Search Results for: Treasury Justice

November 9, 2017

China cheats on the coal ban again

I still remember my excitement, bordering on giddiness, when in May 2013, a few big banks in China froze some North Korean accounts. That action came two months after the Treasury Department designated North Korea’s Foreign Trade Bank, and just over a week after Ed Royce dropped the first draft of the NKSPEA. But as we’ve learned from our friends in the FBI and the Justice Department since then, big Chinese banks began clearing the FTB’s transactions as soon as...

Categories China & Korea/Sanctions
November 6, 2017

Why Trump’s itinerary in Japan hints at re-listing N. Korea as a state sponsor of terrorism

Last week, Secretary of State Rex Tillerson missed a statutory deadline to decide whether to re-list North Korea as a state sponsor of terrorism (SSOT). Asked about this, State said it told members of Congress that Tillerson “expects to conclude his review and announce a decision within the month.” The Washington Times claims that “[t]here were rumors this week in the back hallways of the State Department that the administration was weighing a state sponsor designation.” National Security Advisor H.R....

Categories Abductions/Japan/Terrorism (NK)
October 30, 2017

North Korean assassins arrested in Beijing as Tillerson’s terror sponsor decision looms

If you haven’t read my last post on this week’s deadline for the Secretary of State to decide whether North Korea has repeatedly sponsored acts of international terrorism, you may want to start there. This post will be a combination of breaking news and supplement to that post. This morning, Bloomberg News, citing a report in the Joongang Ilbo, is reporting that yet again, North Korean agents have been caught while on their way to assassinate a dissident in exile....

Categories Money Laundering/Sanctions/Terrorism (NK)/U.S. Law
October 24, 2017

WSJ: Sun Sidong under FBI investigation

Previously, I’ve written about the C4ADS investigation that exposed the Sun Sidong network, and that network’s role in money laundering and arms smuggling for North Korea, most notably the seizure of the Jie Shun arms shipment in Egypt. Shortly after the release of C4ADS’s report, Treasury froze the assets of one of Sun’s companies, Dandong Zhicheng Metallic Materials, and the Justice Department filed a civil forfeiture suit against $4 million of its assets. Now, the Wall Street Journal reports that...

Categories Money Laundering/Sanctions
October 16, 2017

On North Korea sanctions, evidence of an inflection point

As I’ve mentioned previously, this has been a busy month for me, and a difficult one for keeping up with the many developments in North Korea sanctions enforcement. Over the last months, I’ve been keeping a tally of how those efforts are taking shape. The accumulating evidence now gives reason for guarded optimism that at last, the sanctions are starting to show significant effects. Financial. Treasury Undersecretary Sigal Mandelker sent the right message to the financial industry in her recent...

Categories Sanctions
September 21, 2017

Maximum Pressure Watch: Trump puts the squeeze on Kim Jong-un

Donald Trump hit Kim Jong-un with his first sanctions executive order today. (Update: Its official number is Executive Order 13810.) The new EO partially implements UNSCR 2371, UNSCR 2375, and the KIMS Act, which the President signed in August. As a strictly legal matter, this EO will not affect anyone’s interests immediately because Treasury didn’t announce any new designations. As a practical matter, however, we may already be seeing the effects of the clear seriousness of purpose that Trump has...

Categories Money Laundering/Sanctions/Shipping sanctions
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...

Categories Money Laundering/Sanctions
August 5, 2017

UNSCR 2371: Text and commentary (see update)

Today, the U.N. Security Council adopted Resolution 2371 unanimously. The text is in black, my commentary is in blue italic. PP1: Recalling its previous relevant resolutions, including resolution 825 (1993), resolution 1540 (2004), resolution 1695 (2006), resolution 1718 (2006), resolution 1874 (2009), resolution 1887 (2009), resolution 2087 (2013), resolution 2094 (2013), resolution 2270 (2016), resolution 2321 (2016), and resolution 2356 (2017), as well as the statements of its President of 6 October 2006 (S/PRST/2006/41), 13 April 2009 (S/PRST/2009/7) and 16...

Categories "United" Nations/Sanctions
July 31, 2017

WaPo editors ask, “What if sanctions don’t work?” … and answer correctly.

Regular readers know by now how many keystrokes I’ve spent at this site and in print in various places citing the evidence that sanctions against North Korea were largely a sham until last year, and could work if we enforced them in earnest. Still, the editors of the Washington Post ask a question that even the most strident sanctions advocate must consider: ONE SCHOOL of North Korea experts has been arguing for some time that sanctions will never induce the...

