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Category: Sanctions

June 27, 2016

U.S. to sanction N. Korean officials, possibly to include His Porcine Majesty, for human rights abuses

The Treasury Department has sanctioned the presidents of Belarus and Zimbabwe and their cabinets for undermining democratic processes or institutions and has frozen their assets in the international financial system. It has sanctioned top officials of the Russian government for Russia’s aggression against its neighbor, the Ukraine. It has sanctioned the president of Syria for human rights violations, censorship, and corruption, among other reasons. It sanctioned Iranian officials for censorship and human rights abuses. It has even sanctioned officials in tiny...

Categories Human Rights/Sanctions
June 27, 2016

Top Namibian official visits Pyongyang

  In March, this blog reported on the revelation by the U.N. Panel of Experts that the African nation of Namibia, a desert country in the southwest corner of the continent, had hired North Koreans, including representatives of U.N.-designated KOMID, to build an arms factory near Windhoek. At the time, Deputy Prime Minister Netumbo Nandi-Ndaitwah came to her government’s defense, admitting that her government was the site of a North Korean-run arms factory, but denying that the arrangement violated U.N....

Categories Africa/Arms Trafficking/Sanctions
June 23, 2016

HRNK exposes N. Korea’s sale of crew services to Taiwanese ships, via Uruguay (Update: A violation of EO 13722?)

The HRNK insider blog carries a fascinating story that begins with “a recent speaking tour in South America.” Recently, a North Korean sailor arrived at the airport in Montevideo, Uruguay, from Beijing. The sailor and his minder must have been in quite a hurry to get to the port. They forgot his suitcase, which the airport authorities eventually declared unclaimed. The suitcase contained evidence that North Korea is renting crew services to third-country vessels via a Uruguayan broker. (HRNK claims...

Categories Shipping sanctions
June 22, 2016

North Korean trading companies can’t pay their Chinese creditors because of sanctions.

Lately, the news about the implementation and impact of sanctions has come in so thick and fast that I’ve been unable to follow it all, and have instead bookmarked it until I can identify patterns and put it into context. A report I saw yesterday, however, demands immediate attention. According to the Daily NK, starting in April, the trading companies the North Korean regime sends to China to earn hard currency began defaulting on payments to their Chinese creditors because...

Categories Sanctions
June 7, 2016

RFA: Poland to stop granting work visas to N. Korean laborers

Last month, I wrote about Vice’s must-see investigative documentary on North Korean workers in Poland and the exploitative and unsafe conditions in which they work for little or no pay. Via Yonhap, Radio Free Asia now quotes South Korean Foreign Ministry Spokesman Cho June-hyuck as saying that Poland will stop granting new work visas and renewing existing visas to workers from North Korea. “The issue of overseas North Korean workers has increasingly caused concern within the international community from the perspective...

Categories Europe/Human Rights/Human Trafficking/Sanctions
June 6, 2016

Obama Administration, GOP Congress join forces in N. Korea sanctions push in Asia

It’s a rare day in any election year, much less this one, when anyone could write a post title like that about a major public policy issue. Now, for the first time since I began writing this blog, all of the cylinders — the President, the Congress, the U.N., South Korea, and Japan — are all firing in the same sequence to raise the pressure on Pyongyang and Beijing. Over the last week, we’ve seen the Republican Congress’s key foreign...

Categories Anju Links/Money Laundering/Sanctions
June 2, 2016

The Treasury Department just went full Alderaan on North Korea (updated)

For decades, North Korean drug dealers, counterfeiters, proliferators, arms dealers, money launderers, and most recently, bank burglars have used our financial system to move their profits into the regime’s offshore bank accounts, or into casinos. For years, the U.S. Treasury Department had to fight Pyongyang’s abuse of the financial system with its hands cuffed behind its back by the State Department, which sought a deal with Pyongyang at almost any cost. But yesterday, in a move that was at least...

Categories Money Laundering/Sanctions
May 27, 2016

Global wave of bank burglaries should revive calls to kick N. Korea out of SWIFT

In recent weeks, I’ve watched with keen interest, and some schadenfreude, as news reports have implicated Pakistani and North Korean hackers in a series of massive bank burglaries involving as many as 12 banks around the world, starting with the theft of $81 million (or $101 million, depending on which report you believe) from the Bangladesh Bank’s account in the U.S. Federal Reserve. These burglaries did not involve guns or ski masks. They were something more like armored car burglaries,...

Categories Money Laundering/NK Crime/Sanctions
May 25, 2016

Seoul’s diplomacy targets North Korea’s arms trade in Africa

Just last week, I wrote that South Korea’s diplomatic efforts to secure compliance with U.N. Security Council Resolution 2270 were putting ours to shame. Seoul is now offering fresh evidence of this by doing what I’ve said for weeks that our own diplomats should be doing — going on tour in Africa to pressure defense ministries to stop buying from Pyongyang. Seoul’s direct approach to two countries with close military ties to Pyongyang highlights its push to stem North Korea’s...

Categories Africa/Arms Trafficking
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 20, 2016

Pyongyang’s sanctions are the ones that hurt the North Korean people the most.

Last month, I wrote about one slightly surprising consequence of sanctions against North Korea — sanctions have prevented Kim Jong-un from selling off and exporting resources needed by the North Korean people, which has flooded North Korean markets with cheap coal and seafood. Now, we’re starting to see something like the converse of this, in which restrictions on what North Korea’s donju and purchasing agents can import is forcing them to find other ways to kick up steep “loyalty payments”...

Categories Class Warfare/Famine & Food Aid/Sanctions
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
April 12, 2016

Angola may be defying U.N. sanctions against North Korea

A report last month by the U.N. Panel of Experts found that Namibia has been involved in joint projects with KOMID, a designated North Korean entity, to build an arms factory in the African nation. The finding drew a defiant response from the Namibian government, but as a defense to a sanctions violation, it was a blue answer to a red question. In response, I wrote this post — which attracted much attention in Windhoek — rebutting Namibia’s argument and explaining...

Categories Africa/Arms Trafficking
April 8, 2016

Why an unprecedented mass defection could be a sign of instability in North Korea

Yonhap is reporting this morning that 13 North Koreans —12 women and a male manager working at one of its overseas restaurants in an unidentified country — have defected and arrived safely in South Korea. The impetus for this unprecedented mass defection? Sanctions — which never work, so we’ve been told. “As the international community has slapped sanctions on the North, North Korean restaurants in foreign countries are known to be feeling the pinch,” Jeong Joon-hee, a ministry spokesman, told...

Categories Sanctions
April 7, 2016

Does our State Department want denuclearization or an exit strategy?

I’ve long wished that I could attend more ICAS events, but they tend to coincide with busy times in my work schedule. That was also the case when Assistant Secretary of State Danny Russel spoke to ICAS earlier this week. The State Department has since published . A reader (thank you) forwarded it, and asked for my views. Sending a consistent message to North Korea and China is very important at this moment, and it hardly serves that purpose to...

Categories Appeasement/Diplomacy/Sanctions
April 6, 2016

The Panama papers, Pyongyang, and Nigel Cowie

Here at OFK, we keep a running list of gullible foreigners who’ve tried to get rich in North Korea, justified their support for its regime as ways to reform and open it to global commerce, and instead met the same fate as Hyundai Asan, Volvo, Yang Bin, David Chang and Robert Torricelli, Chung Mong-Hun, Roh Jeong-ho, and Orascom’s Naguib Sawaris, who I predicted back in 2008 would “eventually meet the same fate.” Regulators should require securities issuers to disclose their investments in North Korea...

Categories Money Laundering/Sanctions