Pak Nam-gi

Pak Nam-gi or Park Nam-ki (21 February 1934 – 17 March 2010) was, until as late as January 2010,^[1] Director of the Planning and Finance Department of the ruling party of North Korea. There are doubts about his date of birth, with at least two unattributed sources^[2][3] reporting it as 21 February 1934 or sometime in 1928 respectively.

In March 2010, it was reported by news agencies including Yonhap,^[4] Bloomberg,^[5] and The Guardian^[6] that Pak had been tried and then executed by firing squad in Pyongyang for the offense of being "a son of a bourgeois conspiring to infiltrate the ranks of revolutionaries to destroy the national economy". According to the Guardian, he had been denounced as a traitor during a meeting in January 2010 and arrested on the spot. This related to the devaluation of the North Korean won in November 2009, which led to a crisis after rendering valueless many people's savings.^[7][8]

Although John Park, a Stanton junior faculty fellow at MIT, claimed in 2012 that Pak Nam-gi is still alive and had resurfaced after his alleged execution,^[9] Ri Je-gang, the former First Deputy Head of the WPK Organization and Guidance Department, says Pak Nam-gi was executed by firing squad in the course of a reactionary purge in 2010.^[10]

In December 2013 when Jang Sung-taek, uncle of supreme leader Kim Jong-un, was executed, amongst the charges against Jang was that Jang had been the "wirepuller behind the scene" of "Pak Nam Gi, traitor for all ages".^[11]

See also

• 2009 North Korean currency devaluation

References