Officials at Hoeryong Coal-mining Machine Factory in North Hamgyong Province were recently subject to a public trial for greatly inflating their performance.
A Daily NK source in North Hamgyong Province said Tuesday that there was a public trial at the cultural hall of Hoeryong Coal-mining Machine Factory in mid-June. When the trial ended, factory officials accused of filing false reports that inflated their fulfillment of state plans were arrested on the spot.
According to the source, Hoeryong Coal-mining Machine Factory reported to the city people’s committee that it had exceeded the industrial production goals for the first half of the year. When the authorities came to check, however, they found the factory had falsely reported three months of scheduled production as “already complete.”
The officials took issue with this, responding by convening a public trial led by the city prosecutor’s office and the city police’s economic crimes division.
The trial slammed the officials, saying that their false report caused problems not only at the factory itself, but in mining production: “Filing reports that inflate your achievements with no consideration of all the [repercussions] is a very serious problem, an attempt to fool the party and state.”
Three factory officials stood in the docket: the head technician from the technological development department, the head of planning and the head of production. They listened to speeches about why they should face criminal punishments and criticism from ordinary workers.
When the managers of the trial ended the proceedings by telling the trio they were being “handed over to the law,” police guards, who had been waiting handcuffed the defendants, dragged them off and put them in a car.
The source said the whole incident began when a discharged soldier newly dispatched to the factory and a member of the planning team — in the course of filing their performance reports — told the factory’s party organization that it was strange that the factory falsely reported that it had exceeded plans when it was still far from fulfilling its targets.
The factory’s party committee judged the matter a serious one it could not overlook and reported the case to the city party committee, knowing full well this would result in the factory officials facing criminal punishments.
Ultimately, the municipal party committee issued a warning to the factory’s party committee and mobilized the city’s prosecutors and police to impute responsibility onto the officials in question and bring the matter to a conclusion.
However, the provincial party committee — after getting wind of what happened — decided to conduct a 10-day review of economic performance reports from the first half of the year within all the province’s economic sectors to ensure their veracity, the source said.
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