NORTH KOREA MAKES MILLIONS OF DOLLARS VIA SALE OF SAND

North Korea is making a pile by selling sand in violation of sanctions imposed by the United Nations, Joshua Berlinger reported for CNN Business late on June 10, 2020.

Lucas Kuo and Lauren Sung of the Washington-based Center for Advanced Defense Studies (C4ADS), a nonprofit that analyzes and investigates security issues using big data, made the discovery in May 2019, when more than 100 ships gathered off the coast of Haeju, North Korea.

What Kuo and Sung went on to discover was a massive operation allegedly worth millions of dollars involving 279 ships which appeared to be skirting international sanctions on North Korea and many of them flew Chinese flags. But these ships weren't being used for running guns or dealing in drugs, not even for loading coal, Pyongyang's most profitable export. They were being used to dredge and transport sand.

It may seem innocuous, but North Korea is barred from exporting earth and stone under United Nations sanctions passed in December 2017. Trading North Korean sand is a violation of international law. Despite those measures, North Korea raked in at least $22 million last year using "a substantial sand-export operation," UN investigators said in a report released in April. One unnamed country supplied the Panel of Experts on North Korea, as the investigators are formally known, with intelligence claiming that Pyongyang sent one million tons of sand abroad from May 2019 until the end of the year.