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Category: Sanctions

January 11, 2014

Hey … isn’t that video of Dennis Rodman personally giving banned luxury goods to Kim Jong Un?

Skip to the two-minute mark. Well, that certainly looks incriminating. (Hat tip to a reader.) [I guess he picked the wrong week to quit drinking.] If you haven’t read my post explaining the ban on importing luxury goods to North Korea, you should probably start there.* And since you ask, yes, as a matter of fact, I do believe the bottles are engraved with likenesses of Kim and Rodman. Just to be clear, I don’t think Dennis Rodman should do time over five bottles of liquor,...

Categories Sanctions/Sports/Useful Idiocy
January 7, 2014

Source: Dennis Rodman brought luxury gifts to Kim Jong Un (and that’s punishable by 20 years in prison).

Writing at The Weekly Standard today, Dennis Halpin informs us that Dennis Rodman (no relation) was bringing more than his august presence to Kim Jong Un’s birthday party. Halpin, citing a “diplomatic source” he understandably won’t name but says is reliable, claims that Rodman was also carrying “several hundred dollars’ worth of Irish Jameson whiskey,” “European crystal, an Italian suit for him, and Italian clothing, a fur coat, and an English Mulberry handbag” for Kim’s wife, Ri Sol Ju. The level...

Categories Sanctions/Useful Idiocy
January 6, 2014

Christine Hong really should tell us what she thinks about Kim Jong Un’s sweet new ski resort.

Kim Jong Un’s reign must be a dark time for North Korea’s apologists on the far left. Those who elevate equality above all other values (or say they do) must be hard pressed to find solidarity with a regime that has imposed the world’s most obscene case of economic and social injustice. Under Kim Jong Il, North Korea was no paragon of socialist equality. Since his dynastic succession, Kim Jong Un has added the arch-heresies of gaudy consumerism and an...

Categories Fiskings/Sanctions/Sports/Useful Idiocy
November 25, 2013

How the Iran deal affects North Korea policy

You would think that the world’s biggest government would be capable of handling more than one global proliferation crisis at a time. Unfortunately, Washington isn’t wired for that kind of bandwidth. Major policy initiatives require political capital, and it will take all of this administration’s dwindling reserves to fend off a new round of Iran sanctions in Congress.* The administration couldn’t defend a deal with North Korea now if it had one, and that goes double for the sort of...

Categories Axis of Evil/Iran/Sanctions
November 15, 2013

Sanctions, Sanctions-Busting, and the Limits of Incrementalism (updated)

In the years since Treasury dropped the hammer on Banco Delta Asia, North Korea has adapted to make itself less vulnerable to sanctions. It has decentralized its currency flows to different banks to make it harder for Treasury to cut just one weak link. This means that achieving the same effect we achieved in 2005 will take more time today, although – and this is really just an educated guess – a determined attack on North Korea’s access to hard...

Categories Sanctions
October 28, 2013

Is the next Banco Delta Asia in Malaysia?

Over the weekend, a lot people were giggling at the decision by Paul Chan, President of HELP University, to award an honorary degree in economics of Kim Jong Un. Foreign Policy’s Isaac Stone Fish, who first revealed the story, obligingly prints Chan’s manifesto, which reads like the work of a true belieber — a man who writes as if he has spent an inordinate amount of time watching High School Musical over and over again. I have fond memories of...

Categories Money Laundering/Sanctions/Useful Idiocy/WTF?
October 23, 2013

Not all sanctions were created equal.

David Albright has questioned the conclusions of Josh Pollack, in a to-be-released academic paper, that North Korea has now acquired the ability to advance its nuclear weapons with indigenous technology, that the technological horse is out of the barn door, and that there’s nothing more that sanctions can do. (Implication: North Korea is a nuclear state, and we just have to live with that.) Only we really don’t know the exact parameters of what Pollack concludes, because (at least according to...

Categories Sanctions
October 10, 2013

Review: Treasury’s War, by Juan Zarate

Let me begin with an apology for the lack of posting lately. While tossing a football around with some friends, I took a direct head-on hit to that finger you need for typing words that contain the letters “l” or an “o,” which turn out to be less dispensable than you might think. The time I didn’t spend typing, I spent reading instead: [clicking the image takes you to Amazon] If you want to understand why the Banco Delta Asia...

Categories Axis of Evil/Books & Films/Counterfeiting/Money Laundering/Proliferation/Sanctions
October 3, 2013

Sanctions are working in Iran. They’ll work better against North Korea, and here’s why.

Drag a modest grant check through DuPont Circle and you’ll accumulate at least ten pundits, several dozen grad students, and a multitude of assorted kooks who would willingly write you an academic paper entitled, “Why Sanctions Never Worked.” And that’s true, except for South Africa, Yugoslavia, Burma, Nauru, Al Qaeda, Iran, and North Korea, and only if you limit the argument to trade sanctions and exclude other tools of economic pressure, like coordinated divestment, third-party financial sanctions like those in Section...

