Dan Burton: “back in 1993 I met a gentleman named Binh Ly. And Mr. Ly told me and other Congressmen that he had a business partner…”

“back in 1993 I met a gentleman named Binh Ly. And Mr. Ly told me and other Congressmen that he had a business partner, Mr. Nguyen Van Hao, who met with former Secretary of Commerce Ron Brown to seek his help in normalizing relations with Vietnam. Mr. Ly said that Mr. Hao who met with Ron Brown three or four times told him that Ron Brown wanted $700,000 in up-front money to start the normalization process with Vietnam. Mr. Brown said initially that he never met with Mr. Hoa, but later, it was found out that he did indeed meet with him three times. The FBI, on October 2 of 1992, was reported in the New York Times to have discovered evidence that the Vietnamese government was preparing to establish a special bank account in Singapore, and the evidence was in the form of a large transfer of an undisclosed sum of money or a transfer of undisclosed sum of money between the East Asian banks. The interesting thing about this is that Mr. Ly told us before we found out about that that there was going to be $700,000 transferred to the Banque Indosuez in Singapore for Mr. Brown from the Vietnamese government. Now, the reason I bring this up is we had hearing on this, and Mr. Brown was investigated. Unfortunately, Mr. Brown died in a plane crash over in the former Yugoslav a few years ago, but the fact of the matter is, Mr. Ly made this statement, and the normalization process then did go forward.”