R. Hunter Biden Should Declare Who Really Owns His New Ukrainian Employer, Burisma Holdings

Posted on May 21, 2014 by Richard Smith

Here’s last week’s big announcement, adorned by a photograph of an American with a faintly alarming rictus; oh yes, oh dear me, yes: Hunter Biden joins the team of Burisma Holdings:

Burisma Holdings, Ukraine’s largest private gas producer, has expanded its Board of Directors by bringing on Mr. R Hunter Biden as a new director.

R. Hunter Biden will be in charge of the Holdings’ legal unit and will provide support for the Company among international organizations. On his new appointment, he commented: “Burisma’s track record of innovations and industry leadership in the field of natural gas means that it can be a strong driver of a strong economy in Ukraine. As a new member of the Board, I believe that my assistance in consulting the Company on matters of transparency, corporate governance and responsibility, international expansion and other priorities will contribute to the economy and benefit the people of Ukraine.”

Wholehearted approval was not universally forthcoming:

 Isn’t that a bit fishy? Why do you say that?

Because he’s the vice-president’s son! That’s a coincidence. “This is totally based on merit,” said Burisma’s chairman, Alan Apter.

He doesn’t sound very Ukrainian. He’s American, as is the other new board member, Devon Archer.

Who? Devon Archer, who works with Hunter Biden at Rosemont Seneca partners, which is half owned by Rosemont Capital, a private equity firm founded by Archer and Christopher Heinz.

Who? Christopher Heinz … John Kerry’s stepson.

I think Putin’s propaganda people can take a long weekend; their work is being done for them. What do you mean?

Hasn’t Joe Biden pledged to help Ukraine become more energy independent in the wake of its troubles with Russia? Well, yes.

And isn’t Burisma, as a domestic producer, well positioned to profit from rising gas prices caused by the conflict? Possibly, but Hunter Biden is a salaried board member, not an investor. According to anonymous sources in the Wall Street Journal, neither Rosemont Seneca nor Rosemont Capital has made any financial investment in Burisma.

So it’s not fishy at all? No one’s saying that.

Do say: “Somebody needs to get involved in Ukraine’s corporate governance, and it might as well be a clutch of rich, well-connected American dudes with weird first names.”

Don’t say: “Thanks, Dad.”

The White House did the best they could with the optics…

The White House shot down any notion of a conflict of interest with Hunter Biden’s appointment. In a statement provided to Business Insider, Joe Biden spokesperson Kendra Barkoff said Hunter’s appointment did not constitute an endorsement by the vice president.

“Hunter Biden is a private citizen and a lawyer. The Vice President does not endorse any particular company and has no involvement with this company,” Barkoff said. “For any additional questions, I refer you to Hunter’s office.”

Commenters at Daily Kos affirm pugnaciously that there’s nothing to see here:

So the Vice President’s son who has been a high powered lawyer for years who has passed the Bar in DC, CT and the Supreme Court with a speciality in international law and relations shouldn’t sit on company boards? Is this what you are trying to say?

For me, that’s final confirmation that there’s something to see here. But what?

Mollie Hemingway at The Federalist nails it. From her list of nine questions, numbers 7 and 9 are worth particular emphasis:

7. Why would a Ukrainian energy company want Devon Archer or Hunter Biden to serve on its board?

Assuming that they have been appointed to the board, the most innocent explanation is that the company wants to increase foreign direct investment and views Archer and Biden as having the experience to make that happen. Archer, for example, is a long-time investor and financier.

The most disturbing explanation is that the company is attempting to curry favor with the U.S. government by enlisting the services of the close family friend and campaign bundler of the Secretary of the State and the son of the vice president.

…

9. This has to be a hoax, right?

It’s so bizarre that you almost have to assume it’s a hoax. It sounds more like a cliched movie plot — a shady foreign oil company co-opts the vice president’s son in order to capture lucrative foreign investment contracts — than something that would actually happen in real life. But the indications as of this afternoon are that the board appointments actually happened, and that a Ukrainian energy company has retained the counsel of the vice president’s son and the Secretary of State’s close family friend and top campaign bundler.

Take question 9 first. The answer could indeed be “yes”.

However, it is not R. Hunter Biden’s appointment that is a hoax, nor Devon Archer’s; nor is it, for that matter, the appointment of the ex-President of Poland, Aleksander Kwasniewski, who is also on Burisma’s board, as of January. No, it’s Burisma itself that looks flaky, even on a casual inspection.

But surely, that would be a failure of due diligence on the part of messrs Biden, Archer and Kwasniewski? Indeed it would, but there is a most unfortunate precedent for such a failure, which you can read about here, at some length. To sum it up: in 2006 or so, two Bidens, James Biden (future VP’s brother) and our R. Hunter Biden (future VP’s son), wildly overpaid a drug-addicted very senior Moonie for a hedge fund marketing operation that was hugely exaggerating its size and success, and turned out to be distributing ponzis, including the giant Allen Stanford ponzi, second only to Madoff, and other eyecatching frauds, such as Ponta Negra, via a sales network that included brokers with visibly very terrible FINRA records.

