Subscribe
E-Paper
By Yi Whan-woo
North Korea is raising cash by smuggling tobacco products, including counterfeit cigarettes, according to sources familiar with Pyongyang.
They said the impoverished Kim Jong-un regime even raised the export price for a carton of cigarettes by 10 percent.
"The smugglers used to sell a carton of cigarettes to China for 50 yuan ($7.20), but now it a carton is sold for 55 yuan," a source told Radio Free Asia (RFA) last week.
The smuggling comes amid U.N. Security Council sanctions on North Korea to prevent the flow of cash to the regime being used to develop nuclear weapons.
Another source said North Korean cigarettes had been popular in China because they were inexpensive and of reasonable quality compared to Chinese cigarettes.
"There are even Chinese, especially those farmers in the border region, who insist on smoking only North Korean cigarettes," the source said.
According to RFA, some North Korean cigarettes are intended for domestic consumption, but most are falsely labeled with fake foreign brands and smuggled to Hong Kong, Macau, and Southeast Asian countries where they are sold for far more than they cost to produce.
Some tobacco companies even produce counterfeit tobacco products bearing famous foreign brand names like Marlboro and Dunhill and export them to Southeast Asia and Africa.
