An emergency ideological struggle session was held early this month at the Samjiyon Potato Farina Production Factory in the North Korean city of Samjiyon.
“The Samjiyon municipal party committee and prosecutors’ office made senior factory managers attend a struggle session at the factory on Sept. 4 for two officials who had been stealing manufactured goods,” a source in Ryanggang province told Daily NK recently.
The Central Committee had ordered local authorities to avoid holding public struggle sessions or criticism sessions during North Korean leader Kim Jong Un’s visit to China (Sept. 1-5), but this struggle session was held anyway because of the urgent nature of the matter.
The Samjiyon Potato Farina Production Factory manufactures top-quality potato starch for export and various processed potato products, including noodles and chips. It’s considered an important production unit that supplies not only Samjiyon city and the local province, but all of North Korea.
The authorities found evidence that a bookkeeper in the factory’s sales department and a bookkeeper in the material acquisitions department had been conspiring for several years to steal manufactured goods and sell them for personal gain.
When prosecutors raided the two bookkeepers’ homes on Sept. 2, they found one ton of top-quality potato starch and 50 boxes of instant noodles, all recently manufactured.
During the interrogation that followed, authorities learned that the bookkeepers had been regularly selling the stolen goods elsewhere in the country. Their actions were found to represent not merely an isolated incident but a case of organized corruption.
“In the ideological struggle session, officials stressed how serious the case was. Officials denouncing the bookkeepers said that wrongdoing uncovered during Kim Jong Un’s overseas visit would be dealt with a thousand or even ten thousand times more harshly than usual,” the source said.
“In the struggle session, officials told factory officials that if the case received more attention in the future, they should accept responsibility instead of trying to avoid blame and should cooperate with the investigation,” the source added.
The factory officials at the struggle session were terrified that if the incident came to the Central Committee’s attention, not only the individual wrongdoers but the entire factory and even the municipal party committee could all be brought in for questioning.
Daily NK was unable to obtain information about how the case was handled following the struggle session.