None of this makes the Bidens look particularly astute. Much of it would have been very easy to pick up with proper due diligence.

By 2009, Hempton, FT Alphaville and Felix Salmon (linkfest) were all over the story. Bits of it even crept out into the print media.

Final point from Hempton:

Paradigm rejects that the notion that they actively participated in the alleged Ponta Negra scam.  That is an accusation I do not make.  I only make the suggestion that – through clumsiness and the failure to perform even the simplest due diligence – they lend their name to alleged scammers.

Which brings us, five years after the Paradigm scandal blew up, to R. Hunter Biden’s new job at Burisma Holdings, a company that has a mysterious past.

By way of due diligence, we need to make a little dive into some old SEC filings of a US OTC Stock, Sunrise Energy Resources (now called Green Technology Solutions). In their filing for the fiscal year ended December 31, 2003, filed 3 Dec 2004, we find the following in the notes to the financial statements:

Effective October 4, 2004, the Company and certain stockholders entered into a Stock Purchase Agreement and Plan of Reorganization (the “Agreement”) with the stockholders of Esko Pivnich (“EP”), an oil and gas production and development company incorporated and operating in the Republic of Ukraine, to acquire all of the outstanding shares of EP. The Company is to issue that number of shares which, when added to the 5 million shares sold to the EP stockholders in connection with this transaction by five of the Company’s foreign institutional stockholders, will result in the Company’s current stockholders retaining, in the aggregate, 9% of the enlarged company, which will then have 17 million shares issued and outstanding. There are a series of conditions precedent to closing of the transaction, including listing of the Company’s shares for trading on OTC “Pink Sheets”.

There is also a handy list of directors and executive officers of the company, including a youngster called Taras Burdeniy who, ten years later, is part of the team at Burisma.

In the filings for year end 2006, section “description of business” we find another deal:

On January 20, 2006, Sunrise Energy Resources, Inc. executed a share purchase agreement with the shareholders of Pari, Ltd. The board of directors of Sunrise Energy Resources, Inc. approved the transaction on February 9, 2006.

…and an address I’d like you to remember, EP’s offices in Ukraine, at 10a Ryleeva St., Kiev, Ukraine.

Sunrise chugs along producing a bit of oil and gas for a few years. But we are talking thousands of barrels, not millions: it is not some hydrocarbon Eldorado. At its peak, the operation is capitalized at about $20Mn.

But alas, a series of catastrophes is related in the 10-K filed on 31st March 2009: according to the geologist, Sunrise has zero proven reserves, which finishes them as an investment proposition. One of their funders, Millington Solutions, has called in its debt. Oh, and Sunrise has changed accountants.

In the same 10-K Burisma Holdings Limited, of 17 Gr Xenopolou Street, 3106, Limassol, Cyprus, puts in an appearance as the holder of just shy of 70% of Sunrise’s common stock.

It’s all recapped again in a preliminary info filing, Sept 4 2009. Upshot:

1. Sunrise’s equity holders are wiped out. Since Burisma paid only a nominal fee for the privilege of holding 70% of the Sunrise equity, they probably don’t mind too much. As for the other 30%, who knows what they think; they have put no comments on the record.
2. Millington Solutions waltz off with Sunrise’s wholly owned subsidiaries Esko Pivnich and Pari, both with the address 10a Ryleeva St., Kiev, Ukraine. Now debt-free, EP and Pari might at best have some underdeveloped mining assets to pick over.

Millington Solutions LLC (properly Millington Solutions Limited), formerly of Suite 401, 302 Regent Street, London, was deregistered in August 2009, mere months after the above shenanigans. Millington was rather an opaque entity, of a particularly English style. English company law allows companies to be directors of companies, which, while pleasingly recursive, doesn’t do much for transparency. Thus we find that the directors of Millington Solutions are:

Terthur Trading Limited, a BVI company which Opencorporates can’t tell me anything about, except that it directs or acts as secretary for another 1,065 companies just as opaque as Millington Solutions…

and

Lambert Investments Limited, which says it’s British, (although I couldn’t actually find a live British company called Lambert Investments Limited), directs 384 companies just as opaque as Millington Solutions, many still registered, and sometimes has a Cypriot co-director, Georgios Amerikanos, a director of 122 UK companies.

In other words, it’s a big shell company network of a classic British kind, with ownership and control completely obfuscated. The Companies Act 2006 introduced a requirement that at least one company director should be a flesh-and-blood human being (“natural person“), but as we can see, Millington Solutions got its work done just before that loophole was closed.

There’s another question. How is it that, 5 years after the utterly opaque Millington rode off into the sunset with Esko Pivnich and Pari, and Burisma Holdings was left empty-handed, it’s now Burisma Holdings who say they own Esko Pivnich and Pari? It’s all as murky as hell. If I were R. Hunter Biden, I wouldn’t touch it; but as we saw from the Paradigm saga, R. Hunter doesn’t look before he leaps.

