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HuffPo: “If colleges cannot address current events in an intellectually rigorous manner then what are they good for?”
Mary K. Coffey, Dartmouth College’s Art History department chair, asks a valid question — and one that her school’s students, faculty and administration plan to answer.
Dartmouth is set to offer a course titled “10 Weeks, 10 Professors: #BlackLivesMatter,” centered around racial inequality and violence in America.
‘The Dartmouth’ student newspaper reports that professors across more than 10 academic disciplines, from the humanities to geography to mathematics, will come together for an interdisciplinary approach to modern and historic perspectives of America’s racial climate.
According to Dartmouth geography professor Abigail Neely, the course was originally born from a Dartmouth Center for the Advancement of Learning workshop that encouraged discussion of events that took place in Ferguson, Missouri following the fatal police shooting of Michael Brown.
“The course has the potential to be revolutionary insofar as the students who take it will come away with a wide ranging critical framework for thinking through not only what happened in Ferguson (and elsewhere), but also why we continue to see so much violence perpetrated against poor people of color,” Coffey told The Huffington Post. “Having the ability to address the why question will make these students capable of thinking about change, alternatives, or forms of activism that might have a revolutionary impact.”
The creative curricular development comes on the heels of recent on-campus student activism and Dartmouth community protest, and in cooperation with members of faculty and administration dedicated to addressing student concerns.
“It reflects faculty support for student activism over the past several years around issues of inclusion, social justice, and campus climate,” professor Coffey explains. “Those students took risks to raise these issues on campus. Their work has generated interest in these issues within the student body. And it has given faculty who are dedicated to these concerns a new sense of purpose and motivation.”
The course is scheduled to begin during the university’s upcoming spring term.
The course will engage the multiple lenses through which Ferguson, the Black Lives Matter movement, and racial justice in the United States might be explored, including: policing and criminal justice, comparative inquiry regarding race and identity, theories of social movements, education reform, healthcare and medicine, environmental justice, literature and artistic expression, law and legal reform, statistical data analysis, and much more.
SAN DIEGO (AP) — San Diego State University plans to offer a course called “Black Minds Matter: A Focus on Black Boys and Men in Education,” that was inspired in part by the Black Lives Matter movement.
The weekly course will be open to the public for enrollment in October and will feature various speakers who will talk about how black men are undervalued in the classroom.
SDSU professor J. Luke Wood, who helped create the online course, said it will connect themes from the Black Lives Matter movement to issues facing blacks in educational settings.
“The Black Lives Matter movement has shed light on two invariable facts. First, that black boys and men are criminalized in society and second that their lives are undervalued by those who are sworn to protect them,” Wood said in a video introducing the class.
The upcoming course has drawn criticism.
Craig DeLuz, a gun rights advocate with the Sacramento-based Firearms Policy Coalition, said a public university should not be offering a course that includes speakers from a movement whose members have been accused of inciting violence.
“The biggest concern is they are offering a course based on the Black Lives Matter movement which has promoted violence and segregation and has really little to do with education, let alone presenting a positive image of education,” DeLuz said.
DeLuz, a member of Robla Elementary School District board of trustees, is organizing a group that plans to ask SDSU to cancel the course. They have not contacted the university yet, he said.
SDSU said in a statement that the “Black Minds Matter” course “has a racial justice focus, directly aligned with the mission of the joint doctoral program in Education. This program focuses on social justice, democratic schooling, and equity, as well as the research of the faculty who teach in it.”
A number of US colleges, including New York University, University of Washington and the University of Miami, now offer courses that include discussion of the Black Lives Matter movement.
Forbes: Felix Sater is not a name that has come up much during the presidential campaign. That he has a colorful past is an understatement: The Russian-born Sater served a year in prison for stabbing a man in the face with a margarita glass during a bar fight, pleaded guilty to racketeering as part of a mafia-driven “pump-and-dump” stock fraud and then escaped jail time by becoming a highly valued government informant.
He was also an important figure at Bayrock, a development company and key Trump real estate partner during the 2000s, notably with the Trump SoHo hotel-condominium in New York City, and has said under oath that he represented Trump in Russia and subsequently billed himself as a senior Trump advisor, with an office in Trump Tower.
Seems now some emails are leaking and have been seen by the New York Times:
TheHill: A business associate of President Trump in 2015 told Trump’s longtime lawyer that he would enlist Russian President Vladimir Putin in a proposed real estate deal that he boasted would help Trump win the presidency, according to emails obtained by The New York Times.
