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Category: Sanctions

September 23, 2014

North Korean Gulag survivors call on Switzerland to freeze Kim Jong Un’s slush funds (Alternate title: Cursed are the Cheesemakers).

Switzerland has always been there for North Korea. When North Koreans were starving to death in heaps, Switzerland was there to receive Kim Jong Il’s personal shopper and sell him millions of dollars’ worth of its finest timepieces. When North Korea needed creative new ways to make money – literally! – Switzerland sold it the very same intaglio presses and optically variable ink our Bureau of Engraving and Printing uses to make money. When Kim Jong Un needed a place...

Categories Activism/Anju Links/Europe/Money Laundering/Refugees/Sanctions
September 17, 2014

Must Read: Bruce Klingner on North Korea sanctions

Writing at the blog of the (cough, cough) Korea Economic Institute, Klingner, a former CIA analyst and a scholar at the Heritage Foundation, hammers home the weakness of our North Korea sanctions and their enforcement. While still at the State Department, Campbell realized that “Burma had much more in the way of sanctions” than North Korea and correctly, if belatedly, concluded that “Clearly we have not been successful at putting substantial pressure on North Korea [and] it would be possible for us...

Categories Sanctions
September 16, 2014

MUST READ: WSJ on Bureau 39 and North Korean money laundering, post-BDA

The Obama Administration has never talked much, or done much, about North Korean money laundering. There is a tendency to assume that a problem that isn’t discussed isn’t a problem at all, but The Wall Street Journal‘s Alastair Gale has just interviewed some senior defectors with inside knowledge of North Korea’s money laundering, and the product of those interviews was some outstanding reporting. Gale’s interviews confirm the continued importance of Bureau 39 to North Korea’s regime, and that it continues to engage in...

Categories Money Laundering/NK Crime/Sanctions
September 9, 2014

Former Obama Admin. official: Our N. Korea sanctions are weak and our policy is stuck

The Obama Administration’s North Korea team is stuck. Its thirst for fresh blood is so dire that it recently asked Keith Richards whether he still has the number of that secret clinic in Switzerland.* Don’t take my word for it. Last Friday, former Assistant Secretary of State Kurt Campbell spoke at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, as a friend and spy of mine was sitting in the audience (thank you). Campbell’s remarks are worth listening to in full, but the...

Categories Anju Links/Media Criticism/Sanctions/Six-Party Talks/Washington Views
September 8, 2014

U.N. Panel of Experts to investigate M/V Mu Du Mong

A U.N. panel that upholds sanctions against North Korea’s nuclear weapons program is sending personnel to investigate a North Korean cargo ship moored at a Mexican port, U.N. diplomatic sources familiar with the matter told Kyodo News. [Yonhap] “Sending personnel” suggests that the POE will inspect the ship. The POE also sent personnel to inspect the M/V Chong Chon Gang after Panamanian authorities found it smuggling weapons last year. The travels of the M/V Mu Du Bong were first brought...

Categories "United" Nations/Sanctions
September 8, 2014

N. Koreans are bootlegging liquor in Muslim countries

Last week, NK News published a detailed report on a black market in alcohol run by North Korean diplomats in Pakistan. Almost simultaneously, The Daily NK also reported that two North Korean “chauffeurs,” dispatched by the regime to Qatar, and nominally working for private companies there, had been arrested for bootlegging. Two North Korean men are being detained in Qatar under suspicions of the distribution of illegal liquor; Voice of America [VOA] reported on September 4th, citing the Gulf Times, Qatar’s English language newspaper. The...

Categories Drugs & N Korea/Money Laundering
September 4, 2014

Just like France had an unparalleled defense wall on the German border in 1940

The spokesman said that the U.S. has instituted an “unparalleled international sanctions regime that has successfully impeded proliferation, constrained the growth of North Korea’s nuclear and missile programs, and driven up the cost Pyongyang’s misbehavior.” [Yonhap] What utter nonsense. It would be charitable to accuse him of lying. I doubt he has any idea what he’s even talking about.

Categories Sanctions
August 29, 2014

Top N. Korean money man defects to “third country”

A senior North Korean banking official who managed money for leader Kim Jong Un has defected in Russia and was seeking asylum in a third country, a South Korean newspaper reported on Friday, citing an unidentified source. Yun Tae Hyong, a senior representative of North Korea’s Korea Daesong Bank, disappeared last week in Nakhodka, in the Russian Far East, with $5 million, the JoongAng Ilbo newspaper reported. [Reuters, Ju-Min Park and James Pearson] Daesong Bank is sanctioned by both the...

Categories Defectors/Kremlinology/Money Laundering/Sanctions
August 29, 2014

Australian MP calls for divestment from mining venture in N. Korea

”To maintain its iron-fisted hold over the North Korean population, the Pyongyang regime needs hard currency, and it is clear that these projects could provide billions of dollars to the North Korean leadership.” [Michael Danby, MP] It won’t surprise you that I oppose any investment in an unreformed North Korea that continues to slaughter its own people and menace its neighbors. I believe that those who justify investment as a driver of reform have it completely backwards, that investing in the...

Categories Activism/Human Rights/Sanctions
August 25, 2014

Is Obama’s North Korea policy at a tipping point?

Following of Congress’s resounding, bipartisan vote of no confidence in the Obama Administration’s North Korea policy last month, Secretary of State John Kerry has been traveling around the Pacific. In Australia, while meeting with that country’s Foreign Minister and Defense Minister, he traversed his gargantuan mandible toward Pyongyang and threatened to tighten sanctions “if it ‘chooses the path of confrontation.” If? If? “The United States — I want to make this clear — is absolutely prepared to improve relations with...

Categories Diplomacy/Sanctions
August 22, 2014

John S. Park of the Harvard Kennedy School thinks North Korea has …

become more adept at sanctions evasion, and sounds bearish about the prospects for success. I have no doubt that the first part of Park’s thesis is correct. I’m sure Pyongyang has diversified its income streams since Banco Delta Asia, which means that it will be harder to get back to where we were in 2005. On the other hand, I don’t think it will be impossible for sanctions to work, either. Al Qaeda, Iran, and the Medellin Cartel all have smart money launderers,...

Categories Sanctions
July 31, 2014

About Damn Time: Treasury sanctions 2 N. Korean companies, 18 ships over Chong Chon Gang (updated)

More than a year after Panamanian authorities uncovered a massive shipment of Cuban weapons on its way to North Korea, in clear violation of multiple U.N. Security Council resolutions, the U.N. and Treasury have finally done something about it. That something could contain the makings of one part of an effective sanctions strategy, but it will still probably disappoint some powerful members of Congress in both parties. As I noted yesterday, and after public criticism by former head U.N. sanctions...

Categories Sanctions
July 30, 2014

Former U.N. sanctions investigator calls U.N.’s slow response to Chong Chon Gang incident “regrettable”

If you care at all about North Korea sanctions, then NK News’s interview with Martin Uden, the former head of the U.N. Panel of Experts investigating the enforcement of sanction on North Korea, is an absolute must-read. I’ll give you a taste, and then you’ll have to read the rest on your own: In particular, the seizure of a DPRK cargo vessel in Panama in 2013 – the Chong Chon Gang – highlighted that North Korea remains actively engaged in...

Categories "United" Nations/Sanctions