Another thought: could it be that Millington, Burisma, Esko Pivnich and Pari were owned by the same one person all along? All this calling in of loans would then just be corporate kabuki: a tax dodge, say, or some sort of favour to an oligarch or politician…or just the final public move of a good old-fashioned penny stock scam.

This is what one careful Ukrainian journalist dug up in 2012:

…Burisma changed owners last year: instead of Zlochevsky and Lisin, the company was taken over by a Cypriot off-shore enterprise called Brociti Investments Ltd. Pari and Esko-Pivnich also changed their address: they moved from Kateryny Bilokur Street to 10a Rylyeyeva Street in Kyiv. A third company was already waiting for them in the same building – the above-mentioned Ukrnaftoburinnya.

…

The owners of Ukrnaftoburinnya, Pari, and Esko-Pivnich were finally confirmed through first-hand sources. Oleh Kanivets worked as CEO of Ukrnaftoburinnya for two years. He confirmed who actually controlled the above-mentioned companies to “Slidstvo.Info”.

”The Privat Group is the immediate owner. This company was founded by Mykola Zlochevsky some time ago, but he later sold his shares to the Privat Group”.

There’s that address again: 10a Ryleeva St., Kiev, Ukraine.

The identification of Privat Group as the owner of Burisma, though unconfirmed, is logical enough. Privat Group is a conglomerate controlled by the ferocious Ukrainian oligarch Ihor Kolomoisky.

Kolomoisky is one of the oligarchs charged with holding down the Eastern provinces of Ukraine, and recently mocked Putin, reputedly sensitive about his height, as a “schizophrenic shortarse” (apologies for the English intonation: American alternatives are invited); definitely a bridge-burning moment. Putin, meanwhile, shut down as much of Kolomoisky’s bank as he could, in Crimea and Moscow. I’m not sure who started it, but we can certainly mark it down as a first-rate spat.

While that was brewing up, Kolomoisky might well have wanted something that looked an American protector, and got it, in the form of the VP’s son. This line of thinking would neatly answer “The Federalist”’s other question: why would a Ukrainian energy company want Devon Archer or Hunter Biden to serve on its board?

Another guess: Kolomoisky is far too ebulliently Jewish to look like a neo-Nazi. A US connection with Kolomoisky might play well in circles keen to counter Russian complaints that the interim Kiev regime is dominated by “Fascists”.

One also still wonders how oil- and gas-rich those Burisma Holdings assets really are; they never amounted to much in the years 2003-2009; why are they so much better after another roll of the dice? R. Hunter Biden could always get the boss to call in a geologist, I suppose, in the name of transparency, and all. Is there new capital, provenance unknown? Or are there new permits, acquired under the deliriously corrupt Yanukovych regime? Or is there still nothing much to Burisma Holdings at all?

That’s far too many questions and guesses. What we can tell, from Forbes, is that our Ihor isn’t necessarily the most salubrious business partner:

An independent lawsuit between powerful players will not only be fascinating, because it sheds light on how Ukrainian business empires were created. It can also set a powerful precedent for solving corporate conflicts fairly and transparently.

Pinchuk’s suit, currently in English High Court, stems from an alleged breach of contract and breach of trust by the duo, Bogolyubov and Kolomoisky.

The nature of Pinchuk’s claim is simple: Bogolyubov and Kolomoisky are holding Pinchuk’s property illegally. Pinchuk’s suit asserts that they sold him a shell company, Alcross Commercial Ltd., for $143 million in 2005. They told Pinchuk that Alcross owned Krivorozhskiy Zhelezorudnyy Kombinat (KZhRK), a Ukrainian ore-mining company. In reality, Alcross was worthless. They have continuously promised to transfer the assets of KZhRK to Pinchuk but failed to do so—and then, in 2007, they turned around and sold about 50 percent of KZhRK to a third party. They thus sold a stake in a business they did not own.

Written evidence in the case is by no means extensive, it being common practice in the post Soviet time to do business in that way. The prima facie arguments in the claim look coherent enough to go to court. Bogolyubov’s lawyer declared that his client regards the claim “as misconceived and will be vigorously defending it.” The truth will come out only during the court proceedings. This will surely be fascinating to watch because, as I made clear earlier, there are colorful people involved in the dispute.

Bogolyubov and Kolomoisky fostered strong reputations as corporate raiders in the mid-2000s, becoming notorious for a series of hostile takeovers. Hostile takeovers Ukrainian style, that is, which often included the active involvement of Privat’s quasi-military teams. These schemes included, among others, a literal raid on the Kremenchuk steel plant in 2006, in which hundreds of hired rowdies armed with baseball bats, iron bars, gas and rubber bullet pistols and chainsaws forcibly took over the plant. More recently, Aerosvit Airlines, which according to the media was controlled by Mr. Kolomoisky, declared bankruptcy in 2012, stranding thousands of Ukrainians in Ukraine and abroad. The Financial Times, when reporting on Kolomoisky’s recent conflict with UK company JKX Oil & Gas, stated in no uncertain terms, that “in Ukraine they [Kolomoisky and Bogolyubov] are called ‘The Raiders’”.

