US and North Korean financial officials are scheduled to resume talks in Beijing on Tuesday on the 16-month-old sanctions, which have prevented Pyongyang from discussing nuclear issues at the six-nation talks.

In September 2005, the US Treasury banned US financial institutions from doing business with a Macao bank, which it accused of serving as a key conduit for North Korea's counterfeiting and money laundering.

The ban resulted in a freeze on 24 million dollars-worth of North Korean accounts at the bank, Banco Delta Asia, choking Pyongyang's access to the international banking system.

But the US Treasury is now considering removing from the ban 13 million dollars-worth of North Korean accounts that are not deemed related to illegal financial activities, the major Japanese newspaper Yomiuri Shimbun reported.

Yomiuri, quoting US congressional sources, said the Treasury was acting in response to pressure from the US State Department, which wants to see progress in the six-nation nuclear talks involving the two Koreas, China, Japan, Russia and the United States.

Pyongyang, which has denied allegations of illegal financial activities, has demanded the lifting of the sanctions as a precondition to its return to the nuclear talks.

The six-way talks resumed in December in Beijing after a 13-month break but ended in deadlock.

A rare one-on-one meeting this month in Berlin between chief US envoy to the six-nation talks, Christopher Hill, and his North Korean counterpart, Kim Kye-Gwan, led to the new round of talks on the financial sanctions.

The six-nation nuclear talks are widely expected to resume in the week of February 5.

All rights reserved. © 2005 Agence France-Presse. Sections of the information displayed on this page (dispatches, photographs, logos) are protected by intellectual property rights owned by Agence France-Presse. As a consequence, you may not copy, reproduce, modify, transmit, publish, display or in any way commercially exploit any of the content of this section without the prior written consent of Agence France-Presse.