Categories Axis of Evil/Iran/Money Laundering/Sanctions
October 1, 2013

I can’t wait to read this one: “Treasury’s War,” by Juan Zarate

I wonder if Amazon can deliver this while I still have an unexpected windfall of leisure time: Zarate, a senior adviser at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, plays the role of the bureaucrat. He joined the Treasury Department just weeks before the 2001 attacks to aid the agency’s enforcement wing. [….] Treasury launched its most ambitious assault with this new weapon on a tiny bank in Macau. That bank, Banco Delta Asia (BDA), caught the department’s attention in...

Categories Books & Films/Money Laundering/Sanctions
September 21, 2013

Kaesong investors beware: Treasury issues new warning about N. Korea money laundering risk

Precisely what North Koreans do with earnings from Kaesong, I think, is something that we are concerned about.” – David Cohen, Undersecretary of the Treasury for Terrorism and Financial Intelligence Just as Kaesong begins the process of reopening, and as the South Korean government seeks to “internationalize” investment there, the Treasury Department has issued a new warning about money laundering risks emanating from North Korea. The warning echoes longstanding concerns by the global Financial Action Task Force. Every potential investor in...

Categories Money Laundering/North-South/Sanctions/Sunshine
August 27, 2013

European NGOs protest enforcement of U.N. sanctions, but not the millions Kim Jong Un wastes on European luxuries

Last week, the Swiss government announced that it had blocked an attempt by North Korea to buy $7.24 million worth of ski lifts, plus “golf, horseback riding and water sports” gear. That this transaction was beneath even the Swiss is saying something. Switzerland is near the top of any list of countries suspected of hosting North Korean slush funds that are variously estimated to be worth between $1 billion and $4 billion. Throughout the duration of a famine that, according for former USAID Administrator Andrew Natsios, killed...

Categories "United" Nations/Europe/Famine & Food Aid/Sanctions
August 22, 2013

Is North Korea importing oil from Iran?

Remember when Marcus Noland and Stephan Haggard wrote that North Korea, notwithstanding the deepening misery of most of its people, had begun to show a current account surplus in recent years? Their conclusion was based largely on trade data showing that North Korea was importing more foreign goods, mostly through China.  If you believe these official Chinese government statistics for the last six months, however, Pyongyang’s imports from China fell sharply … for the first time in four years. Is this welcome evidence that sanctions...

Categories Anju Links/Axis of Evil/Iran/Sanctions
August 21, 2013

North Korea’s “charm offensive” coincides with growing international financial pressure

Observers in the West and South Korea tend to grasp (even gasp) at subtle or superficial changes in the tone of North Korea’s words, but the consistency of North Korea’s actions has always refuted the interpretations of these observers.  No charm offensive ever interrupted Pyongyang’s pursuit of nuclear weapons or its willingness to proliferate nuclear or chemical weapons technology.  Even its provocations, often described as “unpredictable,” follow a cycle that has become familiar to Korea-watchers, including the President of South Korea....

Categories Anju Links/Money Laundering/Sanctions
March 20, 2013

Follow the money. All of it.

Marcus Noland has published two fascinating charts on recent changes in North Korea’s palace economy. According to one, North Korea has begun posting a current account surplus by squeezing its poor, and by taking in foreign exchange from mysterious (but probably Chinese) sources.  That would certainly explain some of its recent, more aggressive behavior — a well-funded North Korea is menacing; an underfunded North Korea is relatively, if temporarily, conciliatory.  Judging by North Korea’s aggressive WMD development and investment in white elephants (gray...

Categories Money Laundering/Sanctions
March 19, 2013

Open Sources, March 17, 2013: Plan B Watch Edition

WHACK-A-MOLE:  The news that Treasury has designated North Korea’s Foreign Trade Bank under Executive Order 13382 leaves me underwhelmed.  This executive order provides for the blocking of assets of entities involved in the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, and restricts transactions with those entities, assuming we can reach them.  I’m dubious about how many assets or transactions are within our reach, but the pin-pricky targeting suggests that this approach is far less comprehensive than what’s needed to defang North Korea....

Categories Anju Links/Money Laundering/Sanctions
March 7, 2013

Plan B Watch: China’s U.N. Bait-and-Switch

We’ve seen enough of China’s past conduct when it comes to U.N. resolutions aimed at North Korean proliferation that we ought to recognize duplicity when we see it.  We should also know by now that our hapless U.N. Ambassador isn’t very good at recognizing that duplicity.  That’s why the news that China is expected to vote for another U.N. Security Council resolution this morning underwhelms me.  I even think I have a pretty good  idea what China’s game is here. Like I said before — China...

Categories "United" Nations/China & Korea/Sanctions
February 23, 2013

Plan B Watch

Via the Chosun Ilbo, and according to “a diplomatic source:” The U.S. government is considering labeling North Korea as a money-laundering state to pave the way for sanctions after Pyongyang’s latest nuclear test.  [….] Article 311 of the Patriot Act was created following the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks and authorizes the U.S. Commerce Department to identify an individual, financial institution or state as a “primary money-laundering concern.” This would ban the target from transacting business with any system that handles...

Categories Money Laundering/Sanctions