A RIGHT BUNCH OF BANKERS

Banco Delta Asia's battle for world credibility has been dealt another blow after the American government accused one of the Macau bank's former North Korean customers of forging high value US dollar bills.

US officials say they suspect Jogwang Trading, which has now reportedly moved from the former Portuguese colony a few miles across the border to Zhuhai in mainland China, of being involved in counterfeiting US currency.

The stakes to further blacken Delta Asia's name were raised recently when North Korea tried to make the lifting of sanctions against the bank a condition of it joining US-backed talks about its nuclear programme.

North Korea's demand fuelled American suspicions that the bank really was helping to prop up the communist regime in Pyongyang and that the leadership was suffering financial hardship because the Delta Asia 'tap' had been turned off.

Delta Asia has always denied any wrong doing ever since it was accused by the US last September of being a "primary money-laundering concern" for North Korean companies operating from Macau.

The bank said it terminated all North Korean accounts and cut off clients doing business with the country, while insisting the trade accounted for less than three per cent of its operations.

On the counterfeiting claim, it said only one case of a forged dollar bill had been detected at the bank in 10 years. The Americans say whether banks know about financial misdeeds can depend on how hard they look.

Recently the US Treasury's Financial Crimes Division warned banks around the world to take "reasonable steps" to prevent abuse of their financial services by North Korea.And in what is being seen as a victory for the hawks in the US administration, senior officials have issued a stream of statements apparently intended to hound out North Korean interests wherever they are found in the world.

Even the US's close ally South Korea, has been criticised for giving humanitarian aid to its once-deadly enemy. The US argues this well-meaning help is simply propping up a dangerous and unpredictable regime.

In that sense, whatever Banco Delta Asia says or does from now on, it is unlikely to get a sympathetic hearing in Washington, said a senior Hong Kong financier.

He explained: "I think the Americans are trying to create a climate where financial institutions will think very carefully about who they deal with. It will no longer be good enough for banks to say 'we didn't know' or 'nobody told us'. In future they will have to be more pro-active in finding out who their customers are and where their money comes from."

This still begs the question of what hard evidence the US has against Delta Asia. So far it has been unwilling to share such information, giving credibility to sceptics' claims that a 'kangaroo court' is in session on Capitol Hill. The sceptics say the Americans' tough verdict against Banco Delta Asia is now being justified retrospectively through a drip feed of innuendo and speculation that would be considered scandalous and defamatory were it directed against a bigger bank in a more powerful jurisdiction.

The reality is that in the murky world of spying and surveillance, governments rarely like to reveal where they got damning information from, arguing it may compromise their sources.

Unfortunately the recent intelligence debacle about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq has made voters in democratic countries question how scientific such information gathering is, and leads them to wonder whether it might simply be the prejudices of a few powerful people locked away in government offices, that are scribbled down on the backs of envelopes and dressed up as fact and policy.

In the last few weeks alone, officials from the US Treasury, US State Department, the US Ambassador to South Korea, a House Committee and the US Under Secretary for Arms Control have come out with a stream of extremely hostile statements against North Korea, sometimes mentioning Banco Delta Asia by name but more usually referring in general to money laundering and racketeering.

But the real damage was done last September, with the money laundering claim and the warning to American banks not to deal with Delta Asia.

Although the US didn't impose formal sanctions, the banks took the hint, effectively cutting off the Macau-based institution from the world financial system, and causing a run on the bank that saw one billion patacas (US$ 125.2 million) around one third of Delta Asia's capital, withdrawn by customers in the space of 48 hours.

At the time, Delta Asia said it had cut off all ties with Jogwang, but in another of its drip-fed statements recently, the US said the North Korean firm left its offices in Macau and relocated in Zhuhai even before their announcement.

That someone, somewhere, is helping North Korea to circulate millions of fake dollars is, claims Washington, a fact. The month after the US swooped on Delta Asia, it indicted Sean Garland, senior member of an Irish Republican Army splinter group, of conspiring to do just that.

Whatever the truth of Delta Asia's position, it has become a pawn in a much bigger game, namely the US determination to fight the 'War on Terror' and nuclear proliferation via balance sheets and account ledgers.

The US is furious with North Korea's refusal to give up its nuclear programme, accusing it of making missiles, not electricity.

It says Pyongyang funds arms and terrorism through a range of rackets including drug smuggling and the counterfeiting of its currency and its cigarette brands.

Macau was inevitably going to come under Washington's gaze in this strategic game of cat and mouse, given its known trading links with North Korea (including one of the few scheduled air links with Pyongyang).

And yet Washington has been conspicuously silent about China's role in the saga, even though it claims Jogwang Trading is now operating from the Mainland.

China is one of the few countries to maintain formal diplomatic ties with North Korea. President Hu Jintao made an official visit to Pyongyang as recently as October and may relish the opportunity to grab favourable headlines around the world by helping the US to broker a nuclear containment deal that would benefit Beijing and Washington.

If the price for that deal is that America be allowed to bully Macau and Banco Delta Asia publicly, then it's probably considered by the Chinese to be a price worth paying.