Privat Group has been involved in several court cases and arbitration proceedings in the US, UK, and Sweden. In 2009, a US court made clear its distrust of Privat representatives: “the Court has become increasingly skeptical of these gentleman [at Privat] and the credibility of their statements.”

Back to R. Hunter Biden:

As a new member of the Board, I believe that my assistance in consulting the Company on matters of transparency, corporate governance and responsibility, international expansion and other priorities will contribute to the economy and benefit the people of Ukraine.”

I suspect R. Hunter Biden, in his new role, will have as much impact as a fart in a thunderstorm, but let’s give him a chance. One modest way in which R. Hunter Biden could follow through on his job description would be to identify and declare who controls the apparently large and important company that he now works for. Assuming his boss’s boss allows him to tell us, let’s all see what R. Hunter’s bumbled into this time.

http://web.archive.org/web/20140720183946/https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2014/05/r-hunter-biden-declare-owns-new-ukrainian-employer-burisma-holdings.html

Here is the dirt Trump wanted from Zelensky about the Bidens and why Zelensky doesn’t want to give it to him — hidden by rampant falsehoods in the press

by Eric Zuesse for The Saker Blog

In order to understand why Ukraine’s President Voldomyr Zelensky doesn’t want the dirt about Joe Biden to become public, one needs to know that Hunter Biden’s boss and benefactor at Burisma Holdings was, at least partly, Zelensky’s boss and benefactor until Zelensky became Ukraine’s President, and that revealing this would open up a can of worms which could place that former boss and benefactor of both men into prison at lots of places.

First, the falsehoods in the press have to be documented here, since this article will go up against virtually all U.S.-and-allied reporting on these events. And, in order to do such a thing, the bona fides of my main sources need to be presented:

Naked Capitalism is, as the article about it at Wikipedia, says, the blog of Susan Webber, pen-named “Yves Smith,” who “graduated from Harvard College and Harvard Business School. She had 20 years of experience in the financial services industry with Goldman Sachs, McKinsey & Co., and Sumitomo Bank.[3] She has written articles for the New York Times, Bloomberg, and the Roosevelt Institute.[4][5]” “The site has had over 60 million visitors since 2007, and was cited as among CNBC’s 2012 top 25 ‘Best Alternative Financial Blogs’, calling Smith ‘a harsh critic of Wall Street who believes that fraud was at the center of the financial crisis’.[2]” “The New York Times financial reporter Gretchen Morgenson cited Naked Capitalism as one of the ‘must-read financial blogs’ she reads regularly.[9]”

Her blog is widely respected amongst both scholars and experts in the field of finance, and is among the top go-to sites for trustworthy investigative news reporting in their highly complex field. So as to be able to achieve this high degree of respect, day in and day out, for decades, she carefully selects and relies upon the expertise of a small team of investigators, one of whom is Richard Smith, who has done around 200 articles for her site. One of these was dated 21 May 2014 and headlined “R. Hunter Biden Should Declare Who Really Owns His New Ukrainian Employer, Burisma Holdings”, and it reported that the U.S. Vice President’s son had become “a new member of the board” and that this “Ukrainian energy company has retained the counsel of the vice president’s son and the Secretary of State’s close family friend and top campaign bundler.” Since these men were being paid by the corporation’s owner, Mr. Smith researched extensively to find out who that was, or they were. He reported “what one careful Ukrainian journalist dug up in 2012”:

“Burisma changed owners last year [in 2011]: instead of Zlochevsky and Lisin, the company was taken over by a Cypriot off-shore enterprise called Brociti Investments Ltd. Pari and Esko-Pivnich” and a “third company was already waiting for them in the same building – the above-mentioned Ukrnaftoburinnya,” and “The Privat Group is the immediate owner. This company was founded by Mykola Zlochevsky some time ago, but he later sold his shares to the Privat Group,” which “is a conglomerate controlled by the ferocious Ukrainian oligarch Ihor Kolomoisky,” who “is one of the oligarchs charged with holding down the Eastern provinces of Ukraine,” and who “is far too ebulliently Jewish to look like a neo-Nazi. A US connection with Kolomoisky might play well in circles keen to counter Russian complaints that the interim Kiev regime is dominated by ‘fascists’.” Those quotations are from Mr. Smith’s article, but the following is not. Examining the documents myself, I note especially that at their end is the conclusion: “Thus, Ihor Kolomoisky managed to seize the largest reserves of natural gas in Ukraine.” This was the conclusion of the “careful Ukrainian journalist,” which was actually not one but a team of three, who were employed at a Ukrainian non-profit, the Anticorruption Action Centre, which specialized in tracking down the actual persons who controlled corporations and which had a particular focus on finding “Offshore fronts for Yanukovych.” Yanukovych was the democratically elected Ukrainian President, who took office on 25 February 2010. So: this non-profit was an anti-Yanukovych organization, writing more than two years into his Presidency, on 28 August 2012.