In a series of emails to Trump’s lawyer Michael Cohen, the business associate, Felix Sater, argued that building a Trump Tower in Moscow would benefit the businessman’s candidacy.
“I will get Putin on this program and we will get Donald elected,” Sater wrote on Nov. 3, 2015, almost exactly a year before Election Day. “Our boy can become president of the USA and we can engineer it. I will get all of Putins team to buy in on this, I will manage this process.”
The Justice Department is now investigating the Trump campaign’s ties to Moscow, under the authority of special counsel Robert Mueller, as part of the federal investigation into Russian interference in the election.
There is no evidence in the emails that Sater, a Russian immigrant who was then acting as a broker for the Trump Organization, delivered on his promises, according to The Times. The plan for a Trump Tower in Moscow never materialized, and negotiations ended before Trump’s business ties to Russia had become a major campaign issue.
Cohen suggested that the emails were braggadocio.
“He has sometimes used colorful language and has been prone to ‘salesmanship,'” Cohen said in a statement to The Times. “I ultimately determined that the proposal was not feasible and never agreed to make a trip to Russia.”
Sater also claimed to have helped organize a 2006 trip to Moscow for Trump’s daughter Ivanka Trump and son Donald Trump Jr.
“I arranged for Ivanka to sit in Putin’s private chair at his desk and office in the Kremlin,” Sater wrote.
Ivanka Trump told the Times in a statement that she took “a brief tour of Red Square and the Kremlin but I have never met President Vladimir Putin.” Alan Garten, the general counsel of the Trump Organization, said that Sater only happened to be in Moscow at the same time as the two Trump children.
“There was no accompanying them to Moscow,” Garten said.
Trump has long downplayed his relationship to Sater, suggesting under oath in 2013 that he would not recognize him if they were sitting in the same room.
Sater served time in jail after stabbing a man in the face with the stem of a margarita glass during a 1991 bar fight; in 1998, he pleaded guilty to his role in a Mafia-orchestrated stock fraud scheme.
But his sentencing was delayed for years in the latter case while he cooperated with federal law enforcement on other investigations, according to The Washington Post. During that time, he worked in a real estate firm with offices in Trump Tower and in 2010 went to work for Trump directly, carrying a Trump Organization card that identified him as a “senior advisor to Donald Trump.”
After Sater made an August 2016 visit to Trump Tower, Garten told Politico that Sater was not advising the Trump Organization and that the Trump Organization was not seeking business in Russia.
President Trump has repeatedly said that he has no business ties to Russia. In May, the White House released a letter from two of his lawyers saying that his income tax returns do not show income from or debt owed to Russian sources — with the exception of $95 million paid by a Russian billionaire for a Trump-owned estate in Florida and $12.2 million in payments related to holding the Trump-owned Miss Universe pageant in Moscow in 2013.
The Trump Organization on Monday turned over emails to the House Intelligence Committee, which is investigating Russian interference in the election and whether any Trump associates were involved.
In the video two jihadists can be heard speaking Spanish with an Arabic accent and proclaiming: “Allah willing, Al Andalus will become once again what it was, part of the caliphate.” Al Andalus was the name given to the territory of southern and central Spain controlled for more than five centuries by Muslims.
“If you can’t make the hegira (journey or exodus) to the Islamic State, carry out jihad where you are; jihad doesn’t have borders,” says one of the men in the video whose face is uncovered and who is identified by a video title as Abu Lais Al Qurdubi, or Abu Lais “of Cordoba,” the southern Spanish city that was the capital of Al Andalus.
Later, the jihadist adds: “Spanish Christians: don’t forget the Muslim blood spilled during the Spanish inquisition. We will take revenge for your massacre, the one you are carrying out now against the Islamic State.”
His mother Tomasa Pérez, from a Catholic family in Malaga, met Ahram in 1984. In 2014, she left Spain with her six children, including Muhammad, the oldest sibling, to go to Syria and live in territory controlled by the Islamic State.
The name of the other participant in the video is given as Abu Salman Al Andalus (Abu Salman ‘of Andalusia). His face is covered and only his eyes can be seen. He has a rifle on his shoulder.
“We hope that Allah accepts the sacrifice of our brothers in Barcelona. Our war with you will continue until the world ends,” he says.
