Category: Money Laundering

Why DOJ’s deferred prosecution of Essentra FZE is a good deal for it, & for us.

In the Washington suburbs, $665,112 will buy you a nice house, but not a mansion. A settlement with the Treasury Department for a civil penalty in that amount isn’t going to bankrupt a large multinational corporation. Its main impact on Essentra FZE, a UAE-based subsidiary of a British corporation that makes cigarette filters, may be in its access to financial services and legal fees, which would still be worth every penny if they exceeded the penalty. You could argue back...

Feds unseal 14-count indictment against 33 agents of sanctioned North Korean bank

The U.S. Attorney’s office for the District of Columbia has done it again. Today, its prosecutors unsealed indictments against 28 North Korean and 5 Chinese representatives of North Korea’s Foreign Trade Bank (FTB) who are or were posted in China, Russia, Libya, Thailand, Kuwait, and Austria. The Treasury Department’s Office of Foreign Asset Control (OFAC) designated the FTB for proliferation financing in 2013. The North Korea Sanctions Regulations later put additional restrictions on dealings with the North Korean financial industry....

OFAC’s new North Korea (sort of) designations

Today, the Treasury Department’s Office of Foreign Assets Control published a colossal list of amendments to the North Korea designations on its list of Specially Designated Nationals—its sanctions blacklist for the financial industry. The amendments are requirements under the new Otto Warmbier North Korea Nuclear Sanctions and Enforcement Act, the North Korea Sanctions and Policy Enhancement Act, and the regulations promulgated under those authorities. Today’s announcement is an encouraging sign that the administration is feeling more pressure to enforce these...

On OFAC’s new North Korea Sanctions regulations

In the days since the Treasury Department announced its amendment to the North Korea sanctions regulations at 31 CFR Part 510, I’ve received at least half a dozen inquiries from journalists about what it means. Unfortunately for us all, today also marks the first day in almost three weeks, inclusive of weekends and holidays, that I did not work a significant amount overtime in my day job—currently, it involves responding to the nationwide coronavirus disaster declaration—so I’ll keep this post...

DOJ indicts 2 Chinese men for laundering stolen South Korean Bitcoin for North Korean hackers

Today, the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the District of Columbia unsealed an indictment of two Chinese nationals, Tian Yinyin and Li Jiadong, charging them with money laundering and running an unlicensed money transmitting business, for laundering $100 million in stolen Bitcoin and Ether for North Korean hackers between July 2018 and April 2019. The indictment alleges that the $100 million was part of a $250 million take the Lazarus Group stole from four cryptocurrency exchanges, three of them in South...

Huawei & North Korea: Reading between the lines of EDNY’s new indictment

HUAWEI, WHICH WAS PREVIOUSLY INDICTED FOR eleven counts of conspiracy, bank fraud, wire fraud, violations of Iran sanctions, and money laundering (plus criminal forfeiture counts) now finds itself hit with a superseding indictment for sixteen counts of similar allegations by prosecutors in the Eastern District of New York, or EDNY. I’ve always been impressed with the quality of EDNY’s work. It’s a plucky, underrated little office that sits resentfully in the shadow of its more prestigious and prideful neighbor in...

The Warmbier Act could raise the pressure on Kim Jong-un dramatically, whether Donald Trump likes it or not

Kim Jong-un is wrapping Donald Trump’s Christmas present, and Putin and Xi Jinping say that Trump should lift the sanctions on Kim they’ve been violating anyway, but Congress just made those sanctions much tougher in a new bill, the Otto Warmbier North Korea Nuclear Sanctions and Enforcement Act, which just passed both houses of Congress as an amendment to the National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2020, or NDAA. The bill is an updated version of the BRINK Act,...

Judge holds Chinese banks in contempt, fines them $50K a day for failing to comply with North Korea subpoenas

If you haven’t already read my post about Chief Judge Beryl Howell’s order directing three Chinese banks to comply with federal grand jury and statutory subpoenas of their North Korea-related records, you should probably start there. Although the docket in this case is still sealed, I speculated in that post that the banks would likely appeal to the D.C. Circuit and seek a stay of the court’s order. And so they have, according to an order Judge Howell unsealed today....

I’ll give you a topic. The final voyage of the “Wise Honest” was neither. Discuss.

The U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York has seized and sued to forfeit a 17,000-ton North Korean bulk carrier that was hauling neither rice, nor corn, nor milk, but coal to enrich Kim Jong-un, and machinery to keep his mines and his military-industrial complex from shutting down.1 And it was doing it with money laundered through correspondent banks in our country, in New York City. This is the great, uncharged crime of the M/V Wise Honest,...