A certain historical background is essential here; and this, too, goes up against American ‘news’-reporting and will therefore be linked to articles that, in turn, link to ultimate sources that are of unquestioned reliability on each of the particulars that are in question: There was a coup in Ukraine in February 2014, which is portrayed in the West as being a democratic revolution (but was actually a coup hidden behind anticorruption demonstrations, and that was entirely illegal), and it replaced the democratically elected President by a ruler who was selected by Victoria Nuland, whose boss was Secretary of State John Kerry, whose boss was Barack Obama. Nuland had been originally a protégé of Vice President Dick Cheney, and then of Kerry’s immediate predecessor Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. Obama assigned Nuland to carry out his plan for Ukraine, which plan was to turn its government away from being friendly toward its next-door neighbor Russia to becoming instead a satellite of the United States against Ukraine’s next-door neighbor. Consequently, fascists, and even outright racist-fascists (nazis), people who came from the groups that had supported Hitler against Stalin during World War II, were installed into this new government, such as the co-founder of the Social Nationalist Party of Ukraine, Andriy Parubiy. (The CIA instructed that Party, which was Ukraine’s main nazi party, to change its name to “Freedom Party” — Svoboda — so as to become acceptable to Americans; and Paribuy and his colleagues did it, in order to help the U.S. Government to fool the American people about what the U.S. was doing in Ukraine.)

At least until Zelensky was elected, Ukraine’s Government remained fascist. And so is Kolomoysky himself, as I had reported about him on 18 May 2014. As I reported there,

On 12 May 2014, Burisma Holdings announced, “Hunter Biden Joins the Team of Burisma Holdings,” and reported that, “Burisma Holdings, Ukraine’s largest private gas producer, has expanded its Board of Directors by bringing on Mr. R Hunter Biden as a new director. R. Hunter Biden will be in charge of the Holdings’ legal unit and will provide support for the Company among international organizations.”

Promptly, Burisma’s website started presenting Burisma as if if were a Ukrainian-American if not outright American corporation. Devon Archer, shown there, was a business-partner of Hunter Biden. As the Washington Examiner  reported, on 27 August 2019:

At the time, Hunter Biden, now 49, and Christopher Heinz, the stepson of then-Secretary of State John Kerry, co-owned Rosemont Seneca Partners, a $2.4 billion private equity firm. Heinz’s college roommate, Devon Archer, was managing partner in the firm. In the spring of 2014, Biden and Archer joined the board of Burisma Holdings, a Ukrainian gas company that was at the center of a U.K. money laundering probe. Over the next year, Burisma reportedly paid Biden and Archer’s companies over $3 million.

Subsequently, both Hunter Biden and Devon Archer were removed from Burisma’s board and replaced by a four-person board, which mysteriously had included ever since May 2013 (which still was after Zlochevsky no longer controlled the company) Alan Apter, of Sullivan & Cromwell, Merrill Lynch, Morgan Stanley, and Renaissance Capital. Apter now became the “Chairman of the Board of Directors”. Here are the other three Directors: Aleksander Kwaśniewski was the President of the Republic of Poland from 1995 to 2005 when it was being taken over by America, and when Kwaśniewski was also a member of the Atlantic Council (NATO’s PR arm), and of the Bilderberg Group. Joseph Cofer Black was the Director of the CIA’s Counterterrorist Center (1999-2002) and Ambassador at Large for counter-terrorism (2002-2004), while President George W. Bush was lying America into invading Iraq, and Black subsequently became the Vice Chairman at Blackwater Worldwide (now Academi), which the Bush Government hired to train and arm mercenaries to help conquer Iraq. (Blackwater/Academi is owned by Erik Prince, the brother of Betsy DeVos of the Amway fortune, who is the Trump Secretary of Education, and Prince also is a personal friend of Trump. Obama’s Government also hired Blackwater/Academi to kill independence fighters in the Dnieper Donets Basin, where Burisma owns the drilling rights for gas.) And the fourth Director is Karina Zlochevska, whom the site identifies hardly at all, but is actually the daughter of Mykola Zlochevsky. In other words: Zlochevsky probably does remain as a minority owner of the company, and she represents his interests there.

Virtually all of the Western press simply alleges that Mykola Zlochevsky owns Burisma Holdings and brought Biden on board and was his boss; however, I have never seen from any of those ‘news’-reports any evidence or documentation that it’s true — nothing like the sources that Richard Smith relied upon and linked to documenting that this was Kolomoysky’s company. Nothing, at all.

