SK says NK purloined wages meant for industrial workers
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SOUTH Korea said yesterday that 70 percent of the US dollars paid as wages and fees for the suspended Kaesong industrial project, run jointly with North Korea, had been diverted for Pyongyang’s weapons program and luxury goods for leader Kim Jong Un.
It is the first formal acknowledgement by Seoul that the 55,000 North Korean workers at the Kaesong complex saw little of the US$160 they were paid on average a month.
South Korea suspended the project last Wednesday as punishment for North Korea’s long-range rocket launch two days earlier, saying it would not allow the funds to be used in Pyongyang’s missile and nuclear programs.
North Korea conducted its fourth nuclear test last month.
Pyongyang called Seoul’s move to suspend operations “a declaration of war” and on Thursday kicked out all South Korean workers and froze the assets of South Korean firms.
“The wages for North Korea’s workers and other fees were paid in cash in US dollars to the North’s authorities and not to the workers,” South Korea’s Unification Ministry said yesterday.
The cash is then kept and managed by the ruling Workers’ Party’s Office 39 and other agencies, it claimed, adding that it had confirmed the movement of the money through various sources, but did not specify them.
The South Korean government and companies had invested about 1 trillion won (US$828 million) in Kaesong, including 616 billion won in cash since it opened more than a decade ago, Unification Minister Hong Yong-pyo said last Wednesday.
Kaesong’s North Korean workers were given a taste of life in South Korea, working for the 124 manufacturers that operated there, about 54 kilometers northwest of Seoul.
The minimum wage for North Korean workers was about US$70 a month, although the companies paid more than double that amount after overtime and bonuses — still low compared with wages in South Korea.
The Kaesong project resulted from the first summit meeting of the rival Koreas in 2000, where their leaders pledged reconciliation and cooperation. It was the last remaining symbol of that effort in volatile North-South relations over the years.
Kaesong had been shut only once before, for five months in 2013, amid heightened tensions following North Korea’s third nuclear test, although its continuing existence often seemed tenuous.
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