New York Times: Hosting Proms and Selling Cows: North Korean Embassies Scrounge for Cash
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.”
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WNU Editor: My diplomat contacts tell me that contraband cigarettes and booze is the primary money maker for most of these North Korean embassies and their staff .... plus anything else that avoids taxes. When I was working for the UN I never saw the North Koreans do this .... but I saw many others who did. The Ambassador who really exploited this was the representative from Cameroon at ICAO in the early 1990s. OMG!!! His office was filled to the ceiling with boxes of cigarettes and booze, but his real money maker was buying luxury cars without paying the taxes, and then flipping it to someone else. He was eventually kicked out by the Canadian government for failure to pay a few million in taxes ... but in the 2-3 years that he was there .... he lived very well.
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