This was primarily accomplished by Germany's undisciplined, non-transparent and largely unmonitored lending of tens of billions of deutschemarks to the Gorbachev regime.
The company is reported to have falsified documents used to justify a grant of 19.6 million Deutschemarks for exploration of coal liquification technologies in order to defray costs of personnel associated with the Pharma 200 program.
In fact, it was a similarly desperate need for funds that initially drove North Korea to borrow a total of 680 million Deutschemarks and 455 million Swiss francs in syndicated loans from nearly 100 foreign banks in the late 1970s.
But in the late 1990s, some of the banks wanted to capitalize on hopes at that time for a reunification between North Korea and South Korea, so they parceled some of the nonperforming loans into two tranches of 293 million Deutschemarks and 217 million Swiss francs.