PYONGYANG: North Korean officials told the Finnish public broadcaster that they haven’t forgotten the over 30 million Euros in debt they owe government and private businesses in Finland for transactions that date back to the 1970s. Foreign ministry officials in Pyongyang recently assured Media reporters that a solution can still be found.
North Korea is back in the front-page news, thanks to a series of failed missile tests and US President Donald Trump’s pokes at supreme leader Kim Jong-un’s hornet’s nest. Finland’s public broadcaster Media was granted a rare interview with foreign ministry staff in the country’s capital.
Back in the 1970s, North Korea ordered paper machines and other assorted equipment from Finland that it never paid for. The total bill climbed to over 26 million Euros owed to the Finnish state, and another six million that was never paid to private Finnish businesses. Officials in Pyongyang haven’t forgotten this debt.
“We hope you’ve taken into account the special circumstances of our country,” North Korea’s Foreign Ministry official Pak Yun Sik told Media, speaking in Korean for the interview, despite earlier revealing a good command of English.
“Not only in the 1970s, but also in the 80s and 90s, we lived through really hard times,” he said.
He didn’t need to go into detail, because most people are aware of how North Korea’s centrally-planned economy skidded to a halt after the 70s, and went into freefall once the Soviet Union broke up. After large-scale famine in the 1990s, the country still struggles with food production, for example.
Pak, who is the North Korean government’s highest official in charge of Northern European relations, told Media that the economy in North Korea is looking up, so there still may be hope for Finland’s IOU.
“If both sides worked together, I’m sure we could find a solution to the problem in the future,” he said.