This is important — is it Zlochevsky or Kolomoysky? — because Zlochevsky was associated with the prior Government of Ukraine and its President Viktor Yanukovych, whom the U.S. Government had overthrown in an operation that started in 2011 and that ended very successfully in February 2014 with the American Government’s Victoria Nuland on 27 January 2014 telling the U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine to get “Yats” Yatsenyuk appointed to run the country as soon as Yanukovych becomes successfully overthrown — which happened less than a month later, during February 20-22 — and Yatsenyuk then received the appointment on February 26th to run the country, just as Obama’s agent Nuland had instructed. Zlochevsky fled the country, because he had been politically allied with Yanukovych, who also fled the country. Obama’s Government constantly tried to get Zlochevsky prosecuted for alleged corruption, but Zlochevsky had sold the company to Kolomoysky even before Obama took over Ukraine. It’s not at all clear that Hunter Biden had ever so much as just met Zlochevsky.

Joseph Biden, as is well reported in the press, instructed the new Ukrainian Government to fire and replace the General Prosecutor of Ukraine, Viktor Shokin, who had failed to prosecute Zlochevsky, and this action by Joe is reported as indicating that the senior Biden granted his son’s employer no favor but instead the opposite — that Joe insisted upon Hunter’s boss’s prosecution.

For example, James Risen, of The Intercept, which is owned by one of the financial backers of the overthrow of Yanukovych, Pierre Omidyar (see this and this and this and this and this and this), headlined on September 25th, “I Wrote About the Bidens and Ukraine Years Ago. Then the Right-Wing Spin Machine Turned the Story Upside Down.”, and Risen reported that:

The then-vice president issued his demands for greater anti-corruption measures by the Ukrainian government despite the possibility that those demands would actually increase – not lessen — the chances that Hunter Biden and Burisma would face legal trouble in Ukraine.

Risen reported there that V.P. Biden’s “anti-corruption message might be undermined by the association of his son Hunter with one of Ukraine’s largest natural gas companies, Burisma Holdings, and with its owner, Mykola Zlochevsky.”

However, none of that press says Kolomoysky owned the company and was its boss. The presumption there is always that Zlochevsky needed to be prosecuted — not that Kolomoysky did. Kolomoysky is simply being written out of the picture altogether — whited-out from it

Also as is typical, the New York Times reported, on 1 May 2019, that Mykola Zlochevsky is the “owner of Burisma Holdings” and that “Mr. Lutsenko initially continued investigating Mr. Zlochevsky and Burisma, but cleared him of all charges within 10 months of taking office. The prosecutor general reversed himself and reopened an investigation into Burisma this year. Some see his decision as an effort to curry favor with the Trump administration.” For some mysterious reason, that article not only says that the replacement Prosecutor tried and failed and now tried again to prosecute Zlochevsky but that “Some see his decision as an effort to curry favor with the Trump administration,” though, actually, it was the Obama Administration that had been pressing Ukraine’s Government to prosecute Zlochevsky, who wasn’t Hunter Biden’s boss and didn’t control Burisma and was associated not with the 2014 Obama-installed Government of Ukraine but instead with the Government that had preceded it and was the last of all Ukraine’s democratic Governments, having been democratically elected by all of Ukraine including the two regions (Crimea and Donbass) that broke away from Ukraine when Obama in February 2014 overthrew the Government that those two now-breakaway regions had voted for, by over 75% in that 2010 election.

And here is from Wikipedia’s article on “Viktor Shokin”:

The Biden connection[edit]

Since 2012, the Ukrainian prosecutor general had been investigating oligarch Mykola Zlochevsky, owner of the oil and natural gas company Burisma Holdings, over allegations of money laundering, tax evasion, and corruption.[15] In 2014, then-U.S. Vice President Joe Biden‘s son, Hunter Biden, joined the board of directors of Burisma Holdings.[16] In 2015, Shokin became the prosecutor general, inheriting the investigation. The Obama administration and other governments and non-governmental organizations soon became concerned that Shokin was not adequately pursuing corruption in Ukraine, was protecting the political elite, and was regarded as “an obstacle to anti-corruption efforts”.[17] Among other issues, he was slow-walking the investigation into Zlochevsky and Burisma – to the extent that Obama officials were considering launching their own criminal investigation into the company for possible money laundering.[15]

In March 2016, Joe Biden threatened Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko that if he did not fire Shokin, that the US would hold back its $1 billion in loan guarantees. “I looked at them and said, “I’m leaving in six hours. If the prosecutor is not fired, you’re not getting the money.” Well, son of a bitch. He got fired. And they put in place someone who was solid at the time.”[18] Shokin was dismissed by Parliament later that month.

