| Pak Nam-gi | |
 | |
| Korean name | |
|---|---|
| Chosŏn'gŭl | 박남기 |
| Hancha | |
| Revised Romanization | Bak Namgi |
| McCune–Reischauer | Pak Namgi |
Pak Nam-gi or Park Nam-ki (21 February 1934 – 17 March 2010) was, until as late as January 2010,[1] Director of the Planning and Finance Department of the ruling party of North Korea. There are doubts about his date of birth, with at least two unattributed sources[2][3] reporting it as 21 February 1934 or sometime in 1928 respectively.
In March 2010, it was reported by news agencies including Yonhap,[4] Bloomberg,[5] and The Guardian[6] that Pak had been tried and then executed by firing squad in Pyongyang for the offense of being "a son of a bourgeois conspiring to infiltrate the ranks of revolutionaries to destroy the national economy". According to the Guardian, he had been denounced as a traitor during a meeting in January 2010 and arrested on the spot. This related to the devaluation of the North Korean won in November 2009, which led to a crisis after rendering valueless many people's savings.[7][8] Following his execution, Pak was subsequently edited out of various official films and photographs.[9]
Although John Park, a Stanton junior faculty fellow at MIT, claimed in 2012 that Pak Nam-gi is still alive and had resurfaced after his alleged execution,[10] Ri Je-gang, the former First Deputy Head of the WPK Organization and Guidance Department, says Pak Nam-gi was executed by firing squad in the course of a reactionary purge in 2010.[11]
In December 2013 when Jang Sung-taek, uncle of supreme leader Kim Jong-un, was executed, amongst the charges against Jang was that Jang had been the "wirepuller behind the scene" of "Pak Nam Gi, traitor for all ages".[12]