Thuy said in a 2014 interview with VnExpress that she and An had not signed a prenuptial agreement on the properties acquired during their marriage, and therefore belonged to both of them.
Thuy was once a famous model and actress nicknamed the “Marilyn Monroe of Vietnam”.
She retired when she married An.
In 2016, she remarried a lawyer named Truong.
