A panel of experts from United Nations wrote this year that sanctions against North Korea were ‘ineffective.’ Pyongyang keeps acquiring illegal shipments of oil products, sells banned coal and violates an arms embargo.

Syria, the Houthi rebels in Yemen, Libya and Sudan are its main customers, the report added. According to these international experts, North Korea ‘had developed a number of techniques and a complex web of organisations to enable it to evade the sanctions.’

What the report doesn’t say is how North Korea is doing that.

But the September edition of Macau Business magazine, now on sale, has lifted one end of the veil: Zokwang Trading Company, a North Korean company that announces its headquarters to be in Zhuhai, is purportedly selling weapons of war from a discreet and misleading website.

Among the heavy-duty weapons listed on the Internet is the famous Pongae-5 Strategic Surface to Air Missile System (also known as KN-06), costing a cool US$51 million (MOP412 million).

Of course, when violating a number of international embargoes, there’s a ‘problem’ with identification of the website: there is no way to verify its authenticity beyond what is written there.

However, the Pongae-5 Strategic Surface was only deemed fit for purpose by the North Korean authorities in 2017, which indicates that the site has had some kind of update.

The investigation conducted by Macau Business also reveals the list of weapons made available by Zokwang and the techniques used by North Koreans to hide the information so that the site is not discovered or blocked.

North Korea established a business in Macau in 1973 or 1974 called Zokwang Trading Company, a subsidiary of Daesong Economic Group, under the Foreign Trade Ministry and frequently associated with the Korean Worker’s Party.

After an intervention in 2005 by the US Treasury Department, accusing a bank of Macau of being a ‘willing pawn for the North Korean government to engage in corrupt financial activities’, Zokwang decided to transfer its activities to Zhuhai.

[Read the full story at this month’s edition of Macau Business magazine]