The jihadist group ISIS declared a worldwide caliphate in 2014 with ISIS leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi named as the caliph, or leader of all Muslims worldwide. However, this declaration has been rejected by mainstream Muslims while ISIS has been designated a terrorist organization by the United Nations and many individual countries.
Spanish authorities shared information with Belgium more than a year ago about the alleged cell leader in last week’s Spain attacks, but didn’t have any details at the time to indicate he was dangerous, officials said Thursday.
Abdelbaki Es Satty, an imam who is blamed for recruiting young Muslims in a Catalan town to commit attacks in Barcelona, had served a four-year prison term for drug trafficking in 2012 and had been questioned as early as 2006 in a national police operation against jihadism.
But the Catalan police officer who answered an informal request of information from Belgium in early 2016 didn’t have the complete records on Es Satty, according to the remarks by high ranking police and government officials in Catalonia and interviews conducted by The Associated Press.
The chief of the Interior department in the Catalan regional government, Joaquim Forn, acknowledged Thursday that Belgian police in Vilvoorde made an informal request for information on the imam in 2016, when Es Satty spent three months in the city known for Islamic State group recruiting.
Forn said police gave their Belgian counterparts what they had but at no point had anyone told them Es Satty had been investigated or was dangerous. The exchange was described by another Catalan official, who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss an informal conversation between two police officers.
Es Satty was one of two suspects that died in a blast at a house in Alcanar on Aug. 16 which disrupted the cell’s plan to set off bombs at high-profile targets in Barcelona.
Following the explosion, other members of the cell carried out attacks with vehicles and knives as weapons on Aug. 17-18 that left 15 dead and more than 120 injured.
Police confirmed on Thursday the identity of the second body found in the house used as an explosives workshop as that of Youssef Aalla. One suspect survived the blast and has been jailed.
A National Court judge also released Salh El Karib, one of the four suspects arrested in the wake of the attacks, because of a lack of evidence that the cybercafe worker was part of the plot.
El Karib lived in Ripoll, the town where the extremist cell was allegedly formed. He used his credit card to purchase plane tickets for another suspect in the case, according to court documents released Thursday. He was reimbursed in cash and was paid an additional 5 euros ($6), the documents said.
The judge saw insufficient evidence to keep him in police custody and ordered his release requiring him to stay in Spain and show up in court once a week while the investigation is open.
Judge Fernando Andreu also freed under similar restrictions another of the suspects Tuesday, once again for lacking proof of his involvement, and sent to jail the other two people arrested after hearing their testimony.
Eight more people connected to the attacks are dead, six of them shot by police.
While the investigation continues and expands beyond Spain’s borders, new revelations on Thursday raised questions about the level of coordination and intelligence sharing between different security forces and departments in Spain.
Both Civil Guard and National Police in Spain are formally in charge of counterterrorism work and have accumulated experience after decades of fighting Basque militants and religious extremism, but Catalonia’s Mossos d’Esquadra regional force has led the response and initial investigation into last week’s attacks in their operational area.
Catalonia, the northeastern region where separatist sentiment runs high, is currently ruled by a coalition of parties that are openly seeking the region’s independence from Spain.
The regional government has bowed to push ahead with a referendum on the issue on Oct. 1 despite the vote being unconstitutional under Spanish laws.
The Mossos’ work has so far won widespread praise, especially in Catalonia. Although the central government and the national law enforcement agencies have publicly acknowledged the Mossos’ success, some officers’ unions have publicly complained about how being excluded from the response and investigation led to missing valuable input.
An officer who leads an independent group of police agents who spoke to The Associated Press on condition of anonymity said that Civil Guard’s experts on explosives would have been key to assess what the cell was doing when their bomb workshop exploded.
Two of the main unions, the Civil Guard’s AUGC and National Police’s SUP, went even further earlier this week by openly criticizing authorities in a joint statement and saying that the decision to sideline them was aimed at “transmitting an image overseas of a ‘self-sufficient’ Catalan state.”
The events highlight “a deficient functioning of communication” between police forces because authorities in Catalonia didn’t have information on a 2007 National Police investigation into a jihadi cell where Es Satty’s name had appeared, their statement says.
“It is evident that if somebody would have alerted us, we would have acted in a different way,” Forns told reporters on Thursday in response to criticism.
