VIDEO: Trump Rebuked China for North Korea’s Oil Smuggling. It’s More Complicated.

Trump Rebuked China for North Korea’s Oil Smuggling. It’s More Complicated.

KAOHSIUNG, Taiwan — The two ships met in daylight in the middle of the East China Sea. One was an 11,253-ton oil tanker, the Lighthouse Winmore, supposedly heading to Taiwan. The other, an aging freighter, was emblazoned with the red, white and blue flag of North Korea.

The Lighthouse Winmore, a Hong Kong-flagged vessel suspected of transferring oil to North Korea in defiance of international sanctions, near Yeosu, South Korea, in late December. Credit Yonhap, via Reuters

In an illicit high-seas exchange captured in photographs taken by an American spy plane, the Lighthouse Winmore offloaded what officials later said was 600 tons of oil to the North Korean vessel in violation of United Nations sanctions.

With those sanctions constricting its trade, including the import of refined petroleum, North Korea has increasingly turned to illegal clandestine shipments to acquire the fuel it needs, according to diplomatic officials and documents obtained by The New York Times.

Trafficking on the high seas has become what these officials regard as a pernicious subversion of the sanctions. Though the frequency of smuggling is difficult to estimate, they fear it is undermining efforts to thwart the nuclear weapons ambitions of Kim Jong-un, the North Korean leader, through economic pressure. The trafficking has also strained relations between the United States and North Korea’s two largest trading partners, China and Russia.

Last month, the United States tried to persuade other members of the United Nations Security Council to blacklist 10 ships that it said were involved in smuggling oil and coal. In addition to the Lighthouse Winmore, this list, obtained by The New York Times, included four North Korean-flagged vessels, as well as ships linked to South Korea, Hong Kong, Taiwan and China.

A United Nations diplomat said the transfers were happening frequently in the Yellow Sea, the East China Sea and possibly the Sea of Japan.

The diplomat, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss intelligence materials, said that detecting the smuggling was difficult and that preventing it would require interdiction of suspect ships at sea, which could further inflame tensions with North Korea.

Determining who abets the North Koreans has proved difficult. China and Russia have been blamed for the smuggling, or at least for failing to counter it, though evidence of direct government involvement is slim.

A day before South Korea announced late last month that it had impounded the Lighthouse Winmore in November, President Trump seemed to directly implicate China in the smuggling, writing on Twitter that it had been “caught RED HANDED” allowing illicit oil deliveries to North Korea.

Tracing the Winmore’s ownership and its contraband oil underscores the difficulty of identifying who is complicit, despite what the president’s jab suggested.

Most of the Lighthouse Winmore’s 25 crewmen were Chinese, but other connections to China were more tenuous. Some links were to places where the United States may be just as influential.

The ship’s flag showed that it was from Hong Kong, which for the last two decades has been a semiautonomous special administrative region of China. The oil originated with a multinational commodities trader, Trafigura Group, and was sold first to a company in Hong Kong, then to a company in Taiwan, the island that China regards as a breakaway province and that maintains close but unofficial relations with the United States.

The ship’s owner appears to be a Hong Kong-based company whose director lives in Guangzhou, China. But the ship was leased by a fishing magnate from Taiwan, Chen Shih-hsien, whose company, Billions Bunker Group, was until last month registered in the Marshall Islands, a Pacific Ocean nation that enjoys American military protection.

The difficulty has been compounded by the opacity of the international shipping industry, where vessels can be flagged in faraway countries and ownership is often obscured to limit legal liability.

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/01/18/world/asia/north-korea-oil-smuggling.html

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