After more than a dozen petitions from a whistleblower at a farm in Unpa county, North Hwanghae province, were ignored by the county and provincial party committees, a petition finally reached the Central Committee, which dispatched a group of inspectors to investigate.
A source in the province told Daily NK recently that the Central Committee acted on a petition it received after 13 earlier petitions from a worker at the Choksong Cotton Farm in Unpa county were ignored by the county and provincial party committees.
The whistleblower was reporting internal corruption connected with planned output at the farm. But the county and provincial party committees reportedly found the behavior too common to merit a case.
When more than a dozen of his petitions were snubbed, the infuriated whistleblower sent the petition directly to the Central Committee, which took on the case and initiated a large-scale investigation of the farm.
A group of more than 20 investigators arrived at the farm for a weeklong investigation Oct. 1-7.
“The arrival of such an unexpectedly large group of investigators from the Central Committee sent party committees at the provincial and county level, as well as the management of the Choksong Cotton Farm, into a panic,” the source said.
Falsified records, diverted output
The group of investigators looked into whether there was corruption in the farm’s output planning as alleged in the petition. Investigators found evidence that the deputy chair of the farm’s management committee and officials from the county party committee and the county’s agricultural management committee had been falsely reporting the farm’s planned output.
“The farm had been exaggerating its actual cotton output for August and claimed in documents that part of the crop was being ‘reserved in the warehouse.’ But when investigators actually opened the warehouse, they found it full of empty sacks. A more serious issue is that some of the cotton output was diverted to a private workshop run by the families of farm managers,” the source said.
The final report submitted by investigators detailed farm managers’ fabrication of documents and illicit self-enrichment.
The investigators are also looking into why the whistleblower’s petitions were so stubbornly ignored. Considering that more than a dozen petitions were dismissed on identical grounds — as “minor errors that do not merit an investigation” — the investigators regard this not as mere administrative oversight, but as a coordinated coverup.
These findings also appear in the final report sent to the Central Committee’s discipline and investigations bureau, which has recalled most of the investigators while leaving a handful to tie up loose ends.
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