Also this week, justice officials revealed that the imam had won an appeal for showing good behavior against an expulsion order handed down in 2015, right after he served time in prison for drug trafficking.
The Valencia local court upheld Es Satty’s appeal because he had found a job and showed determination to re-integrate into society. More here.
Still, our State Department and White House appears to think that we can have honest dialogues with China regarding North Korea? Additionally, it was just reported a month ago that Beijing has a major spy network in the United States with up to 25,000 Chinese intelligence officers and 15,000 recruited agents.
Not feeling confident on this, are you? Perhaps some expulsions are in order…
Did Owner of Million-Dollar U.S. Home Help North Korea Evade Sanctions?
GREAT NECK, N.Y. — The five-bedroom house in New York’s Long Island suburbs — listed for nearly $1.3 million — boasts a southern exposure and proximity to a country club.
But here’s what’s more interesting: The seller, a Chinese national named Sun Sidong, has been linked by American security experts to a network of Chinese companies under Treasury sanctions for helping companies and individuals who support North Korea’s nuclear and ballistic missile programs.
According to Chinese corporate filings, Sun is the listed owner of Dandong Dongyuan Industrial Co., which has shared an email address with another Chinese company, Dandong Zhicheng Metallic Material Co., a coal exporter suspected of helping North Korea evade sanctions.
The coal company and “four related front companies” were targeted by a federal search warrant allowing prosecutors to secretly monitor their financial transactions at eight U.S. banks, seizing any funds stemming from illegal sanctions-busting, according to a May federal court ruling.
The ruling, by U.S. District Judge Beryl Howell of Washington, D.C., said the eight American financial institutions — Bank of America, Wells Fargo, BNY Mellon, Citibank, Deutsche Bank, HSBC, JP Morgan Chase, and Standard Chartered Bank — had already processed upwards of $700 million in prohibited transactions involving North Korea since 2009. The ruling does not allege any wrongdoing by any of the banks.
On Tuesday, the Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) sanctioned Dandong Zhicheng Metallic Material Co. and its primary shareholder in response to “attempted evasion of U.S. sanctions.”
That shareholder, a Chinese businessman named Chi Yupeng, was also named in a civil complaint filed Tuesday by the Justice Department seeking a money laundering penalty against the firm, as well as the seizure of $4 million in funds allegedly laundered for North Korea’s ruling party. The complaint alleges that front companies controlled by Chi Yupeng comprise one of the largest financial facilitators for North Korea.
Chi Yupeng hung up on NBC News several times when asked for comment.
The Justice Department also moved to seize nearly $7 million from a Singapore firm over similar allegations, and Treasury levied sanctions against a number of other Chinese and Russian entities — 16 in total — it accused of helping North Korea evade sanctions.
The government’s investigation was supported by the Center for Advanced Defense Studies (C4ADS), a non-profit U.S. think tank, as part of a new get-tough approach to North Korean sanctions that began in the Obama administration and is accelerating under President Trump, current and former U.S. officials say.
While it’s widely assumed that North Korea has for years been subjected to punishing international pressure as it defied the world and advanced toward a nuclear missile capability, the sanctions against North Korea have been full of holes, experts say — far less restrictive, for example, than the measures that brought Iran to the nuclear bargaining table.
Sun’s Great Neck house is an example of how the alleged sanction-busting networks can stretch around the globe, even to the luxe suburbs of Long Island. “The fact that you have somebody who’s engaged in trade that is potentially not just sanctioned, but dangerous, and that individual then invests in real estate in the United States reflects that there are holes in the system,” NBC News National Security Analyst Juan Zarate said.
The North Korea sanctions targeted specific military technology, “but what you didn’t see until quite recently are these kind of broader sanctions to go after the North Korean economy as a whole,” said Peter Harrell, who was the deputy assistant secretary for counter threat finance and sanctions in the State Department from 2012 to 2014.
Nor was there an aggressive enforcement effort against banks and individuals doing business with Pyongyang. As a result, the North Korean economy has grown steadily over the last decade, analysts say. And while the country as a whole remains extremely poor, the elite live relatively well amid a building boom of gleaming skyscrapers in the capital.
“Until February of 2016, U.N. sanctions against North Korea were strong on paper but poorly enforced, and U.S. sanctions against North Korea were comparatively weak — weaker than our sanctions against Belarus and Zimbabwe,” said Joshua Stanton, a North Korea expert and former Army officer.
