One good thing about being a world leader, or even better if you’re a dictator, must be not having to pay too much attention to procurement departments when you need to meet at the highest level.
Following the film that provoked a North Korean backlash, comes a unique story of a summit meeting that never was in a book to make Pyongyang choke on its kimchi.
In 2009, Kim Jong Il, father of the current North Korean leader, demanded $10bn to meet Lee Myung Bak, his South Korean counterpart at a summit in 2009.
The expensive approach is revealed in President’s Time, the autobiography of President Lee Myung Bak, published this month (February 2015).
I wonder who handled the RFP for that proposed $10bn meeting and whether procurement signed it off in Seoul before Lee, a staunch conservative, dismissed the North’s meetings T&Cs.
“It was absurd for the North to call for assistance to help sweeten the atmosphere,” he wrote. “We shouldn’t be haggling for a summit.”
Another South Korean leader, Kim Dae Jung, won the Nobel peace prize in the wake of a visit to Pyongyang for a summit with Kim Jong Il in 2000. It later emerged the South had paid $450m for the privilege. I assume Mr Kim (from the South that is) was keener to meet Il duce of juche. Not sure whether the ROI worked out on that one.
The meeting room at Panmunjeom that straddles the DMZ on the Korean states’ border has quite a bit of natural daylight, but not, to my knowledge, too many grazing stations or smoothie machines on tap.
At the end of January it was claimed that Kim Jong Un had accepted an invitation to visit Russia.
RFPs on an email, please, to the People’s Democratic Republic of Korea’s Directorate for Procurement.
Paul Colston, Managing editor, Conference and Meetings World.
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