North Korea has developed sophisticated ways to circumvent United Nations sanctions, including the suspected use of its embassies to facilitate an illegal trade in weapons, a United Nations report issued on Tuesday said.
It said North Korea was also making use of more complicated financial countermeasures and techniques “pioneered by drug-trafficking organisations” that made tracking the isolated state's purchase of prohibited goods more difficult.
The report, compiled by a panel of eight UN experts, is part of an annual accounting of North Korea's compliance with layers of UN sanctions imposed in response to Pyongyang’s banned nuclear weapons and missile programs. The panel reports to the UN Security Council.
“From the incidents analysed in the period under review, the panel has found that (North Korea) makes increasing use of multiple and tiered circumvention techniques,” a summary of the 127-page report said.
China, North Korea’s main trading partner and diplomatically, appeared to have complied with most of the panel’s requests for information.
Some independent experts and Western countries question how far Beijing has gone in implementing sanctions, although the report did not specifically address that issue.
Beijing has said it wants sanctions enforced.
Much of the report focused on North Korea’s overseas trade networks, rather than its relationship with China.
The panel said it found a relatively complex “corporate ecosystem” of foreign-based firms and individuals that helped North Korea evade scrutiny of its assets as well as its financial and trade dealings.
Several UN Security Council diplomats said the North Korean sanctions committee was still weighing the report.
They also described it as a detailed but unsurprising report that offered confirmation of Pyongyang’s well-known methods of skirting sanctions.
However, two diplomats said the council was unlikely to take any action in the immediate future based on the report's findings.
EMBASSIES UNDER SCRUTINY
North Korea's embassies abroad play a key role in aiding and abetting these shadowy companies, the report said, confirming long-held suspicions of the international community.
In some of the most comprehensive evidence presented publicly against Pyongyang's embassies, the report said the missions in Cuba and Singapore were suspected of organizing an illegal shipment of Cuban fighter jets and missile parts that were seized on a North Korean container ship in Panama last July.
It included secret North Korean documents addressed to the ship's captain which offered detailed instructions on how to load and conceal the illegal weapons shipment, and make a false declaration to customs officers in Panama.
“Load the containers first and load the 10,000 tons of sugar (at the next port) over them so that the containers cannot be seen,” said the document, translated from Korean.
Panama seized the ship, named the Chong Chon Gang, for smuggling Soviet-era arms, including two MiG-21 jet fighters, under thousands of tonnes of sugar. After the discovery, Cuba said it was sending “obsolete” Soviet-era weapons to be repaired in North Korea and returned to Cuba.
Chinpo Shipping, a firm that the report said was “co-located” with the North Korean Embassy in Singapore, acted as the agent for a Pyongyang-based company that operated the vessel, and North Korean diplomatic personnel in Cuba arranged the shipping of the concealed cargo.
Singapore’s Foreign Ministry said its policy is to fully implement United Nations sanctions, adding that it has been cooperating with the UN experts ever since learning in January that a Singapore-registered company was implicated in the case.