Now, that is changing — though it may be too late. North Korea tested a missile that many experts say could strike the U.S. mainland, and American intelligence officials say the country may be months away from being able to mount a nuclear warhead on such a missile.
Still, aided by new sanctions imposed in the past year, the Trump administration is moving to increase economic pressure on North Korea, by targeting the Chinese companies that have for years helped the North fund its military activities.
“Justice is stepping it up by going after the Chinese banks,” said Anthony Ruggiero, a senior fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, who served as the nonproliferation advisor to the U.S. delegation to the 2005 Six-Party Talks on North Korea.
In June, the U.S. Treasury Department designated China’s Bank of Dandong — based in a city on the North Korean border that serves as a center of trade between the two countries — to be a “primary money laundering concern.” It said the small bank “acts as a conduit for illicit North Korean financial activity.” Two Chinese individuals were also targeted in the government’s action.
Last September, the Justice Department charged Dandong-based businesswoman Ma Xiaohong with evading sanctions and laundering millions of dollars for North Korea. Ma has not made a court appearance and her whereabouts are unclear.
Sen. Cory Gardner, R-Colo., recently introduced a bill that would cut off entities that do business in North Korea, including the top ten Chinese importers of North Korean goods, from using the American financial system.
In August, the U.N. Security Council unanimously passed new sanctions meant to pressure Pyongyang’s export revenue. They crack down on North Korea’s primary exports — including iron, iron ore, coal, lead, lead ore and seafood — and target banks and joint ventures with foreign companies.
C4ADS, which focuses on international security, uses sophisticated software and business records to map links between companies involved with North Korea.
In June, the group published a report — titled “Risky Business” — naming Sun, who owns the Great Neck house, as part of a network that may be exporting technology that could be used in North Korea’s missile program.
Chinese business records cited by C4ADS show Sun owns 97 percent of Dandong Dongyuan Industrial Co. Ltd., a general-purpose trading firm whose businesses include the sale of automobiles, machinery, natural resources, and general household products, the report says. NBC News confirmed that the records show Sun as primary shareholder.
Customs records indicate the firm has exported to three countries: North Korea, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, and the United States. From 2013 to 2016, the company sent $28 million worth of material to North Korea, the records show.
For example, Dandong Dongyuan Industrial Co. sent North Korea a shipment of radio navigational aid apparatus valued at nearly $800,000 in June 2016, the C4ADS report said. Experts at the James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies concluded that “this category might contain guidance devices for ballistic missiles.”
NBC News reviewed shipment data from Panjiva, which tracks global trade. It shows more than 60 shipments of items by Sun’s company to North Korea that fall into the category of “nuclear reactors, boilers, machinery and mechanical appliances; parts thereof.” This broad category is set by the country of origin, in this case the Chinese government. Experts say dual-use items like these help the Kim regime evade sanctions that are explicitly designed to prevent its nuclear capability.
“The danger with the export of dual-use items is that they appear to be legitimate. These are things that could be used for normal purposes,” Zarate said. “You have parties that are willing to export what are really dangerous items to a regime that has been sanctioned, and trying to use the cloak of legitimate commerce in order to do that.”
C4ADS also links Sun to a ship carrying arms from North Korea to an unknown destination. In August 2016, a cargo vessel flying a Cambodian flag was intercepted by Egyptian authorities entering the Suez Canal with parts for 30,000 rocket-propelled grenades aboard. The grenade parts were hidden under 2,300 tons of iron ore, which is one of the newly banned mineral exports targeted by the U.N.’s recent sanctions program.
According to shipping records reviewed by NBC News, one of Sun Sidong’s companies owned the vessel from April 2012 until August 2014, when ownership was transferred to a company controlled by Sun Sihong, who according to C4ADS is Sun’s sister.
In 2015, Sun registered a New York-based company called Dongyuan Enterprise USA. On March 2, it received a shipment of “used furniture” from Dandong Dongyuan Industrial Co., Sun’s Chinese company. Originally shipped from Dandong, the cargo traveled to the U.S. from Busan, South Korea, according to its bill of lading.
The real estate agent who brokered the sale of the Great Neck home to Sun recalled that the family was expecting furniture to arrive from China.
Sun, whose U.S. company operates out of a New York City address he does not own, bought the Great Neck property near the country club for $1.1 million in December 2016.
The house is already on the market again. Sun’s U.S. real estate broker told NBC News that’s because Sun “doesn’t want to do business here.”
