By Jack Kim and Ju-min Park

SEOUL, March 8 (Reuters) – South Korea mentioned on Tuesday it might impose new sanctions in opposition to 40 people and 30 entities due to suspected hyperlinks to North Korea’s weapons program and would ban vessels that had stopped at North Korean ports up to now 180 days.

The new measures are designed to discourage delivery companies and buying and selling firms from doing enterprise with the North to additional isolate it, South Korea mentioned.

The determination to concern extra unilateral sanctions in opposition to the North follows a U.N. Security Council decision triggered by the isolate state’s fourth nuclear take a look at in January and a long-range rocket launch final month.

Tension within the area is excessive as South Korean and U.S. troops started army workout routines on Monday in an annual take a look at of their defenses in opposition to the North, which referred to as the drills “nuclear war moves” and threatened to reply with an all-out offensive.

The people topic to monetary sanctions introduced on Tuesday embody a Singaporean and a Taiwan nationwide who’re heads of a delivery agency and a buying and selling firm, the federal government mentioned.

South Korea additionally blacklisted a Thai delivery agency referred to as Mariner’s Shipping & Trading and Taiwan firm Royal Team Corporation.

South Korea will ban these on the record from partaking in monetary transactions with South Korean entities and freeze property which might be held within the nation, the federal government mentioned.

After the North’s rocket launch final month, South Korea suspended operations on the Kaesong industrial zone, simply on the North Korean since of their frequent border, which had been run collectively with the North for greater than a decade.

The industrial park, operated with funding from the capitalist South, was a key supply of arduous forex for the impoverished North.

South Korea would additionally discontinue participation in a pilot mission that introduced Russian coal to South Korea by means of the North Korean port of Rajin, a overseas ministry official advised reporters in a joint briefing with different authorities companies.

Trial shipments had been carried out in 2014 and 2015, underneath a consortium involving South Korean steelmaker POSCO, Hyundai Merchant Marine and railway operator Korail, from Rajin.

The three shipments, of a complete 294,000 tonnes of coal, represented lower than 1 % of South Korea’s total imports for that interval.

South Korean President Park Geun-hye and Russian chief Vladimir Putin signed an settlement in 2013 to cooperate and promote the mission linking Russia’s Khasan and Rajin.

Lee Suk-joon, minister of South Korea’s workplace for presidency coverage coordination, mentioned the federal government continued to advise in opposition to South Koreans utilizing North Korean eating places abroad. South Korea views such institutions as a supply of overseas forex for the remoted state. (Editing by Michael Perry, Robert Birsel)

(c) Copyright Thomson Reuters 2016.