Categories Sanctions
July 24, 2017

OFK Exclusive: House, Senate move new North Korea sanctions legislation

Last year, Ed Royce, the Chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, and Cory Gardner, Chairman of the Senate Asia Subcommittee, led the charge to cut Pyongyang’s access to the hard currency that sustains it by drafting and passing the North Korea Sanctions and Policy Enhancement Act. We’ve known all along that nothing short of presenting Kim Jong-Un with an existential choice — disarm and reform, or perish — would create the conditions for a negotiated disarmament of North Korea,...

Categories Arms Trafficking/Money Laundering/Sanctions/Shipping sanctions/U.S. Law
July 12, 2017

Maximum pressure watch: The Dandong Zhicheng warrants foreshadow N. Korea-related indictments

Last fall, as America was consumed by (depending on your state of residence) post-election trauma or celebratory gunplay, China blew past the North Korean coal import caps it had just agreed to at the U.N., and the Obama administration issued what would be some of its final North Korea sanctions designations — of Daewon Industries (a coal exporter subordinate to the North Korean military) and Kangbong Trading Corporation (a coal exporter subordinate to the Munitions Industry Department and involved in the development of...

Categories Money Laundering/Sanctions/U.S. Law
July 7, 2017

Stop talking about bombing North Korea. Talk about the revolution it desperately needs.

The supreme art of war is to subdue the enemy without fighting.  – Sun Tzu On the Fourth of July, I had a long talk with a Famous Person who would probably prefer that I not mention his name here. He’s famous (or infamous — your mileage may vary) for his association with a foreign policy philosophy described as “neoconservative,” whatever that means. Like many Famous Persons, this person’s public image is an injustice to his actual views, which sounded...

Categories Resistance
June 15, 2017

Breaking: DOJ files $1.9M forfeiture complaint against North Korean front company in China

The U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia issued a press release this afternoon announcing that it has filed a complaint under the civil forfeiture statute at 18 USC 981, to forfeit $1,902,976 from Mingzheng International Trading Limited of Shenyang, China. According to the complaint, Mingzheng conspired to evade sanctions and launder money through the United States on behalf of the Foreign Trade Bank of North Korea (FTB). Treasury designated the FTB under Executive Order 13382 in March 2013, for proliferation financing. Under the...

Categories Money Laundering/Proliferation/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...

Categories China/Money Laundering/Sanctions/Shipping sanctions
June 7, 2017

North Korean man stabs, nearly kills Ministry of State Security officer

The Daily NK is reporting another case of a North Korean citizen attacking and nearly killing an officer of the dreaded Ministry of State Security (MSS), the agency that runs most of North Korea’s political prison camps, possibly over official corruption. It has been reported that an [sic] Ministry of State Security agent working as a surveillance patrol officer at the No. 10 guard post in Hoeryong City, North Hamgyong Province, was stabbed by a knife-wielding assailant while on duty....

Categories Resistance
April 4, 2017

Sens. Gardner & Markey call on Trump administration to enforce North Korea sanctions law

Here’s the kind of story you hear too seldom in Washington today: A conservative Republican (Cory Gardner of Colorado) has joined forces with a liberal Democrat (Ed Markey of Massachusetts) to write a letter to the new secretaries of State and Treasury, asking them to fully enforce the North Korea Sanctions and Policy Enhancement Act (NKSPEA), which passed Congress with the overwhelming support of both parties last year. (Even Bernie Sanders would have voted for it had he not been campaigning...

Categories Sanctions/U.S. Law/U.S. Politics
March 27, 2017

UN report shows China, others are still havens for North Korean money laundering

Due to a convergence of other commitments, it took me longer than I’d hoped to digest the U.N. Panel of Experts‘s latest findings about North Korea and financial sanctions. If you only read the bottom line and stop there, you’ll either be discouraged or find support for an argument that sanctions are futile. 210. Despite expanded financial sanctions adopted by the Security Council in resolutions 2270 (2016) and 2321 (2016), the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea has continued to access...

Categories Money Laundering/Sanctions
March 23, 2017

WSJ: Feds may indict North Koreans in Bangladesh Bank fraud

This story just gets more interesting by the day: Federal prosecutors are building cases that would accuse North Korea of directing one of the biggest bank robberies of modern times, the theft of $81 million from Bangladesh’s account at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York last year, according to people familiar with the matter. The charges, if filed, would target alleged Chinese middlemen who prosecutors believe helped North Korea orchestrate the theft, the people said. The current cases being pursued...

Categories Cyberwar/NK Crime/U.S. Law