One lesson of Sun’s activities is that targeting a small number of key actors could put a severe dent in North Korean’s effort to evade sanctions, according to David Johnson, the executive director of C4ADS.
“The networks that perpetrate sanctions evasion for North Korea are limited, centralized, and vulnerable,” Johnson said. “That is, we can touch them, there are very few pressure points, and we can make a major impact.”
Frankly, $11 million is not much considering what North Korea and the Kim regime are doing in the illicit activity realm.
Meanwhile Kim issued yet another threat to President Trump:
North Korea vows merciless retaliation in response to drills
FNC: President Trump is pictured looking out over a Guam graveyard cluttered with crosses in a photoshopped image from the newest propaganda film — and grim warning — from North Korea.
The regime followed the video with a statement posted through its KCNA news agency, saying Trump “spouted rubbish” and frequently tweeted about “weird articles of his ego-driven thoughts” and attacking South Korea’s “puppy-like” Defense Minister Song Young-moo for “pinning hope on that mad guy.”
But the picture of a graveyard believed to be in Guam may be the most rattling in the video, given dictator Kim Jong Un’s repeated threats to strike the U.S. territory with a missile. The video also features Vice President Pence engulfed in flames. More here.
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Tuesday, August 22, 2017
United States Files Complaints to Forfeit More Than $11 Million From Companies That Allegely Laundered Funds To Benefit Sanctioned North Korean Entities
WASHINGTON – The United States filed two complaints today seeking imposition of a civil money laundering penalty and to civilly forfeit more than $11 million from companies that allegedly acted as financial facilitators for North Korea, announced U.S. Attorney Channing D. Phillips, Michael DeLeon, Special Agent in Charge of the FBI’s Phoenix Field Office, and Michael J. Anderson, Special Agent in Charge of the FBI’s Chicago Field Office.
The actions, filed in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, represent two of the largest seizures of North Korean funds by the Department of Justice. One complaint seeks $6,999,925 associated with Velmur Management Pte Ltd., a Singapore-based company. The other seeks $4,083,935 from Dandong Chengtai Trading Co. Ltd., also known as Dandong Zhicheng Metallic Material Co., Ltd., a company in Dandong, China.
The lawsuits follow a similar complaint, filed in June 2017, seeking more than $1.9 million from Mingzheng International Trading Limited, a company based in Shenyang, China.
The complaints allege that the companies have participated in schemes to launder U.S. dollars on behalf of sanctioned North Korean entities. According to the complaints, the companies participated in financial transactions in violation of the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA), the North Korean Sanctions and Policy Enhancement Act of 2016, and federal conspiracy and money laundering statutes. Today’s complaints are the first filed actions based on the 2016 North Korean Sanctions and Policy Enhancement Act.
“These complaints show our determination to stop North Korean sanctioned banks and their foreign financial facilitators from aiding North Korea in illegally accessing the United States financial system to obtain goods and services in the global market place,” said U.S. Attorney Phillips. “According to the complaints, these front companies are supporting sanctioned North Korean entities, including North Korean military and North Korean weapons programs. Working with our law enforcement partners, we will vigorously enforce vital sanctions laws.”
“The complaints allege that these companies are assisting North Korea in evading sanctions, which is in direct conflict with our national security interests,” said Special Agent in Charge DeLeon, of the FBI’s Phoenix Field Division. “We will continue to use the necessary resources to expose these types of actions and investigate those who utilize the U.S. banking systems for illegal activities.”
**
U.S. v. Velmur Management Pte., Ltd. (Velmur) and Transatlantic Partners Pte. Ltd. (Transatlantic)
This complaint alleges that Velmur and Transatlantic Partners Pte. Ltd. (Transatlantic) laundered United States dollars on behalf of sanctioned North Korean banks that were seeking to procure petroleum products from JSC Independent Petroleum Company (IPC), a designated entity. The complaint also seeks a civil monetary penalty against Velmur and Transatlantic for prior sanctions and money laundering violations related to this scheme.
According to the complaint, designated North Korean banks use front companies, including Transatlantic, to make U.S. dollar payments to Velmur. The complaint relates to funds that were transferred through four different companies and remitted to Velmur to wire funds to JSC Independent Petroleum Company (IPC), a Russian petroleum products supplier. On June 1, 2017, the Department of the Treasury’s Office of Foreign Asset Controls (OFAC) designated IPC. The designation noted that IPC had a contract to provide oil to North Korea and reportedly shipped over $1 million worth of petroleum products to North Korea.
