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North Korea suspected of reinsurance fraud
The cash-strapped regime of North Korea, which has a worldwide reputation for its criminal dealings in weapons sales, drugs and near-perfect counterfeit U.S. $100 bills, may have found a new illicit source of hard foreign currency: international reinsurance fraud. A growing number of major underwriters around the world strongly suspect that communist dictator Kim Jong-Il's regime is running an elaborate major insurance and reinsurance scam on them, to the tune of tens of millions of dollars or more.The alleged fraud involves a wide variety of North Korean industrial and personal calamities where insurers have been presented with perfect government-controlled documentation of accidents, including deaths, along with carefully gathered photographic evidence, all compiled in a startlingly brief time. That paperwork is coupled with a resistance to letting foreign insurance adjusters examine some of the most crucial physical evidence, except after long delays and under a watchful eye, if at all. Suspicions in London began to gel in July 2005, when North Korea reported that a medical rescue helicopter had crashed into a government-owned warehouse that authorities said was crammed with disaster relief supplies. The entire contents of the warehouse, which ran to hundreds of thousands of items, were destroyed, KNIC said, submitting within 10 days a list compiled by the relief center of every single commodity that it said had been lost. In the case of a ferry accident that allegedly took place last April, North Korean authorities declared that 129 people had died aboard the vessel after it struck a rock about 1,000 yards off the Korean coast, and only about 100 yards from an island. All of them, the Koreans claim, had been automatically covered with life insurance when they bought their ferry ticket. Here the claims from reinsurers totaled about 5 million euros, or roughly $6 million. When insurers asked for permission to send an independent diver to inspect the ferry wreck, they were refused. Britain's Foreign Office says the lack of firm proof of fraud is why it hasn't taken action on the reinsurance issue, although British diplomats say they are aware of it. But as the British government is trying to put limits on Kim Jong-Il's nuclear weapons program, the lack of an official British reaction could also be an attempt not to rock the boat, as well as to protect its diplomatic presence in Pyongyang. Posted by: Pappy 2006-12-05 |
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