Shokin claimed in May 2019 that he had been investigating Burisma Holdings.[19][20][21][22] However, Vitaliy Kasko, who had been Shokin’s deputy overseeing international cooperation before resigning in February 2016 citing corruption in the office, provided documents to Bloomberg News indicating that under Shokin, the investigation into Burisma had been dormant.[23] Hunter Biden’s ties to Burisma Holdings was criticized as a conflict of interest in a New York Times editorial, though Amos Hochstein has claimed to have never seen coordination between Joe Biden and his son on the matter.[24][25]

And here is from Wikipedia’s Article on “Burisma Holdings”:

History[edit]

Burisma Group was founded in 2002 by Ukrainian businessman Mykola Zlochevsky and Nikolay Lysin [uk]. Now it is owned by Mykola Zlochevskyi [uk], who was minister of natural resources under Viktor Yanukovych.[2] Zlochevsky returned to Ukraine in February 2018 after the corruption investigations into his Burisma Holdings had been completed in December 2017 with no charges filed against him.[3]

So, the myth that Zlochevsky was Hunter Biden’s boss and benefactor at Burisma isn’t only in the ‘news’-media that are controlled by U.S. Deep State that controls the CIA, which controls America’s major ‘news’-media, but it is also in the Web’s main encyclopedia, Wikipedia, which is not only edited by the CIA, but also, to some extent, written by the CIA.

Furthermore, the CIA was the ‘whistleblower’ that made the impeachment-charge to the Democratic Party head of the United States House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, Adam Schiff, who is the lead proponent of impeaching Donald Trump so that Trump can then become tried in the U.S. Senate, which then would possess the power to replace Trump and make President the current Vice President, Mike Pence, which Democrats, for some unexplained reason, seem to hope will happen. As Reuters reported on September 26th, “The whistleblower is a CIA officer and was assigned at one point to work at the White House, two sources familiar with the probe into his complaint said. The New York Times first identified the whistleblower as a CIA officer, which Reuters confirmed.” That report also asserted:

The call occurred after Trump had ordered a freeze of nearly $400 million in American aid to Ukraine, which was only later released. Before the call, Ukraine’s government was told that interaction between Zelenskiy and Trump depended on whether the Ukrainian leader would “play ball,” the whistleblower said.

The report said Trump acted to advance his personal political interests, risking national security.

“I am deeply concerned that the actions described below constitute ‘a serious or flagrant problem, abuse, or violation of law or executive order,’” the whistleblower complaint, dated Aug. 12, said.

The same CIA whose lies had ‘justified’ America’s invading Iraq in 2003, and invading Libya in 2011, and invading Syria starting in 2012 (and extending there up till at least 2018), is now ‘justifying’ congressional Democrats to replace Trump by Pence if they possibly can.

And Kolomoysky might be one of the world’s biggest thieves. On 19 April 2019, Graham Stack reported for OCCRP, a U.S.-and-allied-funded nonprofit anti-corruption investigatory organization that

“‘Large-scale coordinated fraudulent actions of the bank [PrivatBank] shareholders and management caused a loss to the state of at least $5.5 billion,’ [Valeria] Hontareva [former chair of Ukranie’s central bank] said in March 2018. ‘This is 33 percent of the population’s deposits … [and] 40 percent of our country’s monetary base.’ … By the time regulators took over PrivatBank, the $5.5 billion had already been transferred to banks in Austria, Luxembourg, and Latvia. From there, the trail goes cold. … This account is based on a forensic audit by Kroll, the U.S.-based corporate investigation and risk consulting firm. The report … is based on PrivatBank’s own records and was obtained exclusively by OCCRP. … Ukraine nationalized PrivatBank in December 2016, saddling taxpayers with a $5.9 billion bailout.”

There’s nothing that Zlochevsky was even accused of which exceeded tens of millions  of dollars in losses. In Ukraine, that’s tiny.

Furthermore, the estimable and reliably accurate Moscow investigative journalist John Helmer reported on 19 February 2015 that “In March 2014, days after the ouster of Yanukovich in Kiev and the installation of a new regime, the UK Serious Fraud Office (SFO) started investigating Zlochevsky. According to the evidence it presented to the Central Criminal Court between March and December of 2014, and according to Justice Blake, who assessed the evidence, there is no mention of Lisin, Deripon, Burrard or Kolomoisky.” Obama’s people (there via the U.S. regime’s lap-dog UK) were targeting Zlochevsky, certainly not Kolomoysky, who was instead on their team.

Zelensky, prior to becoming Ukraine’s President, had been the star of a popular comedy series on Ukrainian television that was telecast by Ihor Kolomoysky’s 1+1 Media group. On 19 May 2014, Forbes published a shockingly honest article, by Vladimir Golstein, “Why Everything You’ve Read About Ukraine Is Wrong”, which mentioned, about Kolomoysky, that,

His business holdings include the largest Ukrainian media group, “1+1 Media,” the news agency “Unian,” as well as various internet sites, which enable him to whip public opinion into an anti-Putin frenzy. Andrew Higgins of The New York Times published a story with the headline, “Among Ukraine’s Jews, the Bigger Worry is Putin, Not Pogroms,” which praises Kolomoisky for adorning Dnepropetrovsk with “the world’s biggest Jewish community center” along with “a high tech Holocaust museum.” Higgins notes, however, that the museum “skirts the delicate issue of how some Ukrainian nationalists collaborated with Nazis.