OFK Exclusive: Court orders three Chinese banks to comply with subpoenas for North Korea-related records

There is (or should be) a modern Chinese curse that goes something like this: “May the subpoenas fall like rain on your New York correspondents.” In December 2017, that curse afflicted three Chinese banks that now find themselves enmeshed in an expensive and legally perilous FBI investigation into the laundering of large amounts of Kim Jong-un’s lucre. With today’s unsealing of Chief Judge Beryl Howell’s opinion, ordering the banks to comply with the subpoenas, the story can be told. You...

Congress is losing confidence in Trump & Treasury on North Korea sanctions

Yesterday, Senators Chris Van Hollen (D-MD) and Pat Toomey (R-PA) introduced a new version of the Otto Warmbier Banking Restrictions Involving North Korea, or BRINK Act, which I wrote about here in 2017. You can read the two Senators’ summaries of the bill here and here. Otto’s parents also provided a supportive statement. Congress’s patience, which has long been near a breaking point, has reached it. Perhaps it’s not completely fair that Trump is now reaping the frustrations that were...

DOJ sues to forfeit $3M linked to N. Korean money laundering, proliferation financing & slave labor

This afternoon, the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the District of Columbia filed suit to forfeit just over $3 million that three defendants allegedly laundered for an interconnected network of North Korean banks and front companies, in violation of the North Korea Sanctions and Policy Enhancement Act and the International Emergency Economic Powers Act: $599,930.00 in funds “associated with” Cooperating Company 1 of Singapore, which agreed not to contest the forfeiture (and hopefully more), and which used “a bank account in China”...

DOJ indicts Singaporean businessman for conspiring to violate North Korea sanctions

The U.S. Attorney’s office for the Southern District of New York has indicted Singaporean national Tan Wee Beng for laundering money on behalf of two sanctioned North Korean banks—Daedong Credit Bank of Panama Papers infamy, and Korea Kwangson Banking Corporation of Dandong Hongxiang infamy. Both banks have been designated and blocked for years under Executive Order 13382, for proliferation financing. Both banks are also designated by the U.N. Security Council. You can read the indictment here and the Justice Department’s...

The Myth of Maximum Pressure: Why Trump’s North Korea sanctions strategy must change or fail

If you’re a journalist or scholar who writes about North Korea, you’re apt to think that the Trump administration really did impose more-or-less “maximum” pressure on Kim Jong-un, although this was never really true. If your understanding of sanctions is based on a 1980s concept of sanctions as trade blockades that require the cooperation of every customs inspector at the country’s border, you’re also apt to harbor several other misunderstandings about how sanctions work, and consequently, to add to the...

Steve Mnuchin is defying Congress & undermining the President’s North Korea policy

WHO, EXACTLY, DOES STEVE MNUCHIN THINK HE WORKS FOR—Donald Trump or Xi Jinping? We are just weeks away from a scheduled meeting between the President who appointed Mnuchin and the dictator of North Korea. That meeting may decide whether it’s still possible to disarm the North through diplomacy instead of a war that could easily go nuclear. Unlike every other U.S. president since there has been a North Korea, President Trump grasps that the prerequisite to a successful negotiation is...

How to build a big, beautiful (financial) wall around North Korea & make Kim Jong-un pay for it.

HERE IN WASHINGTON, THE BLOB IS ALL ATWITTER over a possible summit between Donald Trump and Kim Jong-un. Those who see no solution to this crisis but the next piece of paper took the news with the same mixture of euphoria and dread as a man who waits four hours in the emergency room in throbbing agony, only to hear, “Doctor Oz will see you now.” But in reality, a Trump-Kim summit is no more than 40 percent likely to happen...

You want maximum pressure? Oh, I’ll show you maximum pressure.

SINCE LAST WEEK, WHEN THE TREASURY DEPARTMENT announced 56 designations of ships, shipping companies, and trading companies, reporters have been emailing me to ask whether this is finally the “maximum pressure” the Trump administration has been talking about. The short answer is “no.” In terms of length alone, yes, this was the largest set of North Korea designations ever, although we should discount for the fact that most of the 28 ships were effectively designated twice (once per ship, and once...

Cash & credit squeeze hits China-North Korea trade

One of the more maddening tropes I see in reporters’ coverage is a question that’s usually presented as dispositive to the success of sanctions: “Will China cooperate?” For reasons I’ve already explained and don’t have time to repeat today, I always answer that question by asking what the questioner means by “China.” The point being: yes, it would be nice if Xi Jinping finally came around to the rising risk that Kim Jong-un will bring war, instability, disrepute, and bankruptcy to...