Category: Sanctions

July 28, 2010

Plan B Watch: A Shot Across China’s Bow?

Hey, did the State Department threaten the Bank of China and the Bank of Shanghai? Or to put the question more bluntly, did someone just grow a pair? A diplomatic source here said the U.S. will blacklist more North Korean entities and individuals in the coming weeks so that international financial institutions would cut off ties with them. Any foreign banks refusing to sever business ties with the North Korean entities and individuals in question will have U.S. financial institutions...

Categories China/China & Korea/Counterfeiting/Money Laundering/Sanctions/U.S. Law

July 26, 2010

Plan B Watch: Treasury Targets 100 Suspicious N. Korean Accounts Worldwide

According to multiple newspaper reports published since late last week, the Obama Administration’s new asset-freezing campaign against North Korea began in earnest in June. The Treasury Department, having identified about 200 accounts worldwide suspected of storing the proceeds of banned weapons sales, currency counterfeiting, counterfeit cigarettes and Viagra, proliferation, drug trafficking, and other things that all sovereign nations to do pay for yachts for their despotic rulers. Treasury focused on 100 accounts where its evidence was strongest and quietly persuaded...

Categories Counterfeiting/Money Laundering/Sanctions

July 22, 2010

Plan B Watch: Clinton Announces Tightening of N. Korea Sanctions

Well, it’s about damn time: The Obama administration announced Wednesday that it would impose further economic sanctions against North Korea, throwing legal weight behind a choreographed show of pressure on the North that included an unusual joint visit to the demilitarized zone by Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton and Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates. The measures, announced here by Mrs. Clinton after talks with South Korean officials, focus on counterfeiting, money laundering and other dealings that she said the...

Categories An Alliance?/Cheonan Incident/Counterfeiting/Money Laundering/Sanctions/U.S. & Korea

July 1, 2010

What Sanctions Can, and Can’t Do

While President Obama expresses frustration at China’s refusal to support sanctions against North Korea for sinking the ROKS Cheonan, U.S. officials are also expressing their concerns that China will also undermine sanctions against Iran. For what it’s worth, I’m much less bullish about Iran sanctions than I am about sanctions against North Korea. The potential effect of sanctions is inversely proportional to a regime’s connections to the outside world and its possession of goods that have an export market. As...

Categories Iran/NK Economics/Sanctions

June 28, 2010

You Say That Like It’s a Bad Thing: “China Hand” Fears Treasury Sanctions

I’m apparently not the only one who cocked an eyebrow at the refusal of a State Department spokesman recently to rule out applying new sanctions to be directed at North Korea to third-country entities. The United States Wednesday did not preclude the possibility of freezing North Korean assets in foreign banks to effectively cut off resources for the North’s development and proliferation of weapons of mass destruction. “I’m not going to predict any particular step that we’re contemplating, but these...

Categories China & Korea/Counterfeiting/Fiskings/Money Laundering/Sanctions

June 19, 2010

Is the Obama Administration Ready for Plan B at Last?

Well, finally! The Obama administration is considering going after the assets of North Korean entities and individuals to punish Pyongyang after the sinking of a South Korean warship, sources familiar with the matter said on Friday. Freezing offshore assets would be the first tangible U.S. action to make North Korea pay a price for the March 26 sinking of the Cheonan corvette in which 46 South Korean sailors died. Pyongyang has denied responsibility for the incident. While there have been...

Categories "United" Nations/Cheonan Incident/Counterfeiting/Money Laundering/Sanctions

June 7, 2010

China’s Support for Kim Jong Il Undermines the U.N., Nonproliferation, and Regional Peace

Some of us, of course, have never really believed that the United Nations could play much of a useful role in restraining North Korea anyway, other than helping us enlist the support of Old Europe, which is almost alone in paying any heed to the U.N. After all, the institution is led by Ban Ki-Moon, who rose from local obscurity to international obscurity by appeasing Kim Jong Il, and who, by all outward appearances, suffers from a genetic testosterone deficiency....

Categories "United" Nations/Cheonan Incident/China & Korea/Diplomacy/Proliferation/Sanctions

June 2, 2010

Plan B Watch

I really, really like the way the South Korean Foreign Minister is talking lately, and I hope he also expresses the sentiments of U.S. officials with whom he’s spoken: Strangling the flow of cash to North Korea is the most effective non-military way to hold the Stalinist country accountable for the sinking of the Navy corvette Cheonan, Foreign Minister Yu Myung-hwan said Tuesday. “The U.S. is keeping a close eye on North Korea’s trafficking of counterfeit banknotes, drugs and tobacco...

Categories Cheonan Incident/Counterfeiting/Money Laundering/Sanctions

May 31, 2010

Robert Einhorn to Lead North Korea Sanctions Implementation Effort

The Joongang Ilbo is reporting that Clinton Administration alumnus and counter-proliferation expert Robert Einhorn is going to be put in charge of “streamlining the process by which it implements” international sanctions against North Korea, sanctions that are likely to be enhanced after an international investigation found that North Korea torpedoed and sank the South Korean warship Cheonan. “The U.S. administration was seeking more efficient management of implementation of sanctions, which had been divided between the State and the Treasury departments,”...

