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We are always interested in new sources of material on North Korea, and thus were pleased to come on New Focus International. A distinctive feature of New Focus is that it is run by North Koreans “in exile,” as they site puts it nicely; the choice of words suggests the promise of return. The editor-in-chief [...]
Why is the US Treasury Department unilaterally sanctioning a bank that conducts no direct business with the United States? And why does this seemingly phantom action represent a major escalation on the part of the US? Park Hyun at Hankyoreh offers some particularly cogent reporting that correctly explains Treasury’s bet. Since it was established in [...]
North Korea has long engaged in illicit activities of various sorts including counterfeiting, smuggling, drug trafficking, insurance fraud and so on. The importance of these activities to the North Korean economy is often exaggerated—attributing to North Korea revenues based on the “street prices” for drugs that go through multiple hands before reaching the final consumers, [...]
Money laundering and terrorist financing activities were problems well before 2001, but 9/11 gave a boost to more robust regimes for anti-money laundering (AML) and combating the financing of terrorism (CFT). The center of these efforts is the multilateral Financial Action Task Force (FATF), a multilateral body that develops and promotes AML/CFT norms; these are [...]
North Korea has been known for its counterfeiting activities for decades. Products ranging from cigarettes to liquor to $100 US bills have been known to make their way out of North Korea. Typically, the counterfeit industry is export oriented. Counterfeiting activities are intended to earn hard currency by smuggling items through China and other nations. [...]
The following is a guest post by Gene Choi, a student from South Korea who has been helping us this summer as a researcher. ——————————————————————————————————————————————– North Korea is changing—not in terms of the p
We were amused by the laconic style of the following story from Yonhap. U.S. ‘concerned’ about N. Korea’s inertia in fighting money-laundering: report Yonhap News Agency. 8/1/12 By Lee Chi-dong By Lee Chi-dong WASHINGTON, July 31 (Yonhap) — The U.S. government expressed concern Tuesday about North Korea’s refusal to improve its regulatory system against money laundering [...]
We take a particular interest in the technology of sanctions (our posts on the topic can be found here) and have noted the whack-a-mole problem: that efforts to restrict transactions with North Korea—or any target–can be circumvented by the creation of front companies. A new report from the Permanent Committee on Investigations of the Senate [...]
The headline on the Yonhap piece was jarring: “N. Korea sets up insurance firm to attract more foreign investment.” The last time “North Korea” and “insurance” met, it was in the context of fraud, in which it was claimed that the North Korean state insurance agency insured assets (such as the contents of a warehouse), [...]
Making up for lost time, two slaves to the blog in one week! ForeignPolicy.com’s lede for 27 January, pretty much says it all: “North Korea warned the South of “full-scale war,” but accepted food aid.” The conventional wisdom is that South Korean financial markets and its economy more broadly are vulnerable to North Korean provocations. [...]
