Search Results for: bank of dandong

November 29, 2016

The U.N.’s new North Korea resolution wasn’t worth the wait

Lest anyone think I’m blindly criticizing the Obama administration as it tries to cover its exit and legacy, start with my favorable comments on UNSCR 2270. That resolution might have been the baseline for a genuinely effective global sanctions program, but the text of the new resolution the Security Council will vote on tomorrow arguably lowers the high bar set by 2270. Indeed, because of our independent authority to enforce 2270 in tandem with our allies, we would have been...

Categories "United" Nations/Sanctions
November 22, 2016

China breaks N. Korea sanctions it says won’t work because it’s afraid they’ll work

In yesterday’s post, I linked to reports suggesting that China’s failure to agree on the terms of a new U.N. sanctions resolution responding to North Korea’s latest nuclear test may be motivated by a desire to wait out the end of President Obama’s administration. This theory would only make sense if China figures it can get better terms from President Trump next year, but my post pointed to evidence of the opposite of this — that what we know so...

Categories China/Money Laundering/Sanctions/U.S. Politics
November 21, 2016

If China is gambling on Trump to blunt N. Korea sanctions, it could lose bigly*

By all outward appearances, President Obama never really had a coherent North Korea policy. While pursuing a deal that Pyongyang either didn’t want or wouldn’t keep, it reacted to each nuclear test by building on John Bolton’s work and nominally tightening the sanctions the U.N. initially imposed a decade ago, in Resolution 1718. The idea, apparently, was to deter Pyongyang by threatening its plans to develop Hamhung and Chongjin, something it no more intends to do than the Confederacy intended...

Categories "United" Nations/China/Sanctions/U.S. Politics
October 14, 2016

North Korea, secondary sanctions, tertiary impacts, and the coming death spiral

As I write today, rumors are swirling through the South Korean media of defections and purges involving so many North Korean diplomats, spies, minders, workers, and other officials that I haven’t had the time to either keep up with them or sort out the conflicts in those reports. I’ll try to do that by this time next week, and identify any patterns I see in them. In the meantime, an intriguing story by the Daily NK elucidates how well-targeted sanctions can drive disloyalties and fissures...

Categories Money Laundering/Sanctions
October 11, 2016

FP: White House “heatedly debating” whether to enforce North Korea sanctions law

Last week, Samantha Power was in Seoul, reassuring our increasingly panicky South Korean allies that the U.S. will use “all the tools in our tool kit” to deny His Porcine Majesty hard currency and WMD materiel, and pressure him to disarm. Meanwhile, a must-read article in Foreign Policy reveals that late in the eleventh hour of his presidency, Barack Obama still hasn’t decided to use “all” the tools after all, particularly the one Congress wants him to use — secondary sanctions...

Categories Sanctions/Washington Views
September 23, 2016

Invest in North Korea? Don’t let Jim Rogers talk you into prison.

For a few years now, I’ve heard that hedge fund investor, TV provocateur, and crackpot Jim Rogers has been urging his audiences to invest in North Korea. A few years ago, that advice might not have done much worse than condemn your soul to eternal damnation and bankrupt you, the way it bankrupted (or nearly bankrupted) Orascom Telecom and any number of other investors who preceded it. Since at least March, however, Rogers’s advice has been malpractice on a whole new...

Categories Sanctions/Useful Idiocy
September 12, 2016

Clinton’s North Korea epiphany: We have always been at (cold) war with China

So desperate are we to avoid a Cold War (or worse) in the Pacific that throughout the Obama years, we’ve pretended that China hasn’t been waging one unilaterally the whole time. Meanwhile, China has seized the South China Sea, bullied our allies with spurious territorial claims, whipped up anti-American rhetoric to persecute human rights activists, and effectively quit enforcing sanctions against North Korea despite signing on for a nominally tough new resolution in March. Evidence, you ask? Start with this...

Categories China & Korea/Sanctions
September 7, 2016

U.N. & Obama vacillate as our last chance to stop Kim Jong-un runs out

Have you ever heard the late Christopher Hitchens speak about his visit to North Korea, and how he promised himself that he would not use the “1984” cliche? “Eventually,” Hitchens said, “They make you do it.” I believe it was sometime around 2007 that I made the same promise to myself about the Hans Blix scene in “Team America” when speaking of the U.N.’s response to North Korea’s increasingly brazen behavior. It has become another cliche, but they also make...

Categories "United" Nations/Missiles/Sanctions
August 16, 2016

The Obama administration isn’t following Kim Jong-un’s money. Congress should ask why.

In February and March, respectively, the U.S. Congress and the U.N. Security Council responded to North Korea’s fourth nuclear test with sanctions that were, in theory, an order of magnitude stronger than any sanctions imposed on North Korea until then. Sanctions, of course, are only as good as their enforcement, and in enforcing sanctions against North Korea, the most important rule has always been “follow the money.” Money — along with the contradictions of its political system — has always...

