Search Results for “luxury”

January 1, 2018

How Kim Jong-un, China & the autumn gales set a death trap for North Korea’s fishermen

By now, you’ve probably seen the ghastly reports of boats from North Korea washing up against the Japanese coastline with the desiccated or skeletal remains of their crews. You’ve probably also read reports speculating about why. This post will sift through dozens of those reports, discard the theories that the evidence refutes, and assemble the more plausible ones into a coherent explanation that the evidence supports. As it turns out, most of what you’ve read about North Korea’s ghost ships...

Capitalism/China & Korea/Class Warfare/Japan & Korea/Resistance

December 5, 2017

So, who else has cut trade with North Korea lately, and who still hasn’t?

With the pace of news of North Korea sanctions news lately, my bookmarks folder is starting to look like what the paramedics found at the Cat Lady’s house after the neighbors noticed a foul odor. Today, I want to catch up with our efforts to deny Pyongyang a haven for its money laundering network, with a focus on Southeast Asia. To review the administration’s progress since January, you may want to start here and here. Ambassador Nikki Haley also gave...

Arms Trafficking/Diplomacy/Sanctions/Southeast Asia

November 27, 2017

Treasury Dep’t hits Sun Sidong, N. Korea’s maritime smuggling & mineral exports

Here at OFK, we’ve chronicled a curious fact that few professional foreign policy scholars have noticed: China is opposed to unilateral sanctions, except when it isn’t. Last week — barely a week after President Trump returned from Beijing — he gave Xi Jinping something to oppose. OFAC designated Dandong Kehua Economy & Trade Co., Ltd., Dandong Xianghe Trading Co., Ltd., and Dandong Hongda Trade Co. Ltd. pursuant to E.O. 13810. Between January 1, 2013 and August 31, 2017, these three...

Arms Trafficking/Money Laundering/Shipping sanctions

November 17, 2017

Singapore’s trade ban with North Korea yields more questions than answers

At first glance, this looks like the State Department’s biggest coup yet in its campaign of progressive diplomacy against Pyongyang. “Singapore will prohibit all commercially traded goods from, or to, the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK),” the city-state’s customs said in the notice sent to traders and declaring agents last Tuesday, referring to the country by its official name. The suspension would take effect from Nov. 8, Fauziah A. Sani, head of trade strategy and security for the director-general...

Luxury Goods/Money Laundering/Sanctions/Southeast Asia

November 13, 2017

What’s extraordinary (and what isn’t) about a North Korean soldier’s defection at Panmunjom

It has been an eventful day along the Korean Demilitarized Zone (DMZ). South Korean authorities say that a 58-year-old Louisiana man was found on the wrong side of the Civilian Control Line, where he was doing something “for political purposes.” Details to follow, presumably. The ROK Joint Chiefs have also confirmed that a North Korean soldier defected today through the Joint Security Area or JSA, the most visible and sensitive part of the DMZ. The soldier bolted from his guard...

Defectors/NK Military

October 20, 2017

North Koreans fight a losing battle for the soil they till & the food they grow

With the greening of the trees each year in North Korea come annual predictions of famine due to weather conditions that, by some meteorological miracle, never cross the Demilitarized Zone and cause hunger in South Korea. This year, as with every year since 1999, the reality was not as bad as the dire predictions, but the situation is still bad: some of the Daily NK’s sources say that they’ve seen the bodies of people who (or so they believe) have...

Famine & Food Aid/Resistance

September 13, 2017

Chinese banks are cracking down on N. Korean money laundering again. Will it last this time?

Several news sources are reporting that Chinese banks, particularly in China’s northeast, have started to freeze or close accounts held by North Korean individuals and businesses. The Daily NK, citing unnamed local sources, was the first to report this potentially important development. It says both large state-owned banks (such as the China Construction Bank) and regional banks (such as Pudong Bank) recently banned all North Koreans from opening new accounts and ordered the closure of existing accounts. It also quotes...

Money Laundering/Sanctions

July 25, 2017

The North Korea travel ban, PUST, and the failure of people-to-minder engagement

Earlier this week, the State Department announced that it will publish a Federal Register notice in the next 30 days, restricting the use of U.S. passports for travel to North Korea, where Americans tend to end up getting arrested, detained for prolonged periods, and lately, much worse. If State will implement the ban through a Federal Register notice, it means it will be done pursuant to the Administrative Procedure Act under some existing statutory authority — almost certainly this one:...

Foreigners in N. Korea

July 21, 2017

What construction in Pyongyang tells us, and doesn’t tell us, about sanctions

As the Trump administration looks to sanctions, including secondary sanctions, to gain the leverage to disarm North Korea, it is natural that North Korea watchers would try to gauge the potential for sanctions to impact Pyongyang’s finances. In a place where predictions of glasnost go to die, it is natural that they would measure what the regime puts on display, like the development of Pyongyang’s skyline. And regrettably, it is natural that any analysis whose research begins and ends with...

