Russia Writes Off 90 Percent of North Korea Debt 234
jones_supa (887896) writes "In Russia, the State Duma (lower house) on Friday ratified a 2012 agreement to write off the bulk of North Korea's debt. It said the total debt stood at $10.96 billion as of Sept. 17, 2012. Russia sees this lucrative in advancing the plans to build a gas pipe and railroad through North to South Korea. The rest of the debt, $1.09 billion, would be redeemed during the next 20 years, to be paid in equal installments every six months. The outstanding debt owed by North Korea will be managed by Russia's state development bank, Vnesheconombank. Moscow has been trying to diversify its energy sales to Asia away from Europe, which, in its turn, wants to cut its dependence on oil and gas from the erstwhile Cold War foe. Russia's state-owned top natural producer Gazprom is dreaming shipping 10 billion cubic meters of gas annually through the Koreas. Russia has written off debts to a number of impoverished Soviet-era allies, including Cuba. North Korea's struggling communist economy is just 2 percent of the size of neighboring South's."
Re:How could this be? (Score:5, Informative)
Compared to North Korea, Cuba is a beacon of democracy and human rights. They're just a banana republic that pissed off the wrong people.
Re:How could this be? (Score:4, Informative)
I don't know about Korea, but some nation of obese tv-lovin' asshats decided to embargo international trade in...farm machinery, food, medicine and other important things. "Ya, let's starve the shit outta their children. That'll teach 'em good."
Did you know that most of the "evil commies" of yesteryear are dead and gone? The US believes that making sure children starve and die is okay foreign policy. That's just fucked up.
North Korea is not a communist state (Score:5, Informative)
Re:That doesn't really explain it (Score:5, Informative)
That's not the enlightened view. Everything that goes wrong is always someone else's fault. It's the #1 Truth of progressive thinking. Poor people are poor because someone else made them poor. If socialist policies don't fix everything, it's because someone else interfered. If all the someone elses could just be burned or imprisoned or gassed or reeducated, society's problems could finally be solved and progressive paradise would be achieved.
Re:One this is for sure. (Score:3, Informative)
That's Russian tradition of providing a loan to their allies and then write it off in a few years. A price of alliance, or at least a hefty bonus. USSR did the same.