(Bloomberg) -- President Donald Trump threw U.S. sanctions policy toward North Korea into confusion on Friday, saying he ordered the withdrawal of “additional large scale” penalties his government imposed against against the country.

It was not immediately clear what he meant. Trump said the new sanctions had been issued on Friday, but the Treasury Department made no such announcement. Treasury announced sanctions against two Chinese shipping companies on Thursday to punish them for alleged violations of existing sanctions against shipments to North Korea.

Spokespeople for the White House and the Treasury Department didn’t immediately respond to requests to clarify Trump’s announcement, which left unclear which sanctions he’d reversed.

“This is utterly shocking,” John Smith, a former director of the Office of Foreign Assets Control at Treasury, which issues and polices sanctions, said in an e-mail. “The president of the United States actively undercut his own sanctions agency for the benefit of North Korea.”

White House spokeswoman Sarah Huckabee Sanders said in a statement: “President Trump likes Chairman Kim and he doesn’t think these sanctions will be necessary,” referring to North Korean leader Kim Jong Un. She also didn’t specify which sanctions Trump planned to withdraw.

One of the two Chinese shipping companies, Dalian Haibo International Freight Co. Ltd, is doing business with a sanctioned North Korean company, Treasury said in a statement on Thursday. The other, Liaoning Danxing International Forwarding Co. Ltd., was sanctioned for “operating in the transportation industry in North Korea,” Treasury said.

The U.S. also updated a North Korea shipping advisory, adding dozens of vessels that are believed to have engaged in ship-to-ship transfers of oil with North Korean tankers or exported North Korean coal in order to evade sanctions.

Trump’s national security adviser, John Bolton, publicly applauded the actions on Thursday. “The maritime industry must do more to stop North Korea’s illicit shipping practices,” he said in a tweet, adding that “everyone should take notice and review their own activities to ensure they are not involved in North Korea’s sanctions evasion.”

Trump abruptly ended a summit with Kim in Hanoi last month after the president said the North Korean leader asked for all U.S. sanctions to be lifted in exchange for the dismantling of the country’s main nuclear facility. Each side has blamed the other, with the U.S. saying North Korea demanded too much sanctions relief and Pyongyang faulting Washington for rejecting its promises to reduce its nuclear program.

Two days after the summit, new images from Beyond Parallel, part of the Washington-based Center for Strategic and International Studies, showed that North Korea was rebuilding a long-range rocket site at the Sohae Launch Facility. The site was dismantled after Trump’s June summit with Kim in an apparent show of goodwill by Pyongyang.

To contact the reporters on this story: Margaret Talev in Washington at mtalev@bloomberg.net;Saleha Mohsin in Washington at smohsin2@bloomberg.net

To contact the editors responsible for this story: Alex Wayne at awayne3@bloomberg.net, Justin Blum

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