Manila – A North Korean vessel impounded as part of tough new sanctions in response to Pyongyang’s nuclear and ballistic missile tests has been released, the Philippines said Friday.

The Jin Teng, a 6,380-tonne cargo ship, was allowed to leave Subic port, northeast of the capital Manila, where it had been held since early March under the United Nations sanctions.

“It was authorised (Thursday). We had an order to release it from the Department of Foreign Affairs,” coast guard spokesman Commander Armand Balilo told AFP.

The 21 North Korean crewmen on board were also allowed to leave with the ship, he added.

The ship’s impoundment was the first reported enforcement of the sanctions, the toughest ever imposed on the pariah state, which were adopted on March 2 by the UN Security Council.

Subic coastguard chief Lieutenant Commander Jonathan Marfil said the vessel left for China after being cleared by customs, immigration and port authorities.

“There was a directive from headquarters to release it (because) the UN Security Council issued an order,” he told AFP.

“At the policy level, there is no more basis to continue to hold MV Jin Teng after UNSC delisted it” from a blacklist of North Korean assets frozen as part of the sanctions, Department of Foreign Affairs spokesman Charles Jose said in a statement.

The Jin Teng, which was carrying palm kernels, arrived in the Philippines from Palembang, Indonesia on March 3, just hours after the UN sanctions were unanimously passed.

The Philippine coastguard inspected the ship for contraband using electronic sensors but found nothing.

The UN Security Council ruled on March 21 that the Jin Teng was not subject to the asset freeze, a statement on the UN website said.

TOKYO – Japan executed two death row prisoners on Friday, the justice ministry said, dismissing calls from international rights groups to end capital punishment.

Convicted murderers Yasutoshi Kamata and Junko Yoshida were executed by hanging, bringing the total number of people put to death since Prime Minister Shinzo Abe came to power in 2012 to 16.

Yoshida, 56, killed two men in the late 1990s as part of a plot to obtain insurance money, the justice ministry said. She is the fifth woman to be executed in more than 60 years.

Kamata, 75, was convicted of murdering four women between 1985 and 1994 – and a nine-year-old girl who started screaming as he tried to sexually abuse her.

Justice Minister Mitsuhide Iwaki, who authorised the executions, said they had committed “extremely heinous” crimes that “took the precious lives of the victims for very selfish reasons”.

Japan and the United States are the only wealthy democracies that still use capital punishment, and rights group Amnesty International said Tokyo’s decision was a step backwards.

“The execution of two death-row inmates is extremely deplorable, and goes against the global trend for abolishing capital punishment,” said Hideki Wakabayashi, its Japan secretary general.

“Despite the fact that about 140 countries in the world have already abandoned or have stopped executions for more than a decade, the Japanese government is turning its back on the trend,” he told AFP.

The death penalty has overwhelming public support in Japan, according to surveys, despite repeated protests from European governments and human rights groups.

Advocacy groups say Japan’s system is cruel because inmates can wait for their executions for many years in solitary confinement and are only told of their impending death a few hours ahead of time.

Iwaki, who authorised the executions, defended the executions, saying the death sentence is a “grave punishment” that “requires careful implementation”.

“At the same time, in a country ruled by law, enforcement of a court verdict has to be carried out with strict fairness,” he told reporters.

In December, Japan executed two death row prisoners, including for the first time someone sentenced to death after a trial involving a jury.

Those sparked criticism by the European Union, which called the death penalty “cruel and inhuman” and demanded Japan impose a moratorium on executions.

Wakabayashi also said Tokyo should be “severely criticised” for carrying out the executions just ahead of the Group of Seven summit due to be held in Japan in late May.

Japan in 2009 launched a jury system in which citizens deliberate with professional judges in a bid to boost the role of the citizenry in the judicial process.

Beijing – The Chinese art market plummeted last year, with auction sales of living artists’ works falling by 45 per cent as slowing growth and a corruption crackdown under President Xi Jinping took their toll, a survey said Thursday.

By far the most valuable artist was ink painter Cui Ruzhuo, 72, who is known for his large-scale traditional landscapes, said wealth publisher the Hurun Report, which collated auction results for the 100 most lucrative Chinese artists.

Cui’s works fetched $120.4 million (S$165.1 million), it said, far ahead of second-placed oil painter Zeng Fanzhi, who saw his sales value crash by 62 per cent.

