By Lee Min-hyung

The Singaporean government is likely to pay accommodation costs for North Korean leader Kim Jong-un's much-anticipated visit to the city-state next week for a summit with United States President Donald Trump.

The Fullerton Hotel, where a North Korean advance team has been staying, may be where Kim will stay. A presidential suite room at the five-star luxury hotel costs more than $6,000 (6.43 million won) a day.

The summit is slated for June 12, but Trump indicated the meeting could be extended, so the leaders may stay in Singapore for a couple of days more.

Following the reports, attention is running as to whether the North can cover the cost of accommodation, as the sanctions-hit regime is allegedly running out of hard currency.

The Singaporean government has expressed its willingness to cover the cost for Kim and his delegation's visit to the country if it can help the historic summit produce a good outcome.

"It is a cost that we are willing to bear to play a small part in this historic meeting," Singaporean Defense Minister Ng Eng Hen told reporters Saturday declining to comment on any details.

A global civic group dedicated to fostering a nuclear-free world also offered to cover the cost for Kim's upcoming Singapore trip, Sunday.

The International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons (ICAN), a Geneva-based coalition of non-governmental organizations across the world, called the upcoming summit a "once-in-a-generation" opportunity for nuclear disarmament and said it was willing to pay part of the summit costs to support the ongoing denuclearization drive on the Korean Peninsula.

Akira Kawasaki, an ICAN member, said the organization was willing to use cash earned from the 2017 Nobel Peace Prize to finance the costs.

"The Nobel Peace Prize included a cash prize, and we are offering funds from this to cover the costs for the summit in order to support peace on the Korean Peninsula and a nuclear-weapon-free world," he said.

Earlier in February when North Korea participated in the PyeongChang Winter Olympics, the International Olympic Committee paid the accommodation cost for 22 athletes while the South Korean government covered $2.6 million for the lodging of a North Korean cheering squad and art troupes.

But it is still possible that the North can pay itself in a bid to underline that the regime is a "normal state."

It is unlikely that the U.S. would pay for North Korea, because the North would regard this as an "insult" and it could also breach economic sanctions which Washington has imposed on Pyongyang.

Against a similar backdrop of the accommodation issue, expectations are that North Korean working-level officials may put a priority on making conditions look like Kim is meeting his U.S. counterpart on an equal footing.

For this reason, some forecast the regime may request the Singaporean government not to allow journalists to take photos of Kim's private Chammae-1 aircraft upon his arrival. The plane is a remodeled version of a Soviet-made IL-62 jet, the production of which started back in the 1960s and stopped in 1995.

This is because the regime does not want foreign media to compare his outdated aircraft with Trump's Air Force One.