The tortoise is not allowed to trade

　　Nguyen Ba Toan, a Hanoi man who has caught and sold a 22-kg Asiatic soft shell turtle, can be fined up to $24,000 for trading threatened species, said lawyer Nguyen Viet Trieu, head of Viet Trieu law firm in Hanoi.
Giant turtle sold to Chinese man

　　Trieu said Vietnamese laws state that any attempt to hunt, capture, raise or kill wild animals listed in appendix IIB of the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (CITES) can receive a fine of VND400-500 million (US$19,200-24,000).
Toan discovered the giant turtle on October 12 when he went fishing under Chuong Duong Bridge and caught it by himself.
After bringing it home, he invited many people to his house to see the turtle and offered to sell it.
After hearing that the turtle is in the Red List of Threatened Species, Toan tried to raise it while waiting for authorities to solve the case.
But as no government official turned up and the turtle started to become weak, he sold it to a person in the northern province of Bac Giang for VND100 million (US$4,800) on October 14.
Many wonder why officials didn’t take any action and let Toan sell the creature.
Nguyen Van Quan, head of the wild animal preservation at Education for Nature Vietnam (ENV) said that after hearing about the case, he immediately called the Department of Captured Fisheries and Resources Protection under the Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Development.
However, he was told to contact Hanoi’s Forest Protection Department, which later said turtles are a marine creature and thus fall within the responsibility of the former department.
But according to a government decree issued on June 20 2008, the Forest Protection Department is in charge of cases related to Asiatic soft shell turtles.