Alibaba president Nguyen Thai Luyen, 34, and director Nguyen Thai Linh, 30, his younger brother, were arrested after hundreds of police officers and at least eight military vehicles surrounded the company’s headquarters in Hiep Binh Chanh Ward, Thu Duc District.

Linh and his accomplices allegedly founded Alibaba and its subsidiaries while creating non-existent projects in certain southern provinces.

These "projects" were neither approved by authorities nor did they go through any legal process. Still, around 7,000 customers were persuaded into investing hundreds of billions of dong into them (VND1 billion = $43,000).

An office of real estate firm Alibaba in the southern Dong Nai Province
is dismantled, September 19, 2019. Photo by VnExpress/Phuoc Tuan.

In June, two employees of Alibaba were arrested for damaging properties and disrupting public order when they protested and threw bricks at bulldozers sent by authorities in the southern province of Ba Ria-Vung Tau to reclaim land plots from illegal real estate projects.

An investigation has been launched into the firm and its activities.

Alibaba claims to possess a charter capital of VND5.6 trillion ($241 million) with over 2,500 employees working on 48 projects.