The United Nations Panel of Experts reported in 2017 on the methods used by North Korean banks to evade sanctions and continue to access the international banking system. Specifically, despite strengthened financial sanctions, North Korean networks are adapting by using greater ingenuity in accessing formal banking channels. This includes maintaining correspondent bank accounts and representative offices abroad which are staffed by foreign nationals making use of front companies. These broad interwoven networks allow the North Korean banks to conduct illicit procurement and banking activity.
An FBI investigation revealed that Velmur’s and Transatlantic’s activities mirror this money laundering paradigm. Specifically, companies identified in the complaint and Transatlantic act as front companies for designated North Korean banks.
The government is seeking to forfeit $6,999,925 that was wired to Velmur in May 2017. The U.S. dollar payments, which cleared through the U.S., are alleged to violate U.S. law, because the entities were surreptitiously making them on behalf of the designated North Korean Banks, whose designation precluded such U.S. dollar transactions. The government also is seeking imposition of a monetary penalty commensurate with the millions of dollars allegedly laundered by Velmur and Transatlantic.
**
U.S. v. Dandong Chengtai Trading Co., Ltd. (Dandong Chengtai), also known as Dandong Zhicheng Metallic Material Co., Ltd.
This complaint alleges that Dandong Chengtai and associated front companies controlled by Chi Yupeng, a Chinese national, comprise one of the largest financial facilitators for North Korea. According to the complaint, Dandong Chengtai conspired to evade U.S. economic sanctions by facilitating prohibited U.S. dollar transactions through the United States on behalf of the North Korean Workers’ Party, a sanctioned entity.
The complaint further alleges that the North Korean government relies on exports of coal as its primary means of obtaining access to foreign currency, and that the North Korean military controls the amount of coal produced and its subsequent export. The North Korean government uses proceeds of coal sales to fund its weapons of mass destruction program and missile programs. Coal generates more than $1 billion in revenue per year for North Korea. The investigation revealed that Dandong Chengtai is one of the largest importers of North Korean coal in China, and has continued to engage in illicit U.S. dollar transactions related to its coal sales to benefit North Korea.
The complaint alleges that Dandong Chengtai facilitated wire transfers denominated in U.S. dollars for purchases of goods that are well outside the scope of a mineral trading company. Financial records reveal that purchases of bulk commodities such as sugar, rubber, petroleum products, and soybean oil, among others, were in fact destined for North Korea.
As reported in findings by the Treasury Department and the United Nations Panel of Experts, North Korean financial facilitators frequently establish and maintain offshore U.S. dollar accounts for the purposes of remitting wire transfers denominated in U.S. dollars on behalf of sanctioned North Korean entities. These broad interwoven networks allow sanctioned North Korean entities to conduct illicit procurement and banking activity.
The government is seeking to forfeit $4,083,935 that Dandong Chengtai wired on June 21, 2017 to Maison Trading, using their Chinese bank accounts. The investigation revealed that Maison Trading is a front company operated by a Dandong Chengtai employee. These U.S. dollar payments, which cleared through the United States, are alleged to violate U.S. law, because the recent North Korean sanctions law specifically barred U.S. dollar transactions involving North Korean coal and the proceeds of these transactions were for the benefit of the North Korea Worker’s Party, whose designation precluded such U.S. dollar transactions.
This case relates to a previously unsealed opinion from Chief Judge Beryl A. Howell of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, which found that probable cause existed to seize funds belonging to Dandong Chengtai.
**
The claims made in the complaints are only allegations and do not constitute a determination of liability.
The FBI’s Phoenix Field Office is investigating the case involving Velmur Management Pte Ltd. and Transatlantic Partners Pte., Ltd. The FBI’s Chicago Field Office is investigating the case involving Dandong Chengtai Trading Co. Ltd. Both investigations are being supported by the FBI Counterproliferation Center.
Assistant U.S Attorneys Arvind K. Lal, Zia M. Faruqui, Christopher B. Brown, Deborah Curtis, Ari Redbord, and Brian P. Hudak, all of the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the District of Columbia, are prosecuting both cases. Paralegal Specialist Toni Anne Donato and Legal Assistant Jessica McCormick are providing assistance.