文章基本信息
- 标题：N. Korea making bogus bills?
- 作者：Tim Johnson Knight Ridder Newspapers
- 期刊名称：Deseret News (Salt Lake City)
- 印刷版ISSN：0745-4724
- 出版年度：2005
- 卷号：Oct 30, 2005
- 出版社：Deseret News Publishing Company
N. Korea making bogus bills?
Tim Johnson Knight Ridder NewspapersBEIJING -- North Korea is financing illicit activities by printing up bogus U.S. $100 bills and passing them abroad to banking centers such as Macau, the former Portuguese colony now under China's control, a senior U.S. Treasury official charged Friday.
The counterfeit bills are of such good quality that they've come to be called "super notes," said Stuart Levey, the Treasury undersecretary for terrorism and financial intelligence.
Washington has fingered Pyongyang as counterfeiting American currency for more than a decade, but its accusations have become increasingly specific. Last month, U.S. officials accused Macau's Banco Delta Asia of a range of offenses, including passing fake American currency for North Korea. The bank denies the charges.
On Oct. 7, authorities in Belfast, Northern Ireland, arrested an Irish nationalist, Sean Garland, after a U.S. indictment said that he and six others helped North Korea move more than $1 million in fake American currency through a number of European countries.
Levey charged that efforts by North Korea to counterfeit U.S. $100 bills finance and underpin a variety of activities, including development of its nuclear weapons program.
"It is sort of an astonishing act to have a government counterfeiting the currency of another. It's also the case that the quality of this particular counterfeit currency is quite good," Levey said at a news conference.
