Kim pledges to denuke North Korea
NORTH Korea said yesterday it would permanently abolish its key missile facilities in the presence of foreign experts, in the latest gesture by leader Kim Jong-un to revive faltering talks with Washington over his country’s nuclear programme.
Speaking at a joint media briefing in Pyongyang, Kim and South Korean President Moon Jae-in said they agreed to turn the Korean peninsula into a “land of peace without nuclear weapons and nuclear threats”.
They said the North was also willing to close its main nuclear complex if the US took unspecified “reciprocal action”. The pledges Kim and Moon made at their third summit this year could inject fresh momentum into the stalled nuclear negotiations between Washington and Pyongyang, and lay the groundwork for another meeting Kim recently proposed to US President Donald Trump.
“I don’t think President Moon got everything he was seeking from these interactions, but Kim Jong-un gave Moon some tangible things for which he can take credit,” said Michael Madden, an analyst at the Stimson Centre’s 38 North think-tank in Washington.
“These are gestures that will likely facilitate further and more substantive negotiations,” Madden said, adding that a second summit between Kim and Trump was “highly probable”.
Kim pledged to work towards the “complete denuclearisation of the Korean peninsula” during his two meetings with Moon earlier this year, and at his historic June summit with Trump in Singapore.
But discussions over how to implement the vague commitments have since faltered. Washington is demanding | EPA concrete action towards denuclearisation, such as a full disclosure of North Korea’s nuclear and missile facilities, before agreeing to key goals of Pyongyang – declaring an official end to the 1950-53 Korean War and easing tough international sanctions.
Trump called the pledges “exciting. Kim Jong-un has agreed to allow nuclear inspections, subject to final negotiations, and to dismantle a test site and launch pad in the presence of international experts”.
“In the meantime there will be no rocket or nuclear testing,” Trump wrote on Twitter. | Reuters | African news Agency (ANA) INDIA’S largest law firm, Cyril Amarchand Mangaldas (CAM), is being scrutinised by federal agents after they seized documents related to the $2 billion (R29bn) fraud at state-run Punjab National Bank (PNB) from CAM’s premises in February, a lawyer for the State and a police source said.
In what has been dubbed India’s biggest bank fraud, PNB in January alleged that billionaire diamond jeweller Nirav Modi and his uncle had for years fraudulently raised billions of dollars in foreign credit by conspiring with staff at the bank.
In mid-February, Modi’s aides packed cartons of documents at one of his diamond firm’s offices in Mumbai and sent them to CAM’s office nearby, from where police seized them, a review of the Central Bureau of Investigation’s (CBI) court filings and witness testimonies showed.
K Raghavacharyulu, a prosecution lawyer in the Modi case, and two CBI sources, said CAM possessed documents detailing Modi’s dealings with PNB. | Reuters
In CBI’s first charge sheet in May in the fraud case against Modi and others, the agency said “incriminating documents/articles relevant to the case” were concealed in the office of CAM.
Raghavacharyulu said it is possible the police could bring charges against CAM for helping conceal documents.
The CBI search included locking and sealing the meeting room overnight as the search dragged on over two days.
On the night of February 21, CBI officers left with 24 625 pages of documents.
CAM has more than 600 lawyers. It has advised companies such as Alphabet Inc’s Google, Microsoft, Standard Chartered and India’s ICICI Bank, according to research firm The Legal 500. It also advises Thomson Reuters, which owns Reuters. | Reuters