N.Korean leader meets Egyptian telecom tycoon

SEOUL, S.KOREA: North Korea's reclusive leader Kim Jong-il held a rare meeting with a foreign business leader when he hosted a banquet for the Egyptian chairman of Orascom Telecom, Naguib Sawiris, the North's media said on Monday.

The mobile telephone company has set up a network in the North's capital, Pyongyang, and invested in work aimed at completing a city skyscraper that had been deserted for more than a decade.

"(Kim) ... warmly welcomed his DPRK visit taking place at a time when Orascom's investment is making successful progress in different fields of the DPRK, including telecommunications," the North's KCNA news agency said.

DPRK stands for the Democratic People's Republic of Korea, the official name of the North, which has been hit by international sanctions over its nuclear programme. The sanctions are aimed at stifling its arms trade.

KCNA gave no details about what investment Orascom had made.

The Middle Eastern mobile operator initialed a North Korean contract worth more than $400 million in 2008, media reports said.

There have been no official reports of reclusive leader Kim meeting a visiting foreign business executive since 1998 other than delegations from the South's Hyundai conglomerate, South Korea's Unification Ministry said.

Hyundai developed a factory park in the North where more than 100 South Korean firms use cheap North Korean labour and land to produce consumer goods that get shipped back to the South. The project has been a major source of hard cash for the North.