Top North Korean officials attended Kim Jong Un’s year-end meeting with swag-in luxurious Mercedes S-class vehicles despite a ban on luxury goods in the country under the United Nations maintains sanctions. Yonhap reported that Kim Jong Un presided over the meeting of the ruling party to review state policies for this year. Party officials were seen coming out of eighth-generation S-class limousine and other luxury cars despite the international sanctions as per the report.
Kim Jong Un’s love for luxury cars
Kim Jong Un has also been seen in different Mercedes-Maybach S-class vehicles, including a limousine, previously. In 2020, he was spotted in an SUV presumed to be a Lexus LX 570 which means that he owns luxury vehicles subject to UN sanctions.
As per a report in South China Morning Post, Japan police foiled an attempt to smuggle a $70,000 Lexus sedan as the car was intercepted when North Korea recalled its ambassador to Switzerland amid an investigation into ivory trafficking. The car was seized during a raid on a used car showroom on December 7 in Chiba prefecture, it was reported.
What Kim Jong Un said at the meeting
In his speech, Kim Jong Un defined 2023 “as a year of great turn and great change both in name and reality, in which (North Korea) left a great trace in the glorious course of development in the efforts to improve the national power and enhance the prestige of the country,” according to the official Korean Central News Agency (KCNA).
The comments were in reference to North Korea test-firing its most advanced intercontinental ballistic missile Hwasong-18- third of its kind this year and Pyongyang’s first military spy satellite which was put into orbit.
