How North Korea Smuggles Luxury Cars and Evades Sanctions

Mercedes-Maybach S 600 Guard

North Korea is under the world's most stringent set of international sanctions. This includes, since 2006, a ban on exporting of luxury goods to North Korea. So how is it that Kim Jong Un has amassed fleet of high-end cars?

A new report in the New York Times offers a glimpse into the complex ways that North Korea is able to evade international sanctions to import luxury cars -- and perhaps also smuggle illicit goods and materiel into the country.

Reporters from the New York Times teamed up with researchers at the non profit Center for Advanced Defense Studies to track two Mercedes Maybachs from their manufacture in Germany to the streets of Pyongyang. The route was a circuitous one, involving multiple shipping vessels docking in at least five countries over the course of several months. But using open source data and satellite imagery, the reporters and researchers were able to paint a pretty clear picture of how those cars ended up in NorthKorea. And in so d…