North Korean leader denounces corruption in military at rare joint meeting in Pyongyang

North Korean leader Kim Jong-un denounced corruption in the military as he attended a joint meeting of the ruling party, government and army, state media said Saturday.

The rare meeting took place in Pyongyang on Friday "to give a warning to all sorts of antirevolutionary, antisocialist, anti-people acts going against the trend of the times," the North's Korean Central News Agency (KCNA) said in an English dispatch.

In particular, the meeting addressed the case of Pak Hui-chol, former vice-director in charge of organizational affairs of the General Political Bureau of the People's Army, who the agency said was punished by the Supreme Court for engaging in various forms of corruption.

"During the past four years when he had been in a responsible post of the political organ, he created special illusions about him while being engrossed in all sorts of abuses of authority and arbitrariness, and received a large amount of bribes from dishonest elements obsessed with greed and thirst for a high post and embezzled them," the KCNA said.

"Pak Hui Chol's scandals are extra-large crimes that go beyond imagination in view of their dangerousness and harmfulness," it added.

In his remarks to the meeting, Kim pointed to the gravity of Pak's corruption at a time when the ruling party has declared "an all-out war against the abuse of power, bureaucratism, and irregularities and corruption."

He "stressed that all the officials should keep principle and uprightness as their lifeblood and should be mindful of the Party's trust and think of the people first," the KCNA said.

Kim also "clarified the solemn stand of the Party Central Committee to steadily enhance the intensity of the organizational and ideological offensive for transforming the ranks of cadres into an elite and the legal struggle for rooting out the irregularities and corruption," it said.

Yonhap