excel,” Payton said.
“For example, where death certificates and hospital reports are required, the regime’s attitude is ‘tell us what you want, we’ll give it to you.’”
In the case of a ferry accident that allegedly took place last April, near the coastal city of Wonsan, North Korean authorities declared that 129 people had died aboard the vessel after it struck a rock about 1,000 yards off the Korean coast, and only about 100 yards from an island. All of them, the Koreans claim, had been automatically covered with life insurance when they bought their ferry ticket, and that insurance risk had been passed on to the London market through a common reinsurance product known as “excess loss personal accident reinsurance.” Here the claims from reinsurers totaled about 5 million euros, or roughly $6 million.
The North Koreans claimed that most of the victims had died of hypothermia in the freezing water. Industry sources say that when insurance investigators discovered that weather conditions were warmer than claimed at that time, the North Koreans responded that severe winds were blowing from Siberia in the spring, making the water unusually frigid.
When insurers asked for permission to send an independent diver to inspect the ferry wreck, they were refused.
To get North Korea’s side of the story, FOX News approached the regime’s official insurance representative in London, Song Ryon Ko, at his home. Song refused to discuss the issue and hastily closed his door.
It’d make a great dystopian sci-fi novel: a totalitarian regime which survived by killing its citizens and claiming the life insurance money. Too far-fetched, I suppose.
(via One Free Korea)
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