Posted on 10/08/2017 7:28:12 AM PDT by TigerLikesRooster
Hosting Proms and Selling Cows: North Korean Embassies Scrounge for Cash
By DAVID SEGAL OCT. 7, 2017
SOFIA, Bulgaria — While the embassies of most countries promote the interests of companies back home, North Korea’s are in business for themselves.
A series of tough sanctions by the United Nations and an executive order recently signed by President Trump have sought to economically isolate the nuclear-armed regime of Kim Jong-un. But Pyongyang has held on to an array of profit-making ventures, some of which operate in the roughly 40 embassies of the hermit kingdom.
Many of these enterprises are hard to trace, but at least one is impossible to miss. For years, neighbors have complained about the noise coming from a large, fenced-in building here in a southern section of Bulgaria’s capital city. It hosts parties a few times a week, many of them capped off with a late-night flurry of fireworks, shot from the roof.
“It isn’t loud now,” one neighbor, Bonka Nikolova, said as a parade of wedding guests filed into the building. “But if they paid for fireworks, there will be fireworks.”
Ms. Nikolova has called the police, but there isn’t much they can do. The building, filled with gilded halls that can be rented for events, enjoys a kind of diplomatic immunity courtesy of its owner: the government of North Korea.
North Korean embassies have spent decades running cash-raising schemes, nearly all of them illicit under current international law. Diplomats and their underlings have brokered deals for weapons and drugs, and more mundane products like machine tools and cows. They have also smuggled liquor, cigarettes, luxury cars and anything else that can be imported duty free and then sold at a gain.
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
P!
Capitalistic Running Dogs...
Good post....thanks
The North Koreans are running a slave labor enterprise, IMHO.
The rest of the world winks, nods, and does nothing.
When I visited Okinawa about 10 years ago, the Norks ran all of the pachinko parlors and “full release” massage joints on the island
Sounds like free enterprise. How ironic.
And they still found the money to rebuild an embassy in Tehran which just opened last month. That one would be promoting ‘business back home.’
Who would want to be married in a NK embassy? How bizarre!
In the early 80s selling cows in Arkansas was very lucrative. And they didn’t have to be real cows
Is there a cow in the future?
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