Categories Cheonan Incident/China & Korea/Counterfeiting/Money Laundering/Sanctions/U.S. Law/Washington Views

May 13, 2010

Cheonan conclusions will mean tougher N. Korea policies … for a while, anyway

It certainly looks like every government official outside Beijing who has seen the evidence now believes that North Korea sank the Cheonan and killed 46 members of its crew. Among those who have drawn their conclusions are the South Korean government, the Obama Administration, and the Republicans in Congress. The multinational investigation is now sufficiently advanced that the official Yonhap News Agency says that the findings could be released as early as next week. One interesting leak references a stray...

Categories Cheonan Incident/North-South/Sanctions/Terrorism (NK)/U.S. Politics/Washington Views

May 12, 2010

North Korea Arms Terrorists, State Department Dozes

The Foreign Minister of Israel has become the first government official to openly accuse North Korea of arming terrorists since the U.S. government removed North Korea from the list of state sponsors of terrorism in 2008: The Israeli foreign minister said on Wednesday that North Korean weapons seized in Thailand last year were headed for Islamist groups Hamas and Hezbollah. [….] “With huge numbers of different weapons … (it had the) intention to smuggling these weapons to Hamas and to...

Categories Axis of Evil/Proliferation/Sanctions/Terrorism (NK)/WMD

April 28, 2010

“Collective Spirit” Update

The Chosun Ilbo reports that despite international sanctions, Kim Jong Il still manages to import ample quantities of rice and infant formula add “between $200 and $300 million every year” to his personal slush fund: With the money, North Korea would be able to import between 400,000 to 600,000 tons of rice, which would be enough to cover half the country’s food shortage of 1 million tons of rice per year. What? Since when isn’t cognac food anymore? Isn’t it...

Categories Kim Jong Il/NK Economics/Sanctions

April 15, 2010

China Helps North Korea Import Infant Formula New Cars Despite U.N. Sanctions

I dedicate this post to John Feffer and Christine Ahn, who may now rest in the security of knowing that U.N. anti-proliferation sanctions aren’t causing starvation in North Korea: Around 100 Chinese-made cars have been brought into North Korea through a checkpoint on the border with China, probably for North Korean leader Kim Jong-il to give to favored officials. The delivery was made on Tuesday, two days before former leader Kim Il-sung’s birthday, which is the biggest holiday in the...

Categories China & Korea/Sanctions

March 19, 2010

Global Financial Body Blacklists North Korea

One of the most important offices in the subterranean warrens of the Treasury Department is the Financial Crimes Enforcement Center, or FINCEN, whose mission is to combat illicit finance and money laundering, and whose global power derives from its influence within a global body of counterpart agencies from governments worldwide known as the Financial Action Task Force, or FATF, which in turn has the power to exclude any bank and most countries from the global financial system, rendering the target...

Categories Money Laundering/Sanctions

March 17, 2010

Must Read: Sanctions Could Cause N. Korean Regime to Collapse

The full report is here. I won’t have time to read it until this weekend, but here’s a teaser: The North “is facing several domestic problems that in isolation would each be manageable but together could threaten regime survival,” said Daniel Pinkston, the group’s northeast Asia deputy project director. “The North Korean government has demonstrated an extraordinary ability to survive, but the regime is under extreme pressure when it must also deal with looming succession issues.” The 68-year-old Kim, who...

Categories Kim Jong Il/Regime Change/Sanctions

March 5, 2010

Kim Il Sung’s Personal Shopper Writes Tell-All Book

Kim Jong Ryul, who spent 16 years under cover in Austria, also described how the “great leader” and his son and successor Kim Jong Il spent millions pampering and protecting themselves with Western goods — everything from luxury cars, carpets and exotic foods, to monitors that can detect heartbeats of people hiding behind walls and gold-plated handguns. The colonel’s account — told in a new book by Austrian journalists Ingrid Steiner-Gashi and Dardan Gashi — shows the deep divide between...

Categories Famine & Food Aid/Kim Jong Il/Sanctions/Useful Idiocy

February 23, 2010

South Africa Intercepts North Korean Arms Shipment (Updated)

Not for the first time, North Korea is implicated in shipping weapons to one or more belligerents in the civil war in Congo, and not for the first time, North Korea is caught selling tank parts to a warring African nation in violation of a U.N. resolution. This time, however, the North Korean shipment has been seized in the course of what “Western diplomats” call a “clear-cut violation” of UNSCR 1874 (full text in my sidebars): South Africa has told...

Categories Africa/Sanctions

February 16, 2010

China Will Give Kim Jong Il $10 Billion, Violating the Spirit and Letter of U.N. Security Council Resolutions It Voted For

[Update: More here, at the Daily NK] Consistent with reports I’d linked previously, China is now offering a financially beleaguered Kim Jong Il a massive bailout, in obvious retaliation for America’s assistance in helping Taiwan to defend itself against the Chicom missiles aimed at its cities, and likely also as a way to bail Kim Jong Il out after the self-inflicted catastrophe of The Great Confiscation. China’s decision factors in the assumption that America lacks the spine to respond by...

Categories "United" Nations/China & Korea/Sanctions