Search Results for: goldberg bank

October 28, 2009

Treasury Knocks Over Yet Another North Korean Bank

Phillip Goldberg and Stuart Levey have done more to advance U.S. interests in five months than the entire East Asia Bureau of our State Department has done in two decades: Treasury said in a statement that Amroggang Development Bank was being added to a list of proliferators of mass destruction because it was owned or controlled by North Korea’s Tanchon Commercial Bank. Tanchon was previously hit with sanctions by both the United States and the United Nations Security Council for...

Categories Proliferation/Sanctions/WMD

August 20, 2009

Goldberg in Singapore, Thailand

Singapore – The US coordinator for North Korea sanctions on Thursday praised an unprecedented agreement and intensity in the international community to enforce the UN measures against the Stalinist regime in Pyongyang after its nuclear tests in May. ‘That’s something new about this, that there is an intensity and agreement internationally, regionally, … that this is an essential part of our overall effort,’ Ambassador Philip Goldberg said in Singapore, his first stop on a tour through Asia. [….] ‘But it’s...

Categories Money Laundering/Sanctions/Uncategorized

July 6, 2009

Malaysian Bank Linked to North Korean WMD; Happy 5th to GI Korea (Updated)

GI Korea explains what Philip Goldberg was doing in Malaysia. By the way, let me add my belated good wishes to GI Korea on the fifth anniversary of the founding of his blog.  The fact that it’s one of two with feeds on my sidebar should be some testament to my high regard for the amount and quality of information he posts (NKEconWatch would be the third if its RSS worked there).  It’s one of my daily reads, and the...

Categories Blogs & Blogging/Money Laundering/Proliferation/Sanctions/WMD

February 27, 2017

Malaysia’s lax enforcement of North Korea sanctions has finally come home

Over the weekend, Malaysian authorities painstakingly decontaminated a terminal of the Kuala Lumpur International Airport where North Korean agents – including a diplomat – carried out a lethal attack with the nerve agent VX, a substance so deadly that a tiny droplet can kill an adult. The authorities are clearly concerned that the use of a persistent chemical weapon of mass destruction in a crowded airport terminal will cause panic among Malaysian citizens and members of the traveling public, as...

Categories Arms Trafficking/Money Laundering/Sanctions/Shipping sanctions/Southeast Asia

July 26, 2010

Plan B Watch: Treasury Targets 100 Suspicious N. Korean Accounts Worldwide

According to multiple newspaper reports published since late last week, the Obama Administration’s new asset-freezing campaign against North Korea began in earnest in June. The Treasury Department, having identified about 200 accounts worldwide suspected of storing the proceeds of banned weapons sales, currency counterfeiting, counterfeit cigarettes and Viagra, proliferation, drug trafficking, and other things that all sovereign nations to do pay for yachts for their despotic rulers. Treasury focused on 100 accounts where its evidence was strongest and quietly persuaded...

Categories Counterfeiting/Money Laundering/Sanctions

May 31, 2010

Robert Einhorn to Lead North Korea Sanctions Implementation Effort

The Joongang Ilbo is reporting that Clinton Administration alumnus and counter-proliferation expert Robert Einhorn is going to be put in charge of “streamlining the process by which it implements” international sanctions against North Korea, sanctions that are likely to be enhanced after an international investigation found that North Korea torpedoed and sank the South Korean warship Cheonan. “The U.S. administration was seeking more efficient management of implementation of sanctions, which had been divided between the State and the Treasury departments,”...

Categories Cheonan Incident/China & Korea/Counterfeiting/Money Laundering/Sanctions/U.S. Law/Washington Views

January 3, 2010

China Pursues Dual Strategy on Sanctions Compliance

For what little it’s worth, U.N. Ambassador Susan Rice says that because of UNSCR 1874 sanctions, “North Korea is feeling far greater pressure to halt its nuclear weapons program than it has in the past.” Well, maybe. I think the sanctions are still insufficient to disarm North Korea, because Kim Jong Il still thinks he can either ride them out, or bait-and-switch our diplomats, just like he did to Madeleine Albright and Chris Hill before. And as I never tire...

Categories China & Korea/Sanctions

November 12, 2009

Sanctions Update

The Chosun Ilbo reports that Ambassador Phillip Goldberg has kept himself busy crossing the globe, meeting with government officials and bankers in Russia and China, and shutting down North Korean accounts, even as Stephen Bosworth and others met with the North Koreans to talk nuclear diplomacy. North Korea invited U.S. North Korea envoy Stephen Bosworth on Aug. 4, when former U.S. president Bill Clinton was in Pyongyang to win the release of two American journalists. The same day, Goldberg was...

Categories Counterfeiting/Money Laundering/NK Economics/Sanctions

November 4, 2009

4 November 2009

HOPE, CHANGE, AND PEACE IN OUR TIME: Kim Jong Il announces that he’s reprocessed another 8,000 fuel rods, enough to make at least one more bomb. Thank goodness Chris Hill came along in time to end this d*ck-measuring contest with the give-and-take of compromise. Thank goodness our president isn’t afraid to talk to his enemies. Now please send Philip Goldberg to freeze the bank accounts of Orascom, Koryo Tours, and the Korean Friendship Association. CYBER ATTACKS UPDATE: After some doubts,...

Categories Anju Links

October 3, 2009

We Are All Neocons

Don Kirk, writing in the Asia Times, concludes that however North Korea behaves toward its neighbors at any given moment, it is determined to get our money and keep its nukes. That’s not an astonishing conclusion for any intelligent analyst of North Korean behavior, but Don’s writing is always worth a read. I try to refrain from predicting whether North Korea’s next move will be provocation or the North Korean equivalent of a “charm offensive,” since the options aren’t mutually...

Categories Diplomacy/Sanctions

June 30, 2009

Plan B Watch

A year ago, who would have suspected that we’d be celebrating the replacement of a liberal accommodationist named George W. Bush with a hard line neocon named Barack Obama, who would finally show signs of grasping not just the reality of North Korea’s bad faith, but some of the very best tools for breaking it? Christine Ahn’s misery (and Selig Harrison’s, and Leon Sigal’s) is my pleasure: The Treasury Department’s 2005 blacklisting of Macau’s Banco Delta Asia, which held a...

Categories Money Laundering/Sanctions/Washington Views

June 29, 2009

Obama Forms Team Plan B

The Washington Post is reporting that President Obama is forming an inter-agency team, much like the Illicit Activities Initiative that David Asher headed in G.W. Bush’s first term, to coordinate sanctions against North Korea: The White House is forming an interagency team to coordinate sanctions efforts against North Korea with other nations, senior administration officials said yesterday.  The team will be led by Philip S. Goldberg, a former ambassador to Bolivia who is slated to leave for China in the...

Categories Diplomacy/Money Laundering/Sanctions/U.S. Politics/Washington Views

July 31, 2008

The Continuum: Birth of a Nation

The restoration of Korea’s nationhood seemed to begin so harmoniously:  It is their purpose that Japan shall be stripped of all the islands in the Pacific which she has seized or occupied since 1914, and that all territories stolen from China shall be restored. Japan will be expelled from all other territories taken by violence and greed. In due course Korea shall become free and independent. With these objects in view, the three Allies, in harmony with those of the...

Categories History/Korean History/U.S. Military