Here’s a quandary: do you hate a King who conned the North Koreans, or throw the book at him? Is there a lesson to be learned here about how to “take Kim Jong-il”?

Mr [Russell] King, who is now believed to be on the lam in Bahrain, first convinced directors of small investment bank First London Plc to hand over 49% of the company to him, in return for his apparently colossal business. This done, he used First London to finance an investment in Notts County, a Midlands football club with a proud history, now plying its trade in the lower divisions.

Mr Eriksson, drawn in by the promise of shares in Swiss Commodity Holdings (SCH), a vehicle of Mr King’s, was duly installed as football director at County. He was joined there for a time by another fellow dupe, Sol Campbell, an ex-Arsenal and England star. Messrs King and Eriksson ventured to Pyongyang on SCH business, where they are reported to have made a deal with officials in the North Korean government to grant them exclusive rights to the impoverished nation’s gold mines. “I was in the palace and they were handing over to the North Korean government so-called shares”, Mr Eriksson told BBC’s investigative news programme “Panorama”. “They used my name”, he laments; there was even talk of him managing the North Korean football team.

Those who follow developments in North Korea tend to prefer casting Kim Jong Il as an evil genius—crazy like a fox—rather than as merely crazy. While there can be no doubting that he has it in him to run circles around America and China, the Dear Leader appears to be no match for a silver-tongued conman of Russell King’s stature.

It seems the North Koreans either like capitalism and charlatans equally. Or, unburdened with democracy and unpracticed with the riff-raff it can vomit up, the Dear Leader met his match. Sign up Mr. King for an ambassadorship?

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Filed under: Business/Economy, Europe, Korea, Sports Tagged: kim jong il, north korea, premier league, russell king, sven-goran eriksson