Categories Sanctions/U.S. Law
July 15, 2016

When Kim Jong-un nukes off — and he will — here’s how we should respond (updated)

The U.N. Security Council was already meeting about how to respond to North Korea’s latest missile tests when Pyongyang drew the curtain on its next act of satellite theater at Punggye-ri. Even without the latest sanctions, His Corpulency would probably have carried out another nuke test within the next year, if only to help consolidate his rule, and because the U.S. and South Korea are holding presidential elections. (North Korean dictators prefer to nuke off as new administrations assemble their...

Categories Sanctions
June 28, 2016

N. Korean counterfeiting surges as Bureau 39’s checks bounce.

When the Secret Service first found high-quality counterfeit dollars circulating in the Middle East over three decades ago, North Korea wasn’t the prime suspect; . The counterfeits were so good that experts could only tell them from the originals by the superior quality of their printing, so the Secret Service named them “supernotes.” The Secret Service’s suspicions shifted to North Korea in 2000, after Cambodian authorities arrested Yoshimi Tanaka, a Japanese Red Army hijacker who had taken refuge in North...

Categories Counterfeiting/Money Laundering/Sanctions
May 20, 2016

N. Korea sanctions update: I sense a great disturbance in the force, as if billions of dollars cried out in terror and were suddenly frozen.

[First, thank you for your patience with the light blogging recently. Most of my limited spare time has been consumed by a project that must take a higher priority than this site. That project has been perpetually at the verge of completion for weeks now, but should be done soon.] North Korea’s fourth nuclear test in January was a watershed in sanctions law and policy. Until then, the U.S. and the U.N. had mostly pretended to have tough sanctions against North...

Categories "United" Nations/Money Laundering/Sanctions
April 28, 2016

Claudia Rosett: Shipping sanctions against North Korea are leaking

Unlike my friend, Claudia Rosett, I’d call the new U.N. sanctions against North Korea a qualified success, despite the fact that implementation is still a work in progress. This post, and the other posts it links, summarize the effects of just one aspect of the sanctions — their restrictions on North Korean shipping, which have idled dozens of North Korean ships. Since then, NK News’s Leo Byrne has reported that no North Korean ships have called in the port of Dandong...

Categories Shipping sanctions
April 26, 2016

Report: 100 North Korean workers in Kuwait protest unpaid wages

Because North Korea is so uniquely opaque and repressive, it’s often difficult to gauge the level of dissent against, or popular support for, its regime. That repression follows North Koreans when they’re sent abroad to earn money for the regime, usually through the implied threat to punish the workers’ loved ones back in North Korea if they step out of line.  The recent and unprecedented mass defection of 13 restaurant workers from Ningpo, China, is an example of this. In...

Categories Resistance
April 13, 2016

Dozens of North Korean ships stranded by U.N. sanctions

Since this year’s nuclear test and the rounds of U.S. and U.N. sanctions that followed, I’ve tracked the implementation and enforcement of shipping sanctions closely on this site. For ease of reference, here’s a brief chronology of what I’ve observed since March 2, 2016, when the U.N. Security Council approved Resolution 2270, which — required the inspection of all cargo to and from North Korea; banned the reflagging of North Korean ships; banned exports of coal and iron ore (except...

Categories Shipping sanctions
March 29, 2016

N. Korea’s restaurants, rumored to be involved in money laundering, are closing down.

North Korea’s overseas restaurants are not a significant percentage of its GNP,* but they are an important source of hard currency for Kim Jong-un. As early as 2008, one writer estimated that each restaurant remitted between $100,000 and $300,000 to Pyongyang each year. As of February of this year, there were 130 of them earning $100 million annually. Since then, the South Korean government has told its citizens to stop patronizing the restaurants, and business has fallen dramatically: On some...

Categories Money Laundering/Sanctions
March 23, 2016

North Korean diplomats behaving badly

If you’re a North Korean diplomat, a good general rule is that all publicity is bad publicity. Over the last two weeks, North Koreans, most of them diplomats or former diplomats, have attracted much publicity of the kind they couldn’t have wanted. The Chinese government reports that “a North Korean consular official” killed two Chinese citizens while driving home drunk in Dandong last month. The North Korean diplomat was on his way home from an “event celebrating North Korea’s launch...

Categories Diplomacy/Money Laundering/NK Crime/Sanctions
March 21, 2016

China & Russia alarmed about secondary sanctions, because sanctions never work.

After years of extensive, flagrant, and well-documented violations of U.N. sanctions against North Korea, China is finally reaping the consequences. Americans don’t agree on much anymore, but Beijing’s cheating has achieved a political impossibility — it has united 418 representatives, 96 senators, The New York Times, The Washington Post, and the mainstream of North Korea watchers in support of secondary sanctions on the (mostly Chinese) banks and businesses that are propping up Kim Jong-un financially. That policy is now expressed in law, and the...

Categories China/Diplomacy/Russia/Sanctions