HOW MANY OF THE "CHINESE" WHO ACQUIRED CBI PASSPORTS FROM HENG SHENG IN GRENADA, AND FROM CARIBBEAN GALAXY IN SAINT KITTS & NEVIS AND IN SAINT LUCIA, ARE NORTH KOREANS POSING AS CHINESE?

If you are a compliance officer at an international bank, accepting a North Korean national at Account Opening is as close to a fatal error, regarding professional malpractice, as you ever want to be. The People's Democratic Republic of Korea is a State Sponsor of Terrorism, and allowing a North Korean into your bank would be career suicide. North Korean agents are involved in just about every type of financial crime, narcotics trafficking, counterfeiting, and Internet fraud, to support their autocratic regime, which exports terrorism; your job is to keep them out as gatekeeper.

So why am I bringing up such such a forbidden topic? I have always been sensitive to the possibility of North Korean penetration of the West ever since I became aware that officers of the North Korean Peoples' Army were advising Hugo Chavez' regime in Venezuela's military, but wearing Chinese Peoples' Liberation Army uniforms, to conceal their involvement. I am also personally familiar with the latest iterations of the so-called "Supernote," the counterfeit USD$100 bill, manufactured in North Korea with impunity.

We know for a fact that, in the past, North Korean government agents have acquired CBI passports, through passport consultancies in Hong Kong. The question becomes just how many PDRK agents bought Saint Kitts, Saint Lucia and Grenada passports through the dominant sales agents HS and Caribbean Galaxy? This question becomes relevant to bank compliance officers in the Western democracies, as we now see a new and direct American focus upon terrorism and terrorist financing as National Security threats.

Is your new affluent Chinese bank client, providing a CBI passport from one of the Eastern Caribbean states, actually a North Korean? What about his accent? Do you have native Chinese speakers on your staff who can tell you if there are red flags with his use of vocabulary syntax and grammar, a regional accent that is inconsistent to what your staff know to be normal, or issues with his generic supporting documents? Govern yourselves accordingly, to reduce the risk of inadvertently onboarding a North Korean agent, laundering the proceeds of crime back to his superiors in Pyongyang.