Search Results for: Tongsun Park

July 11, 2006

Tongsun Park Trial Update

Today, Claudia Rosett reports from the courtroom that Park was picking up the tab for Maurice Strong’s private New York office. And that matters, why? Strong, for example, served in a public capacity in 1996 as a top adviser to former U.N. Secretary-General Boutros Boutros-Ghali, then from 1997-2005 as a special adviser to Secretary-General Kofi Annan. With the rank of under-secretary-general, Strong orchestrated Annan’s 1997 reorganization of the U.N. Secretariat, stayed on as a top adviser, and from 2003-2005 became...

Categories "United" Nations/Human Rights/U.S. Law
June 30, 2006

Claudia Rosett Is Blogging the Tongsun Park Trial

Here, at National Review. The name Boutros Boutros Ghali has already come up. I’ll be interested in gaining any insight into why the U.N. did nothing for the North Korean people while Park’s friend and fellow bagman Maurice Strong was Kofi Annan’s Special Envoy to North Korea. Previous posts here. Update: Strong has issued a statement denying any involvement in Oil for Food, but stating, “I have continued to maintain a relationship with Mr. Park. Indeed, as a native of...

Categories "United" Nations
June 28, 2006

Tongsun Park’s Trial Begins

Park formerly served as a “Special Advisor” to Maurice Strong, a wealthy, uber-connected Canadian leftist who in turn was Kofi Annan’s Special Envoy to North Korea. Strong and Park have now both been implicated in the U.N. Oil-for-Food scandal. During his tenure, Strong was notable for a deathly silence on human rights. He resigned after the OFF allegations emerged. Today, Park is charged with being an unregistered Iraqi agent, in violation of the Foreign Agents’ Registration Act. Writing in the...

Categories "United" Nations/U.S. Law
January 18, 2006

Tongsun Park’s Friends Offer to Post $2M Bail

I’d like to have some of this guy’s friends, and let’s not forget the South Korean officials who conveniently lost him for all these months: Mr. Park “is a guaranteed risk of flight,” an assistant United States attorney, Stephen Miller, told Magistrate Judge Theodore H. Katz in Federal District Court in Manhattan. Mr. Miller said Mr. Park had “fled back to South Korea” after he was served in December 2004 with a grand jury subpoena at the Watergate hotel in...

Categories Uncategorized
January 9, 2006

‘Korean Connection’ Tongsun Park Arrested in Houston; Park Was Closely Linked to Resigned U.N. Special Envoy to N. Korea, May Implicate Boutros-Ghali

Months after he was indicted by the feds in New York, oil-for-food bag man Tongsun Park has been arrested. Tongsun Park, a lobbyist from South Korea who was a central figure in the Congressional bribery scandal in the 1970’s known as Koreagate, was arrested yesterday in Houston on charges that he worked illegally to secure favorable treatment for Iraq under the United Nations oil-for-food program, federal authorities said. Michael J. Garcia, the United States attorney in Manhattan, announced that Mr....

Categories Uncategorized
September 13, 2014

On Think Tanks, Propaganda, the Foreign Agents’ Registration Act, and Korea

Washington is a marvelous city for someone like me. Where else could a foreigner, an outsider like myself, do the things I was able to do? – Tongsun Park, to the House Ethics Committee, April 1978 A detailed story in The New York Times, examining grants and gifts by foreign governments to U.S. think tanks — and how those gifts influence scholars (and through them), voters, policymakers, and Congress — has caused much controversy and discussion in Washington this week....

Categories U.S. & Korea/U.S. Law/Washington Views
May 26, 2009

Bolton: Expel North Korea from the U.N.

[Bolton] urged Obama’s team to first put North Korea back on the list of state sponsors of terrorism following its removal in the waning months of the Bush administration.  Bolton also urged the UN Security Council to expel Pyongyang from the world body as a “persistent violator” of UN resolutions.  [AFP] The accusation is obviously true, and it could be justified for human rights reasons alone. North Korea has also consistently stolen U.N. development and food aid and refused to...

Categories "United" Nations
September 12, 2007

Anju Links for 9/12/07

*   Canadian Oil-for-Food scandal figure Maurice Strong, who took $1 million  from Saddam Hussein as a senior U.N. official and confidant of Kofi Annan, has resurfaced in China.  You’ll remember that Strong was also Kofi Annan’s Special Envoy  to North Korea, and  that the North Korean-born Tongsun Park, now serving a five-year prison sentence, was his bag-man and informal  advisor on North Korea.  All of which may go far to explain why the U.N. stood  around performing a colonoscopy...

Categories Anju Links
July 21, 2007

‘Pyongyang Soju’ Importer Arrested

A Korean American businessman has been arrested by the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation on charges of hiding his activities as a spy for the South Korean government, AP reported Thursday. According to court documents obtained by the wire agency, Park Il-woo, also known as Steve Park, was a legal resident in the U.S. for the past 20 years and conducted business with North Korea. Park provided information he obtained from his frequent trips to North Korea to the South...

