Russia’s UN Claims vs. Its Own Registry: Tracking DPRK Ownership in EGRUL
by Robin Dost
EDIT 15.10.2026:
Clarified the ASM/Grinton connection, corrected Pak’s tax ID, and tightened wording to distinguish documented registry entries from unproven assumptions about ownership transfers, physical presence and company succession.
A few hours after publication, EGRUL was no longer accessible from our connection or proxy pool and displayed an error message.
According to users in the official FNS Telegram chat, the service is supposed to be restored on October 16.
We were unable to independently verify this claim for EGRUL itself. The October 16 date does appear in official communications, but for a different outage.
Reporting operator Kaluga Astral, whose Yandex-hosted data centers were damaged in drone strikes on October 8 and 11, initially set October 14 as its restoration target, with October 16 named as a fallback if the relaunch ran into problems. No comparable restoration date has been published for the EGRUL service.
In March 2024, the UN Panel of Experts on North Korea published its final report (S/2024/215) before Russia vetoed the panel out of existence.
Annex 79 is an awkward reading for Moscow:
Dozens of Russian companies with alleged DPRK ownership, some of them tied to sanctioned IT-worker and labor-export schemes.
Russias formal replies, reproduced in the same annex, follow a comforting pattern:
The North Korean founder? He left. Years ago. Removed from the ownership structure. Nothing to see here.
Comforting and very easy to check.
Russia runs a public company register, EGRUL and the tax service hands out extracts to anyone who asks the server nicely.
So we asked nicely.
On 14 October 2026 we pulled fresh EGRUL extracts for all 83 company INNs from our Annex 79-based working list, including the additional Grinton case and compared them, line by line, with what Russia told the UN.
Spoiler: The register did not get the memo.
The scoreboard first
Of the companies where Russia assured the UN that the DPRK founder had exited the ownership structure, the register as of 14.10.2026 shows the opposite or a fresh DPRK national walking in through the front door, in at least 12 cases.
Across all 83 companies:
- 61 still show at least one person whose citizenship field reads “Корейская Народно-Демократическая Республика” – the registers own words
- 36 carry a formal “information unreliable” flag (недостоверные сведения) – Russias own registry flagging information as unreliable; the affected field and reason must be checked in each entry;
- 33 are dead- mostly struck off by the state, which is one way to make a problem go away, we suppose;
- and several that are very much alive acquired new North Korean owners in 2024-2026.
After the UN report. After the assurances.
Let’s meet the highlights.
Choki: the founder left, and then a completely different North Korean bought the whole thing
OOO Choki (INN 9709058310, a Moscow restaurant company) was one of the cases where Russia told the panel the DPRK founder had departed in 2019-2020 and been removed from the ownership structure.
The UN table names that founder: Jon Gil Ryon (Джон Киль Рён, DPRK, INN 972905167320), 100% owner.
Now here is where it gets beautiful. Registry history shows the same personal tax ID still holding those shares in December 2022 – and right up until 11 November 2025.
The founder Russia said had left years earlier never actually left the register.
What happened on 11 November 2025 instead: the shares moved to a new sole owner, Kim Zu Hyang (Ким Зу Хянг, INN 775163195990) – explicitly recorded as a DPRK citizen, holding 100%.
To be clear about the timeline here:
By the time the UN report appeared in March 2024, registry history still showed the same North Korean as the owner, despite the reported removal.
In November 2025, a change of ownership was finally registered.
The new registered owner: another North Korean.
If this is what removal looks like, we’d hate to see retention.
Chebeoton: new North Korean owner, no tax ID, and a very familiar address
OOO Chebeoton (INN 2540272806, Vladivostok) appears in the UN report with a Kim Sang Man as shareholder.
On 4 March 2026, ownership moved to one Ton U Jin (Тон У Джин) explicitly DPRK, 100% of the shares and no personal tax number recorded at all.
The extract records no personal INN, which limits identity matching; it does not establish that he has no tax ID.
Four weeks later, on 1 April 2026, Chebeoton moved its registered address to Ul. Raevskogo 18, Vladivostok.
The exact address that OOO Alis had moved to on 19 March 2026.
Alis, for those keeping score, is the company the US Treasury designated on 27 March 2024 as a DPRK IT-worker front, run by Andrei Babkin.
And Chebeotons director since July 2024, Irina Ignatenko (INN 253802000907)?
She also directs OOO Arirang, which on 23 June 2025 quietly changed hands from the UN-named Shin Hye Ok to a new sole owner, Kim Son Hi (INN 253619894268), also explicitly DPRK.
