PH
Years after the UK government was made aware of concerns about his activities, a British marine insurance salesman and football club owner “kept North Korea’s foreign trade fleet afloat” in apparent violation of UN sanctions.
According to records and emails discovered by Danish daily Information, David Skinner, who died in 2016, owned a company named DGS Marine that issued fake insurance certificates for at least 29 North Korean ships in the five years preceding his death.
“It is no exaggeration to say that for years, David Skinner kept North Korea’s foreign trade fleet afloat,” said Hugh Griffiths, a former co-ordinator of the UN panel that monitors North Korea sanctions.
According to a former employee of the organization, the true number of North Korean ships awarded certificates by the corporation was closer to 100.
Because DGS Marine was not authorised to issue insurance in any of the jurisdictions from where it operated, the certificates were forged. Regardless, the certifications were accepted by ports all around the world.
DGS Marine was domiciled first in Liechtenstein and then the British Virgin Islands, with operations in the UK, Cyprus, the British Virgin Islands, Dubai, India, Vietnam, Germany and Denmark.
According to TradeWinds, Skinner was a veteran of the maritime protection and indemnity industry. Before launching DGS maritime in the late 2000s, he worked with prominent maritime insurers such as Standard, Skuld, and West of England, as well as German insurer Hanseatic.
In 2014, he became the majority owner of Greenwich Borough, a semi-professional football club sponsored by DGS Marine. The club is well known for helping former Crystal Palace, Arsenal, and England striker Ian Wright began his career.
In at least two cases, DGS Marine continued to issue insurance certificates to ships operated by Ocean Maritime Management, a North Korean business sanctioned by the UN Security Council in 2014 for shipping weapons to Cuba.
Copies of certificates granted by DGS Marine to two North Korean ships, the Won San 2 and the O Ka San, in June and August 2016, respectively – several months after the UN barred insurance from being issued to any ships traveling under the North Korean flag.
“These were clear and obvious sanctions breaches,” Griffiths told the FT. “UN Security Council resolution 2270 expressly prohibited insuring North Korean ships, and the maritime insurance communities had been made aware of this.”
Internal DGS Marine documents suggest that the company’s contact with the North Koreans began in 2011, when the company met in London with representatives of the Korea National Insurance Corporation (KNIC), North Korea’s state-owned insurance monopoly.
KNIC, which had an office in south-east London’s Blackheath, was eventually sanctioned by the UN and recognized as an affiliate of Office 39, a cell inside the Workers’ Party of Korea dedicated to raising funds for the dictatorship’s ruling Kim family.
KNIC’s assets were frozen in 2017 after the EU accused it of “generating significant foreign exchange revenue that could contribute to [the country’s] nuclear-related, ballistic missile-related, or other weapons of mass destruction-related programs.”
DGS Marine’s actions were first made public in 2012, when the Telegraph reported that Skinner’s company had breached EU sanctions by insuring Iranian ships transporting crude oil from areas controlled by Syrian tyrant Bashar al-Assad’s regime.
According to correspondence, UK Treasury officials wrote to DGS Marine about the allegations soon after that.
Skinner reacted by producing paperwork purporting to indicate that the insurance on the Iranian vessels was cancelled at the end of 2011, when the EU sanctions went into effect.
Weeks later, Treasury officials wrote to Skinner again, this time with proof obtained “via colleagues in the US government” indicating that DGS Marine had continued to insure one of the tankers months after the contracts were meant to have been revoked.
However, the officials appear to have taken Skinner’s promises at face value, believing that the paperwork provided by the US government, rather than those provided by Skinner, had been fabricated.
“On the basis that the certificate provided to you is indeed a forgery, then we would agree that there is no evidence of any breach by DGS Marine,” an official from the Treasury’s Asset Freezing Unit wrote to Skinner.
DGS Marine remained in business for another four years, until Skinner died suddenly in 2016 at the age of 52. His son Nicolas took over as CEO, but the company failed soon after. A request for comment from Nicolas Skinner was not returned.
“The UK authorities, as well as EU member states such as Denmark and Cyprus failed to identify DGS Marine as a serial sanctions violator,” said Griffiths. “The UK failure is particularly egregious because they were warned by the US, yet took Skinner at his word.”
The UK Treasury declined to comment on the matter, but officials emphasized that in 2016, the UK restructured its enforcement framework, establishing the Office for Financial Sanctions Implementation and introducing additional enforcement capabilities.