Categories Human Trafficking/NK Economics/U.S. Law
January 19, 2007

The UN’s Latest North Korea Scandal

I’ve often criticized the UN World Food Program (WFP)  for the inadequate monitoring  of its food aid program in North Korea, but as it turns out, there was something I didn’t know then:  compared to the UN Development Program’s (UNDP)  operations there, the  WFP’s  were a paragon of accountability.  Ever since the days when the disgraced team of Maurice Strong  and Tongsun Park began advising and representing Kofi Annan on North Korea, the UNDP has been funneling millions of dollars...

Categories "United" Nations/Famine & Food Aid
July 14, 2006

Guilty

Tongsun Park has been convicted in his Oil for Food trial, for acting as an unregistered agent for Saddam Hussein’s Iraq. History will note this as just one more time the U.N. abetted a dictator’s self-aggrandizement at the expense of his suffering subjects. A hat tip to Claudia Rosett herself for sending. And in a delicious coincidence, South Korea picked today to formally nominate Ban Ki Moon to be the next U.N. General Secretary. This story says not one peep...

Categories "United" Nations/U.S. Law
January 12, 2006

Korean Connection Watch

Tongsun Park–Arrested in Mexico? That certainly suggests a much higher level of U.S. interest in what he knows, as well as a much lower interest by Park in cooperating. Of course, he ratted everyone out after his Koreagate indictment. Let’s hope the pattern holds up. Update: . . . and on his way from Canada, home of Liberal Party supporter and Oil-For-Food co-suspect Maurice Strong, to God-knows-where, on the very eve of the Canadian national election. If this proves to...

Categories Uncategorized
January 11, 2006

Claudia Rosett on the Korean Connection; Maurice Strong’s ‘Special Interest’ in Building Power Plants in North and South Korea

I can’t even begin to scratch the detail that Ms. Rosett has added to our knowledge of the Korean Connection with her most recent Oil-For-Food article. For some time, my interest in Oil-For-Food has focused in on Tongsun Park, who was born in North Korea, and Maurice Strong, Kofi Annan’s former Special Envoy to North Korea. Strong resigned from that position last May, after news reports named him as the possible recipient of some of Saddam Hussein’s bribe money, conveyed...

Categories Uncategorized
October 31, 2005

Believe Me, Not Your Eyes

Welcome to the new, independent South Korea–the one that bravely sets its own policy direction without regard for how Yankee imperialists may view it: The Foreign Ministry is hiring an American PR firm to put a positive spin on its U.S. policies in a nation that has been reading them as increasingly hostile. The Foreign Ministry recently wrote to the parliamentary Unification, Foreign Affairs and Trade Committee asking for an extra budget of W1.2 billion (about US$1.2 million) next year...

Categories Uncategorized
April 23, 2005

Korean Connection Update

According to a recent federal criminal complaint, South Korean citizen Tongsun Park was the bag man who carried Saddam’s millions to U.N. officials. A growing body of evidence suggests that Park invested $1 million in a company set up by the son of Maurice Strong, the U.N. Special Envoy to North Korea. Park was born in North Korea and Strong has admitted to seeking his advice in the course of his special envoy duties. After exposure of the payments, Strong...

Categories Uncategorized
April 23, 2005

Korean Connection Update

According to a recent federal criminal complaint, South Korean citizen Tongsun Park was the bag man who carried Saddam’s millions to U.N. officials. A growing body of evidence suggests that Park invested $1 million in a company set up by the son of Maurice Strong, the U.N. Special Envoy to North Korea. Park was born in North Korea and Strong has admitted to seeking his advice in the course of his special envoy duties. After exposure of the payments, Strong...

Categories Uncategorized
April 20, 2005

Maurice Strong Resigns (Steps Aside?) as Special Rapporteur to N. Korea!

Thanks to an anonymous source for referring this: Canadian Maurice Strong, an influential entrepreneur, withdrew as U.N. envoy for Korea on Wednesday while investigators probed his ties to a lobbyist suspected of bribing U.N. officials with Iraqi funds. Strong, who has served in a variety of U.N. posts since 1947, was a part-time adviser to Secretary-General Kofi Annan on the six-party talks aimed at getting North Korea to abandon its nuclear weapons programs.” He is suspending himself with the secretary-general’s...

Categories Uncategorized
April 20, 2005

Maurice Strong Resigns (Steps Aside?) as Special Rapporteur to N. Korea!

Thanks to an anonymous source for referring this: Canadian Maurice Strong, an influential entrepreneur, withdrew as U.N. envoy for Korea on Wednesday while investigators probed his ties to a lobbyist suspected of bribing U.N. officials with Iraqi funds. Strong, who has served in a variety of U.N. posts since 1947, was a part-time adviser to Secretary-General Kofi Annan on the six-party talks aimed at getting North Korea to abandon its nuclear weapons programs.” He is suspending himself with the secretary-general’s...

Categories Uncategorized