Seoul firms set for push into N. Korea

Seoul firms set for push into N. Korea

SEOUL (Reuter): South Korean businesses yesterday set out plans to break into the long-frozen North Korean market as the Seoul government prepared to lift its economic embargo on the communist North.

The nation's major business conglomerates said their top managers would visit North Korea as soon as possible in order to reopen trade and investment links with Pyongyang.

"South-North business relations have just been through a long hibernation," said Chun Woo-taik, spokesman at the Daewoo Group.

"We are ready to resume operations in the North upon the government's approval," he added.

South Korea banned practically all economic contact with the North in late 1992 after a brief period of detente collapsed due to a diplomatic rumpus over the North's nuclear program.

But President Kim Young-sam said on Monday an agreement between the United States and the North, struck last month in Geneva to reshape North Korea's nuclear program, had laid the groundwork for a fundamental solution of the nuclear issue.

Pyongyang agreed to return to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty and allow UN inspections of its atomic facilities, suspected of developing nuclear bombs, in exchange for $4 billion in aid to build safer atomic plants.

The Seoul government, heartened by the nuclear agreement, said it planned to reveal details this week of its lifting of the ban on South Korean business visits and investment.