Category: North Korea

When I first heard about the leak of the “Panama Papers” I wonder if North Korea was using these off shore companies to launder money like many other politically connected individuals around the world were doing?  Sure enough it has now been confirmed that North Korea has been linked to the Panama Papers:

The Panama legal firm at the heart of a massive data leak kept clients who were subject to international sanctions, documents show.

Mossack Fonseca worked with 33 individuals or companies who have been placed under sanctions by the US Treasury, including companies based in Iran, Zimbabwe and North Korea.

One had links to North Korea’s nuclear weapons programme.

The information comes from the leak of 11m of the company’s internal files.

Mossack Fonseca registers companies as offshore entities operated under its own name. This meant the identities of the real owners were hard to trace because they were kept out of public documents.

Some of the businesses were registered before international sanctions were imposed. But in several cases Mossack Fonseca continued to act as a proxy for them after they were blacklisted.

DCB Finance was established in 2006, with its owners and directors based in North Korea’s capital Pyongyang. It was later put under sanctions by the US Treasury for raising funds for the North Korean regime and being linked to a bank helping to fund the regime’s nuclear weapons programme.

The leaked files reveal the owners of DCB Finance were a North Korean official, Kim Chol Sam and Nigel Cowie, a British banker who was also CEO of the sanctioned Daedong Credit Bank.

Mossack Fonseca appears to have overlooked that the owners and directors of the company were based in Pyongyang until it was contacted by the British Virgin Islands (BVI) authorities in 2010, inquiring about another company Mossack Fonseca had set up with directors in North Korea.

Mossack Fonseca resigned as agents for DCB Finance in September 2010.  [BBC]

You can read much more at the link, It will be interesting to see what else comes out about the document leak involving North Korea.

With prices to pay brokers to assist people defecting from North Korea skyrocketing due to the border crackdown during the Kim Jong-un era; it only makes sense that defector families already in South Korea would have to pool their meager resources to get the rest of their family members out:

First came Kim Yong-shil, in 2006. Then her husband, her two grown daughters, her teenaged son. Two years later, out came her mother, then one brother, then in 2012, the other.

One by one over the past decade, the members of this family have escaped from North Korea, the ones who made it out first earning money and meeting brokers so they could bring out the others.

This process — called “chain defection” — is almost the only way to escape from North Korea now, as security along the border has tightened dramatically since Kim Jong Un took control of the state four years ago.

In the past 20 years, some 29,000 North Koreans have fled hunger and repression at home by escaping across the river that forms the country’s border with China. The flow of refugees had been tracking steadily upward until plummeting during Kim’s first year in power. By last year, fewer than 1,300 people had escaped, less than half of the peak recorded in 2009.  [Washington Post]

You can read much more at the link.

I wonder if it is too late to send this guy back to North Korea if he misses oppressing people so much?:

A middle-aged man is walking through a quiet Seoul neighborhood when he suddenly stops. He lights a cigarette, cupping his hands to shield the flame from the winter wind, and takes a deep draw, remembering how things used to be. He’s a former policeman, a broad-shouldered man with a growling voice and a crushing handshake.

Back where he came from, he says, he was someone who mattered.

“In North Korea, people were afraid of me,” he says. He says it wistfully, almost sadly, like a boy talking about a dog he once had. “They knew I could just drag them away.”

That fear meant respect, and bribes, in the North Korean town where he lived, a place where the electricity rarely worked and the Internet was only a rumor. It meant he could buy a TV, and that he had food even as those around him went hungry. It meant that when he grew exhausted by the relentless poverty and oppression around him, and when relatives abroad offered to advance him the money to escape, he had connections to a good smuggler.  [Mashable]

The article features stories about other defectors, but here is the passage that I found of the most interest; just think if unification comes there will a whole country of people thinking just like this that South Korea would have to integrate:

“I knew that South Korea was a capitalist country, that it was very rich. I thought that if I can just get there, I can work less but earn a lot of money,” he says.

He grimaces when he thinks of his naivete.

Few North Koreans have the work ethic and competitiveness needed to succeed in South Korea which is another reason why instant unification would be a disaster for the ROK.

North Korea’s top leader Kim Jong-un (C) visits the Sinhung Machine Plant in South Hamkyong Province, north of Pyongyang, in this photo provided by the country’s ruling party newspaper Rodong Sinmun on April 1, 2016. The daily said Kim emphasized the plant’s role in building the country’s economic power through knowledge-based economy. (For Use Only in the Republic of Korea. No Redistribution) (Yonhap)

What sanctions? North Korea heralds "marvelous" coal output on front page of its main newspaper today. pic.twitter.com/KRNMwANyzX

— Alastair Gale (@AlastairGale) March 30, 2016

It makes me wonder if there is any legal mechanism that can be used to address something like this considering how important GPS has become in today’s modern society?  Would the ROK be justified to launch a military strike to destroy GPS jammers if North Korea is properly warned and still does not stop?  What would the US do if someone in Mexico just started jamming GPS in southern California and the Mexican government did nothing to stop it?

