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The United States was hopeful Wednesday to build on talks with North Korea this week to resume nuclear negotiations this month and suggested flexibility on the venue for a separate meeting on financial sanctions.

Chief U.N. nuclear envoy Christopher Hill met North Korean counterpart Kim Kye-gwan for a second day in Berlin on Wednesday, continuing groundwork discussions on the six-party talks, State Department spokesman Tom Casey said at a daily briefing.

The talks were designed "to make sure that when we reconvene the six-party talks, that there's real progress that can be made in them," he said.

"Hopefully, we can continue to build on that and will be able to reconvene the talks sooner rather than later."

South and North Korea, the U.S., China, Russia and Japan are members of the multilateral forum aimed at denuclearizing the Korean Peninsula. After 13 months in suspension, the talks restarted last month in Beijing.

The U.S. proposed a "package" solution that combines and sequences actions and incentives that in the end would lead to Pyongyang eliminating its nuclear weapons and programs. Six-party participants are pressing the North to come back to the dialogue table with its answer to the proposal.

Hill was visiting Berlin to make a speech at the American Academy. His meeting with Kim was not announced beforehand.

Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice was due to arrive in Germany on Wednesday, but it wasn't confirmed whether she will be able to see Hill to get a briefing.

He described the talks, which on Tuesday continued for six hours in two separate sessions, as "useful" and "productive."

A State Department official, speaking on background only, said the length of the contact suggests it was useful. "If not, they would have given up long before (six hours)," he said.

The December session veered off track when Pyongyang's envoys insisted on first discussing U.S. financial sanctions imposed on the North. A separate meeting on the issue was slated for this month, with the U.S. proposing New York as the venue.

Casey indicated flexibility, saying the location was not important.

"If people want to do it elsewhere, I am sure there would be reasonable opportunity to do that," he said.

Reuters reported earlier that the Treasury was combing through North Korean accounts at the Banco Delta Asia, a bank in Macau accused of laundering money for Pyongyang, and considering releasing the money confirmed to be from licit sources.

Casey said such separation of licit and illicit money was a complicated process.

"I would steer people away... from ever being able to say that you can separate out where individual dollars in individual accounts came from," he said.

"The fact of the matter is that what we are looking at in the discussions with the North Koreans on this subject is a way of making sure that the fundamental causes of problems that resulted in these sanctions in the first place are addressed."

Washington, Jan. 17 (Yonhap News)