According to the AFP:
North Korea is forging trade documents and changing the names of its trading firms to try to dodge international sanctions, a Seoul intelligence official and a media report said Wednesday.
The communist state also renamed weapons trader Tangun Trade as Chasongdang Trade when the company was put on the sanctions list after the North’s second nuclear test in May 2009.
The tests prompted the Security Council to impose tougher sanctions targeting Pyongyang’s weapons exports and blacklisting companies suspected of such dealings.
The sanctions also called on UN member states to inspect ships and planes suspected of carrying banned cargo to or from the North.
Since then, the North has mostly used China to transport its arms exports, Dong-A said.
It had forged trade invoices on military products, for instance by labelling torpedoes as fish processing equipment and anti-tank rockets as oil boring machinery, the paper added.
A spokesman for Seoul’s National Intelligence Service confirmed the report but declined to give details.
“Intelligence authorities in South Korea and the United States are trying to crack down on the North’s forging of company names and export invoices, but it is becoming increasingly difficult since the North keeps coming up with new schemes,” the paper quoted one South Korean official as saying.
The impoverished North faces multiple sanctions imposed by the UN and the United States and targeting its illegal trade in arms, drugs and luxury goods.
The US Treasury Department announced Monday it was imposing sanctions on four people and eight organisations accused of aiding the communist government through illicit trade.
Of course these games are nothing new. About this time last year DPRK sanctions enforcement was in the news. Marcus Noland referred to the task as “Whac-a-mole”.
Read the full stories here:
N.Korea forges trade documents to dodge sanctions
AFP
9/1/2010
N. Korea Fakes Trade Documents to Export WMDs
Donga Ilbo
9/1/2010
