Is the next Banco Delta Asia in Malaysia?
Over the weekend, a lot people were giggling at the decision by Paul Chan, President of HELP University, to award an honorary degree in economics of Kim Jong Un. Foreign Policy’s Isaac Stone Fish, who first revealed the story, obligingly prints Chan’s manifesto, which reads like the work of a true belieber — a man who writes as if he has spent an inordinate amount of time watching High School Musical over and over again. I have fond memories of my friendships with Malaysian students during law school, so it saddens me to say that this can’t be unrelated to the weirdness of Malaysia’s political culture. At the end of the day, however, the main consequence of this will be to make HELP University look ridiculous, and to highlight how little Kim Jong Un really knows about economics.
What concerns me more is how the weirdness of Malaysia’s political culture may play a role in North Korea’s illicit arms deals and the evasion of U.N. Security Council sanctions. The Korea Herald has called Malaysia “a cornerstone for North Korea’s diplomacy in Southeast Asia.” Malaysian banks are suspected of hosting offshore bank accounts for North Korea, and of serving as financial intermediaries for North Korea’s arms deals with Burma, long after those transactions were banned by U.N. Security Council resolutions. As of July, Malaysia had not yet provided the U.N. a report of its compliance with U.N. Security Council resolutions sanctioning North Korea. Today, it is one of just two states that still has direct Air Koryo flights to Pyongyang.
That would not only be contrary to their interests, it would be hypocritical, given their own history.
We tend to forget that SWIFT isn’t a strictly European operation. They have substantial operations right here in the United States, and no doubt, most of the transactions they message move through U.S. financial institutions in U.S. dollars. And don’t you suppose that Europe’s own security benefits from whatever data SWIFT shares? The Europeans have to feign outrage at moments like these, but allies spy on each other, too.
The American Civil Liberties Union strongly supports the Leahy-Sensenbrenner USA FREEDOM Act reforming National Security Agency surveillance authorities.
Besides James Sensenbrenner (R-Wis.), House sponsors include Darrell Issa (R-Calif.), John Mica (R-Fla.), Justin Amash (R-Mich.), Duncan Hunter (R-Calif.), and Dana Rohrabacher (R-Calif.).
Here’s the ACLU statement.
And what does that have to do with North Korean money laundering again?
It affects our ability to monitor Korean money laundering.
You’ve hit it out of the ballpark again. In my experience, Singapore is totally honest at the local level, and unbelievably crooked at the higher political echelons. One can very easily imagine a DPRK money-laundering triangle of KL, Singapore and Rangoon (yeah, Yangon too.)
Some years ago I reported to US Treasury a Chinese company with US offices that was importing ammonium nitrate into Nanpo using a Singaporean front. Treasury woke up to it two years and a half later. it’s unlikely to have been lost on the DPRK that such routes work.
You raise, implicitly, the point that Treasury needs more people to investigate and enforce all the sanctions laws that Congress is passing. H.R. 1771 addresses that by depositing the proceeds of forfeitures and deferred prosecutions into the usual forfeiture funds (Treasury and DOJ), but then authorizing some of that money to be spent for the salaries and expenses of the cops and lawyers. Of course, assuming those provisions survive.