Hosting Proms and Selling Cows: North Korean Embassies Scrounge for Cash
Hosting Proms and Selling Cows: North Korean Embassies Scrounge for Cash
By DAVID SEGALOCT. 7, 2017
SOFIA, Bulgaria — While the embassies of most countries promote the interests of companies back home, North Korea’s are in business for themselves.
The North Korean embassy in Sofia, Bulgaria, is a large, fenced-in building in a southern section of the city. Credit Dimitar Katsarov for The New York Times
북한 외교관들 자신의 돈벌이에만 관심
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.”
Ms. Nikolova has called the police, but there isn’t much they can do. The building, filled with gilded halls that can be rented for events, enjoys a kind of diplomatic immunity courtesy of its owner: the government of North Korea.
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