The MKP Group’s website is a feast of mendacity, quackery, possible illegality, and web design hilarity
The aftermath of Kim Jong-nam’s assassination, and the attention it has drawn to North Korea’s connections to Malaysia, continues to yield new revelations about Pyongyang’s illicit finances overseas. Reuters, having already exposed Glocom as a front for the Reconnaissance General Bureau, now adds to what the Wall Street Journal reported two weeks ago about the MKP Group.
To summarize Reuters’s extensive and detailed report on MKP: it was founded by a North Korean named Han Hun-il and a Malaysian named Yong Kok-yeap in 1996. According to its own promotional materials, MKP “operates in 20 countries in Asia, Africa and the Middle East, piling up contracts worth at least $350 million,” mostly for construction (such as building houses in Africa that Africans can’t afford). Reuters has since located a defector named Lee Chol-ho, a former employee of Han. Lee says Han is a former official in North Korea’s Reconnaissance General Bureau and has funneled cash to Pyongyang for years — through Jang Song-thaek until his execution in 2013, and more recently, to the Central Committee of the Workers’ Party. Although Reuters and Lee couldn’t say how Pyongyang used those earnings, we can safely assume it wasn’t to buy grain or baby formula.
MKP’s website — which appears to have been designed by Borat — lists a much earlier founding date of 1964, and a diverse set of products and services it provides, many of them either sanctioned by the U.N. (luxury yachts) or having dual-use applications (machine tools). I’ve posted numerous screenshots from MKP’s site here, for reasons that will become evident later.
Given MKP’s operations in Africa and its involvement in exporting art from North Korea (see “entertainment”), it probably also has links to the Mansudae Art Studio, whose subsidiary, Mansudae Overseas Project Group, exports those grandiose statues North Korea builds in Africa and the Middle East, most infamously this one in Senegal, where half the population reportedly lives below the poverty line. Mansudae Overseas Project Group also works in collaboration with U.N.- and U.S.-designated arms dealer KOMID in Namibia, and was itself designated by the U.S. Treasury Department last December for “exportation of workers from North Korea, including exportation to generate revenue for the Government of North Korea or the Workers’ Party of Korea,” under Executive Order 13722. The U.N. Security Council banned the export of statues by North Korea last November 30th, in Resolution 2321.
MKP is also involved in North Korea’s chain of clinics in Africa, using North Korean doctors, despite North Korea’s own chronic shortage of doctors to care for its people. A report by Radio Free Asia a year ago exposed that some of those clinics in Tanzania provided quack medicines to their patients. The Tanzanian government subsequently closed two of those clinics.
[* Actual clinics may not contain white people.]
It also lists several trading companies as subsidiaries (lower left sidebar).
Fortunately, when Reuters called, MKP’s reaction wasn’t at all suspicious.
Han, also known as Dr. Edward Hahn, hung up the phone and blocked a Reuters reporter on his messaging app when contacted for comment.
MKP did not respond to requests for comment on Lee’s assertions. The company issued a statement dated March 23 saying MKP had “no reason to hide the fact” that Han is North Korean. It denied owning ICB or any other North Korean bank and said nobody from the United Nations has contacted the company. [Reuters, James Pearson, Tom Allard and Rozanna Latiff]
For reference, here’s what the U.N. Panel said in its 2014 report about the relationship between MKP and ICB:
According to Reuters, “ICB is among several banks the U.N. is currently investigating for possible breaches of various U.N. Security Council resolutions.” U.N. resolutions ban joint ventures with North Korean banks. If the U.N. designates MKP or ICB, member states would be obliged to shut them down, freeze their assets, and expel all of their representatives. The Treasury Department could (and should) designate those joint ventures, and penalize any foreign banks that provide the joint ventures or North Korean banks with the correspondent services and thus help them access the financial system.
At this point, things get really ridiculous:
In its March 23 statement, MKP said its website had been “hacked” to insert ICB under its list of service companies and place a “doctored photograph” of “MKP personnel”, including Yong, visiting ICB’s office in Pyongyang.
A search of archive.org, a database of old websites, shows ICB has been listed on MKP’s website since 2009, including under its earlier name, Sungri Hi-Fund International Bank. As of April 10, ICB was still listed on the website.
[Diamonds are forever. So are screenshots.]
As of this morning, you can still click the “services” tab of the MKP Group’s website and see this image. So evidently, the North Koreans would have us believe that MKP’s website was hacked a month before Reuters called, and yet its website — the website of a multi-million-dollar international conglomerate — remained functional and unrepaired for the entire time until March 23rd, and even today. MKP’s website also lists another bank as a part of its group:
Click here for a summary of what we know about North Korea’s use of Malaysia as a base of operations for smuggling and money laundering, here for a summary of U.N. financial sanctions against North Korea, and here for a list of North Korean banks that are or aren’t sanctioned by the U.N. and the U.S. Treasury Department.
This report reinforces what I’ve said before: the combination of good investigative reporting and good investigative work by the U.N. Panel can expose and destroy the financial networks that fund Pyongyang. These are not fly-by-night operations, but long-established and well-capitalized groups that have put down deep roots in states where corrupt officials and ex-officials allow the North Koreans to ingratiate themselves. Uproot those networks, expel their representatives, and freeze their assets, and Pyongyang will have lost hundreds of millions of dollars and decades of work. It’s anyone’s guess why our own government has abdicated the work of investigation and coercive diplomacy to reporters and the U.N. Panel. Imagine what could be accomplished if our government devoted the political will and the resources to using the tools that Congress has given it.