Fiskings/Sanctions

July 5, 2017

We cannot live with a nuclear North Korea (or rather, it will not live with us)

Yesterday, the North Korean threat finally crossed the ocean to our shores. As it is after every fresh outrage from Pyongyang, the question many will ask is, “Now what?” Certainly, there are plenty of legal, financial, and diplomatic options on this list that President Trump’s cabinet can exercise. Congress is also ready to act, or nearly so. You should expect to see the Senate move legislation you’ve seen (or something similar to it) and legislation you have not yet seen....

"United" Nations/Missiles/Proliferation/Sanctions/WMD

June 30, 2017

Commence Primary Ignition: Treasury zaps the Bank of Dandong for laundering Kim Jong-Un’s money

And so, the “maximum pressure” we’ve been waiting for begins in earnest. Yesterday afternoon, the Treasury Department announced a series of legal actions against Chinese enablers of North Korea’s proliferation, smuggling, and money laundering. First, Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control froze the assets of two businessmen and a shipping company. One of those businessmen, Sun Wei, was the sole shareholder of Mingzheng International Trading, the Chinese company targeted in this recent civil forfeiture action. The shipping company was sanctioned for...

Money Laundering/Sanctions

June 20, 2017

How to hold North Korea accountable for Otto Warmbier’s death

In North Korean prisons (at least, in those from which release is possible at all) when the guards conclude that a prisoner is about to die, they release her and send her away to die at home, so that disposing of her body will be someone else’s problem, and so that the warden can manipulate the camp’s rate of in-custody deaths downward. (Perhaps in some small way, even the wardens of North Korean prisons fear being held accountable, one day,...

Foreigners in N. Korea/Sanctions/U.S. Law

June 13, 2017

C4ADS: Pyongyang’s networks in China are “centralized, limited, and vulnerable” to sanctions

Because I’ve already given too many minutes of my life to the moveable farce named Dennis Rodman, I’m devoting today’s post to something more consequential: the Center for Advanced Defense Studies’s new report exposing more North Korean financial networks in China, and dispelling the misinformation that North Korea is isolated from the financial system and thus sanctions-proof. (Full disclosure: I advised C4ADS on the drafting of the report, without compensation of course.) Money quote: The continuing misperceptions of North Korea...

China/Money Laundering/Sanctions/Shipping sanctions

April 10, 2017

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...

Arms Trafficking/Money Laundering/Sanctions

April 6, 2017

When North Korean agitprop backfires: A film about a peasant uprising is sowing dangerous ideas

What passes for a feel-good story in one of the world’s bleakest corners? Evidence that the seeds of class warfare are sprouting within a state that has fooled so many gullible leftists into believing that it’s a paradise of socialism. The Daily NK reports that an old agitprop film is inspiring exactly the kind of revolutionary consciousness that Kim Jong-un sees in his cognac-sodden nightmares. The film, “Im Kkoek Jung,” reminds North Koreans that their society has become the very thing the state’s propaganda...

Class Warfare/Famine & Food Aid/Inside NK/Propaganda/Resistance/Subversion

March 24, 2017

Only North Korea’s government can end hunger in North Korea

Although I have many, many unanswered questions about how the U.N. is able to fully assess exactly how many North Koreans are going hungry, let’s just stipulate that it’s a majority of those living outside Pyongyang: Nearly 70 percent of the North Korean population, roughly seven in 10 people, is undernourished, a U.S. broadcaster reported Wednesday, citing a U.N. report on the need for humanitarian aid to North Korea. According to the report released the previous day by the U.N....

Famine & Food Aid

February 27, 2017

Malaysia’s lax enforcement of North Korea sanctions has finally come home

Over the weekend, Malaysian authorities painstakingly decontaminated a terminal of the Kuala Lumpur International Airport where North Korean agents – including a diplomat – carried out a lethal attack with the nerve agent VX, a substance so deadly that a tiny droplet can kill an adult. The authorities are clearly concerned that the use of a persistent chemical weapon of mass destruction in a crowded airport terminal will cause panic among Malaysian citizens and members of the traveling public, as...

Arms Trafficking/Money Laundering/Sanctions/Shipping sanctions/Southeast Asia

December 4, 2016

What the Treasury Department’s blocking of Air Koryo means

Last week’s North Korea sanctions designations by the U.S. Treasury Department’s Office of Foreign Assets Control — commonly known as OFAC — go far to explain why U.N. Security Council Resolution 2321 took so long to negotiate and pass. There were many reasons why I panned the terms of that resolution last week, including new and not-improved coal export limits, and the U.N.’s failure to designate North Korea’s state airline, Air Koryo. Friday’s OFAC designations — which block any of...

Foreigners in N. Korea/Sanctions

Search Results for: luxury