SINGAPORE - For more than six years, a Singaporean company director breached United Nations sanctions and supplied luxury goods such as wine, perfumes, musical instruments and jewellery to a North Korean department store chain.
His company T Specialist International was fined $880,000 for supplying luxury items to a person in North Korea on 10 occasions, and for two counts of money laundering charges. Seventy-five other charges of a similar nature were considered. The shop, owned by a North Korean identified as Li Ik in court documents, received the goods via Dalian, China.
According to court documents, Li Hyon had studied in Singapore and began helping his father with his luxury goods business here from late 2014 until early 2017.To generate liquidity, Ng conspired with Wang to deceive DBS Bank, CIMB Bank, Malayan Banking, RHB and OCBC into granting $130 million in trade financing loans to T Specialist.
The banks then made the payments for 81 invoices totalling $130 million to Pinnacle Offshore, and the money was later transferred back to the accounts of T Specialist or Ng's other companies. Ng used the money to pay outstanding bank facilities and business expenses.