There were no figures to indicate whether the average price of individual works had decreased.

“A heady mix of the continued anti-corruption campaign, which has put a stop to gifting art to government officers, and a slowdown in the economy have combined to see both sales and the number of top works at auction pretty much halve,” said Hurun Report chairman Rupert Hoogewerf.

Growth in the world’s second-largest economy slowed to its weakest in a quarter of a century last year at 6.9 per cent, a far cry from the double-digit boom years of the past.

Even so, greater China surpassed the US last year to become home to the largest population of billionaires in the world, Hurun said in a previous report – indicating an increase in the pool of potential super-wealthy art collectors.

The 100 artists’ auction sales totalled $565 million.

Only three artists on the list were women. They included Chen Peiqiu, age 94, at number 16.

A surprising new entry was Jack Ma, CEO of internet giant Alibaba, whose inclusion came courtesy of a collaborative painting he executed with Zeng Fanzhi that sold at Sotheby’s in Hong Kong for $5.3 million.

Cui was one of just eight artists who saw an increase in sales, with his revenues up 69 per cent from 2014.

He made headlines last April when an eight-panelled snowy mountainscape of his sold for $30 million at Poly Auction in Hong Kong – the highest ever by a living Asian artist.

At the same auction the year before, another of his landscapes that sold for $3.7 million was mistaken for rubbish and thrown out by cleaners, with Cui telling the Wall Street Journal: “I believe it was an accident.”

Though many believe China’s art market has been overheated in recent years, Cui told fellow artists that it was a national imperative to increase the value of their work.

“Our current downturn and backwardness shouldn’t discourage us; we artists should unite together and for the sake of our art market and our nation walk out towards the world, hand in hand, striving ardently together,” he said.

Huang Jiannan, a self-taught artist ranked seventh on Hurun’s list, saw the auction value of his works drop by 45 per cent last year, but he shrugged off the loss.

“These statistics measure the flow of my works in the market – it has nothing to do with me. I don’t get the money from these sales directly,” he told AFP.

He pointed to a Mao pin on his lapel.

“I worship Mao Zedong.” Huang’s auction sales totalled $13.1 million last year, according to Hurun.

Critics such as Xie Chunyan believe that focusing on auction values is a poor judge of Chinese artists’ worth: “Just because this little British guy Hoogewerf says he wants to find a common standard to measure things 1, 2, 3 doesn’t mean that this is the best method.”

Shanghai – China’s central bank said Friday that firms involved in Internet finance had set up an industry association, as authorities try to get a handle on the rapidly growing but weakly regulated sector.

The group will seek to “self-regulate” the industry at a time of growing risk from Internet financing, according to a transcript of a speech by a People’s Bank of China (PBoC) official at the opening ceremony.

Its establishment followed revelations last month that a well-known peer-to-peer (P2P) lending firm called Ezubao had bilked 900,000 investors out of $7.6 billion (S$10.4 billion) in what a company executive called a “Ponzi scheme”.

The Shanghai-based industry association groups online payment providers, P2P lenders and other Internet finance entities, PBoC deputy governor Pan Gongsheng said, according to the transcript posted on the central bank website.

“We must fully understand that Internet financing institutions lack familiarity with risk,” Pan said.

He added many were unaware of the need to abide by regulations, protect consumer rights, oppose money laundering or combat financing for terrorism.

“Industry self-regulation is beneficial and strongly supports administrative supervision,” he said.

Members of the new industry group include major banks and financial firms, as well as P2P lenders and retailers with online sales, reports said, among them Bank of China and P2P giant Lufax, which is linked to financial Ping An Insurance Group.

China has nearly 2,600 platforms described as P2P businesses, according to industry website www.wdzj.com, with transactions valued at around $150 billion last year.

Online and mobile payment services are dominated by e-commerce giant Alibaba, with nearly three-quarters of the market, followed by Tencent – operator of the popular messaging app WeChat – which has some 17 per cent, according to Beijing-based BigData Research.

But Tencent is keen to expand in the area while US technology giant Apple recently entered the market by launching Apple Pay.

Pan said Internet financing could boost efficiency, lower costs and introduce more channels of funding.

Small, private firms especially have looked online for financing as many are shut out of the state-dominated banking system.