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<p>[QUOTE=&quot;Art Wilkerson, post: 3031532, member: 88525&quot;]On April 23, 1970 a Korean delegation signed the contract with Italcambio in Italy.&nbsp;&nbsp; The meeting took place at the Korean embassy in Rome and was attended by Yi Myeon-seok (in place of the Director of the Bank of Korea, Suh Jin-soo), Mario Pizzorni, the President and founder of Italcambio, Yu Jae-heung, the Korean ambassador to Italy, and Pak Bo-Hee, head of the Korean Cultural &amp; Freedom Foundation (KCFF).&nbsp;&nbsp; The contract that these men entered into that day stipulated an unusual, reciprocal scheme between the Bank of Korea, the KCFF, and Italcambio. </p><p><br /></p><p>The parties agreed that the Bank of Korea was to be the official contracting authority with Italcambio;&nbsp; However, the KCFF was to play the role of the Bank of Korea´s proxy as the &quot;distribution authority,&quot; while Italcambio would fulfill its dual role as the manufacturer and as the &quot;exclusive world agent&quot; for the sale of the commemorative coins.&nbsp;&nbsp; The roles and responsibilities of each party are detailed in the diagram on the right. </p><p><img src="http://dokdo-research.com/trirelat1.jpg" class="bbCodeImage wysiwygImage" alt="" unselectable="on" /></p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p>The contract with Italcambio further stipulated that: </p><p><br /></p><p>1)&nbsp;&nbsp; Twenty percent of all profits from the sales of these commemorative coins were to go directly from Italcambio to the KCFF (and not to the Bank of Korea).</p><p><br /></p><p>2)&nbsp;&nbsp; In its capacity as &quot;distribution authority,&quot; the KCFF would be responsible for overseeing the manufacture of the coining dies, the handling of the coins, and quality control.</p><p><br /></p><p>3)&nbsp;&nbsp; The Bank of Korea would not issue other gold and silver coins during the contract period (at the request of Italcambio).</p><p><br /></p><p>4)&nbsp;&nbsp; Italcambio, for its part, would not enter into a minting contract with the North Koreans.</p><p><br /></p><p>5)&nbsp;&nbsp; The contract to mint and sell the coins would last four years from the date of signing (April 23, 1970). </p><p><br /></p><p>The ostensible reasoning behind this three-party arrangement was because the Koreans wanted to sell the gold and silver coins overseas to non-Koreans in an effort to promote South Korea (using the external entities of the KCFF in Washington, and Italcambio with its branches worldwide).&nbsp;&nbsp; Also, selling the coins outside of Korea through Italcambio´s sales network would circumvent some legal issues involving their importation and sale in Korea.&nbsp;&nbsp; Although a full explanation of the KCFF´s involvement (and the performance of its supposed duties) in this sales scheme does not exist in the available literature on this subject, an equally important consideration was the effort to fund the KCFF:&nbsp; A US government investigation uncovered documents that the KCFF called this the &quot;Coin Project.&quot;&nbsp; Pak Bo-hee and Yang Yu-chan had obviously wangled their twenty-percent cut from the contract after Yang was the first to warn the Korean president of the supposed impending release of the North Korean commemorative coins.&nbsp; The veracity of Yang´s claim about the North Korean coins has never been proven.&nbsp; Permission for the KCFF to skim the profits from the coin contract came from Korean Central Intelligence Agency (KCIA) director Kim Kye-won (who was later one of the only four witnesses to President Park Chung-hee´s assassination in October 1979).[/QUOTE]</p><p><br /></p>

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