A North Korean-to-North Korean handover.
Very inclusive.
Koryo Group: gone, except for the 50% stake and the bankruptcy trustee
OOO Koryo Group (INN 7725410416) got the same “founder exited” treatment in Russias replies.
The register as of 14 October 2026:
Han Chhol Ho (INN 772992694363, explicitly DPRK) is still listed with 50%, with the relevant entry dated December 2017.
Still there in the register.
What did change:
On 30 April 2026 a bankruptcy trustee was entered in the register.
So the company is insolvent, but even in insolvency, the North Korean co-owner Russia said had exited is right there in the extract, presumably waiting for the creditors meeting like everyone else.
Bugan: The owner who left so hard he became the liquidator
OOO Bugan (INN 5263150929, Nizhny Novgorod) made local news back in 2023 over a job ad for North Korean construction workers.
Russia told the panel the DPRK founder had long departed.
The register shows Kang Sen Chin (INN 526003670064, DPRK) as 100% owner from incorporation in December 2022 all the way to the companys forced strike-off on 8 December 2025.
In between, in July 2024, he was appointed… liquidator.
The man who supposedly left Russia years earlier was later registered as its liquidator. That entry does not establish his physical whereabouts or that he completed the liquidation himself.
A hands-on approach to not being involved.
The “this company does not exist” that existed
Our personal favorite in the reply column is OOO Enisei (INN 2466210127), about which Russia informed the panel that no company of this name exists. EGRUL records its history: it existed from 2008 until its strike-off on 26 June 2023, more than eight months before the report came out, wholly owned by one Kim Dok Sam, and directed by Li En Cher (DPRK, INN 525801031616), who simultaneously owned 100% of the identically themed OOO Enisei-K next door in the annex.
The company therefore did exist historically, but its June 2023 strike-off means this alone does not contradict a later statement that it no longer existed.
A possible follow-up: Grinton, 2024
OOO ASM (INN 2807007600), the Amur region company where Russia claimed founder Pak Ki Khek left the country and was removed from ownership, was liquidated in March 2024 with Pak still registered at 100%.
ASM records Pak’s personal INN as 280130120714. Its extract lists Alexander Rebro as liquidator; it does not establish a shared director with Grinton.
On 13 June 2024, three months later, a brand-new OOO Grinton (INN 2543185252) was incorporated in Vladivostok with a “Pak Ki Khek”, DPRK citizen, as sole owner, without a personal tax ID recorded in the entry and Andrei Babkin as director.
Is it the same Pak? The matching name and citizenship make this a lead, but Grinton’s missing personal INN prevents a conclusive identity match. A shared director has not been established.
What the register does say plainly:
Pak remained registered as ASM’s sole owner at liquidation.
A newly incorporated company then recorded a DPRK owner with the same name. A transfer of ownership or business from ASM to Grinton has not been established.
Methodology and the honest fine print
The register findings above draw on official EGRUL extracts dated 14 October 2026, pulled for all 83 company INNs on our Annex 79-based working list, including the additional Grinton case, cross-checked against the reports reply column and secondary aggregators.
Full structured dataset (companies, persons, INNs, shares, GRN entry dates, hashes of the source PDFs) is available on request.
Now the part where we have to be clear: A register entry is not proof of operational control.
It’s theoretically possible some of these founders exited in practice and nobody bothered to file the paperwork, which would be its own story about registry hygiene, but a different one.
It’s possible some “DPRK citizen” entries are stale.
Names without tax IDs (Ton U Jin, the Grinton Pak) can’t be identity-matched with certainty and we haven’t claimed otherwise.
One sourcing note:
Current EGRUL extracts show only the current owner, so the pre-2025 ownership chain at Choki rests on registry-history aggregators mirroring the same register.
The INN match between the UN-named founder and the 2022-2025 holder is exact.
What is not possible, reading the same documents Russias own tax authority publishes.
That the register supports the assurances given to the UN.
It doesn’t.
In at least twelve cases it records continued or renewed DPRK ownership. Continued registration challenges claims of removal; a later new owner alone does not disprove an earlier exit. In 2025 and 2026 it shows new North Korean owners arriving, not departing.
Russia vetoed the Panel of Experts out of existence in March 2024.
The register, apparently, keeps publishing.
Data & replication: structured JSON of all 83 extracts + per-finding source pages available on request.
Companies marked in the UN table with South Korean counter-claims (AMC, Vitamin ABC) were excluded from DPRK attribution, the register lists those individuals as Republic of Korea citizens and we see no reason to argue with it.
Nobody was contacted for this piece, everything is public-record.
