Report: North Korea used UN program to skim money

The sums aren’t huge by US standards but by the standards of a hermit kingdom with virtually no economy that trades in a currency that’s worthless outside its borders, a few million in any hard currency can go a long way.

North Korea used the bank accounts of a U.N. agency for deceptive cash transfers, among a wide range of abuses of that organization’s presence in the communist state, a U.S. Senate panel reported on Wednesday.

The United Nations Development Program deviated from its standard practices in the way it hired local North Koreans and paid their salaries, but was not complicit in — or aware of — the host government’s improper financial transactions, said the U.S. Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations.

The United States had accused UNDP of sloppy accounting, handing over cash to North Korean bodies without proper documentation and hiring staff hand-picked by the communist Pyongyang government.

The UNDP issued a statement saying that none of the major allegations of financial wrongdoing had been substantiated.

Stories of UN corruption specifically in North Korea go back years. Dr. Norbert Vollertsen has accused UN officials of living high in Pyongyang amid a starving country. So the UN hasn’t earned the benefit of the doubt here.

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