A new investigation into companies trading in the Chinese city of Dandong, on the border with North Korea, has shed a spotlight on Pyongyang’s global money laundering networks and raised fresh questions about China’s complicity in bypassing United Nations sanctions against Kim Jong-un’s regime. “The Billion Dollar Border Town,” a report published on Friday by the Royal United Services Institute, reveals how companies in Dandong, in China’s northeast Liaoning province, have allegedly helped North Korean entities construct complex sanctions evasion networks across various jurisdictions. Data obtained by researchers indicated a small core of 150 companies was involved in $2.9 billion worth of shipments between September 2014 and February 2017, at a time when North Korea was escalating its nuclear and weapons programmes and the UN imposed wide-ranging sanctions in response. As a result, these 150 companies alone could have accounted for around 20 per cent of North Korea’s total reported global trade value in that time period. “These include multiple Dandong firms being involved in coal and iron imports even as ever more stringent measures on such commodities were imposed by the UN Security Council in 2016 and 2017,” said Joseph Byrne, a research analyst at RUSI’s Proliferation and Nuclear Policy Team, and one of the report’s authors.
