Pacific island of Kirbati found to have sold passports to North Koreans engaged in arms deals
The Chosun Ilbo, South Korea’s century-old newspaper, reports today on the sale of passports to North Koreans for cash, as a revenue-raising initiative, by the South Pacific island of Kirbati.
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South Pacific Island Admits Selling Passports to N.Koreans
Anote Tong Anote Tong
The tiny South Pacific island nation of Kiribati issued passports to North Korean businessmen until 2004 as a “means of generating revenue,” its president has admitted.
There had been speculation for some time that North Koreans engaged in illicit activities such as arms deals were illegally obtaining passports from small countries.
Appearing recently on Australian radio, Kiribati President Anote Tong said he was embarrassed that the passports were reportedly related to international crime. “I can assure you that we had corrected that situation in 2004 when we stopped issuing these passports,” he said.
Late last year, a Japanese activist group said two agents from North Korea, Han Chol and Ju Ok-hui, used passports issued by Kiribati and the Seychelles.
They are board members of North Korea’s Tongsin International Trading Corporation, an agency suspected of illegally exporting weapons to Burma and other countries, the group added.
Both Han and Ju were given passports by the Kiribati government in 1996 and by the Seychelles in 2007. The countries reportedly sold passports to foreign businessmen but abandoned the practice due to mounting worries about illicit activities.
A Foreign Ministry official in Seoul said, “Kiribati has been neutral since it won independence from the U.K. in 1979. “It would have been easier for the North Korean agents to travel with those passports rather than with North Korean ones.”
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http://english.chosun.com/site/data/html_dir/2013/03/13/2013031301124.html
X’int tahseb, Daph, li Malta ser jigri hekk? Ahna serji ta u naghmlu due diligence tajba. Dik ta’ Shiv Nair qabzitilna bi zball.
The Labour Party in Opposition courted Shiv Nair with intention and fully cogniscant of the big black stain on his reputation.
They even went to the extreme of applying mob pressure from different angles to ensure that purported outside knowledge of this fact/ facts linked to this engagement did not come to light before the elections.
The moment they realised there could be a threat to their operations, this mob pressure was put into action.
Thanks for the information you are providing us with. If it were not for you we would not know certain details. Seems like our so-called ‘journalists’ are asleep or afraid of reporting anything that is deemed to be against the PL government.
Have we already come to that stage now where people are afraid of upsetting ‘Joseph’?
Another thing that is greatly worrying me – what is this with MPs not attending Parliament? I know the law will go through anyway because of the 9-seat majority – useless thinking that there are PL MPs with balls who will vote against.
If this is so, then the PN MPs need not attend parliament when laws that do not require two-thirds of the votes are presented. I think the 162,000 who voted the PN have a right to know what is going on in Parliament.
North Korea can now demand repayment for the armaments and the expertise it supplied to the MLP (tramite the secret agreement with Lorry Sant and Alex Sceberras Trigona) how to suppress the right of the Maltese to peaceful assembly by its political opponents.
The Maltese citizenry would not even know how many Malta passports would have been passed under the counter and to whom.
That’s relatively benign. Various terrorist groups could easily obtain Maltese passports to move their operatives around more easily. Not only is €650,000 not a lot of money, but you get a second terrorist for only €25,000 as long as you produce a marriage certificate of sorts.