North Korea on Thursday tried to disrupt South Korean global positioning satellite signals as the leaders of the South, the U.S. and Japan met in Washington to discuss the North’s nuclear program.

The disruptions could cause mobile communication devices to malfunction and affect airplanes and ships that depend on GPS.

The Ministry of Science, ICT and Future Planning said it issued warnings in Seoul, Incheon, Gyeonggi Province and Gangwon Province as North Korea discharged a large amounts of radio waves to jam GPS signals.

Once the jamming waves were detected at around 7:30 p.m., government officials met to assess the impact. The signals were traced to Haeju and Mt. Kumgang in North Korea.

“No damage of involving mobile communications and ships has been detected,” a ministry official said. “Two airplanes experienced disruptions in signals, but their flight operations were not affected.”

A government official said the North has been sending test waves since last month.  [Chosun Ilbo]

The North Korean shooting down an airliner with an anti-aircraft missile has always been something I have been concerned about.  Could you imagine what that would do to air traffic to Incheon International Airport?  It would basically shut off all air travel to Incheon for who knows how long which would have huge economic impacts for South Korea.  This is why I have never been a huge fan of where the international airport was constructed.  However, shooting down an airliner would be a huge provocation that could trigger a military response in retaliation, so I think the Kim regime would try and shoot down a military aircraft before trying something like this.  Shooting down a military aircraft is something they have done before and in recent years have deployed their SA-5s along the DMZ to threaten ROK aircraft.  The North Koreans just test fired an anti-aircraft missile which makes me wonder if they are trying to signal something to South Korea that they best watch their aircraft?:

North Korea on Friday launched a surface-to-air missile into waters off its east coast, the Joint Chiefs of Staff (JCS) said, a move seen as a show of defiance against mounting pressure to give up its nuclear program.

The North fired off the anti-aircraft missile at around 12:45 p.m. from South Hamgyong Province in the country’s northeastern area. The missile was fired toward the East Sea, according to the JCS.

It said that the military is on high alert amid heighten cross-border tensions following the North’s nuclear test in January and long-range rocket launch in February.

Seoul, earlier thought the North fired a ballistic missile, but on close examination of the trajectory picked up by its radar said it was a surface-to-air missile. The missile flew some 100 kilometers.

The North’s provocation came as President Park Geun-hye held a three-way summit with her counterparts from the United States and Japan on Thursday in Washington to discuss how to deal with the North’s nuclear weapons program.

Park warned of additional tougher sanctions against North Korea if the communist country carries out another provocation.

Also on Friday, South Korea’s defense ministry said that the North is continuing to jam GPS signals in South Korea in an attempt to raise tensions on the peninsula.  [Yonhap]

You can read more at the link.

https://twitter.com/pearswick/status/714660235458117632

The regime has shown in the past that it is more than willing to let hundreds of thousands of citizens to starve to death because of sanctions and it appears they are getting ready to do it again:

North Korea is telling its citizens to prepare for famine.

State-run newspaper Rodong Sinmun published an editorial Monday telling the people of North Korea that food shortages and economic hardship are on the horizon, Time reports.

The news comes less than a month after the United Nations Security Council handed down  harsh sanctions for North Korea continuing its nuclear and missile programs. The sanctions, targeted at the nation’s elite and their assets, prohibit certain luxury items and ban exports of resources being used to finance the country’s weapons pursuit.

A result of this struggle, the editorial says, “We may have to go on an arduous march, during which we will have to chew the roots of plants once again,” invoking a metaphor used by North Korean leadership for the four-year famine in the country beginning in 1994, during which approximately 3 million people died.

“The road to revolution is long and arduous,” it continued, calling for renewed support for Kim Jong Un in the form of a “70-day campaign of loyalty” that involves each already-struggling residents of Pyongyang donating two pounds of rice per month to state warehouses. Farmers are also being forced to “donate”portions of their crops to the military. [US News and World Report]

You can read more at the link.

People's Discontent Rises as Restrictions Reinforced to Prepare KWP Conference #NorthKorea https://t.co/RJ1lTHpqyT pic.twitter.com/nd1vSFBYRt

— RimjingangNK (@RimjingangNK) March 30, 2016