Kolomoysky himself had become installed by the Obama Administration’s Ukrainian agents as the Governor of the Dnipropetrovsk region of Ukraine where his approximately $5 billion financial empire was based, and which in its north extends into the Dnieper Donets Basin where Burisma owns the drilling rights for gas. As this last link indicates, that Basin “is the major oil and gas producing region of Ukraine accounting for approximately 90 per cent of Ukrainian production and according to EIA  may have 42 tcf of shale gas resources technically recoverable from 197 tcf of risked shale gas in place.” That article, from the investment-oriented website Zero Hedge, sums up:

In a nutshell, Ukraine (or rather its puppetmasters) has decided to let no crisis (staged or otherwise) or rather civil war, go to waste, and while the fighting rages all around, Ukrainian troopers are helping to install shale gas production equipment near the east Ukrainian town of Slavyansk, which was bombed and shelled [by the Obama-installed Government] for the three preceding months, according to local residents cited by Itar Tass. The reason for the scramble? Under peacetime, the process was expected to take many years, during which Europe would be under the energy dictatorship of Putin. But throw in some civil war and few will notice let alone care that a process which was expected to take nearly a decade if not longer while dealing with broad popular objections to fracking, may instead be completed in months!

Ukraine’s bombing of that region (for examples, this and this and this) was in order to clear the land for a massive fracking operation. However, it turned out that not only Kolomoysky’s operation with Shell in the Dnieper Donets Basin in Ukraine’s far east, but also the Ukrainian Government’s own gas-exploration operation with Chevron in western Ukraine’s Olesska field, were uneconomic; or, as I headlined about them on 16 December 2014, “Ukraine’s Two Big Gas Deals Are Now Both Dry”. It seems that if Hunter Biden is to become a billionaire, it won’t come from Ukrainian gas. (Nor, of course will it have come from Zlochevsky, which the news-media would have it to be.)

As was reported on 20 May 2014 by Israel Shamir at the website of Paul Craig Roberts, under the headline “The Ukraine in Turmoil” (and his article there was the first comprehensive and accurate summary of what had recently happened to Ukraine):

These people had brought Ukraine to its present abject state. In 1991, the Ukraine was richer than Russia, today it is three times poorer because of these people’s mismanagement and theft. Now they plan an old trick: to take loans in Ukraine’s name, pocket the cash and leave the country indebted. They sell state assets to Western companies and ask for NATO to come in and protect the investment.

They play a hard game, brass knuckles and all. The Black Guard, a new SS-like armed force of the neo-nazi Right Sector, prowls the land. They arrest or kill dissidents, activists, journalists. Hundreds of American soldiers, belonging to the “private” company Academi (formerly Blackwater) are spread out in Novorossia [Donbass, the far-eastern region that became independent after Obama’s coup], the pro-Russian provinces in the East and South-East. IMF–dictated reforms slashed pensions by half and doubled the housing rents. In the market, US Army rations took the place of local food.

The new Kiev regime had dropped the last pretence of democracy by expelling the Communists from the parliament. This should endear them to the US even more. Expel Communists, apply for NATO, condemn Russia, arrange a gay parade and you may do anything at all, even fry dozens of citizens alive. And so they did.

The harshest repressions were unleashed on industrial Novorossia, as its working class loathes the whole lot of oligarchs and ultra-nationalists. After the blazing inferno of Odessa and a wanton shooting on the streets of Melitopol the two rebellious provinces of Donetsk and Lugansk took up arms and declared their independence from the Kiev regime.

And then, to top it off, there is the brilliant pewreport blogger, who, on 27 July 2014, headlined “USAID to Help Young Biden: The Burisma File”, and that anonymous person succinctly laid out the use of the U.S. Government to enable the families of some of its top officials to join America’s aristocracy, the billionaire class. It’s something that Trump himself is intimately involved with and exploits, but if America’s national and international police-agencies such as the FBI and CIA are trying (first with Russiagate, and now with Ukrainegate) to replace him by Pence in order to enable another friend of Obama to become installed (like Hillary was supposed to have been) as President and Commander-in-Chief, then this struggle between the agents of America’s Democratic Party billionaires versus those of its Republican Party billionaires could end up having consequences that no one is predicting.

It’s also important to point out here that Zelensky’s predecessor, Poroshenko, was not Obama’s first choice to win the 25 May 2014 Ukrainian election that followed the February 2014 coup and installation of Yatsenyuk to run the country on an interim basis. Yatsenyuk was supposed to run it until that election (after which Yatsenyuk still continued long in office, and Obama pushed as hard as possible for President Poroshenko to continue Prime Minister Yatsenyuk’s policies). Obama’s first choice — and the planned winner — in the 25 May 2014 election, was an intense hater of Russia, Yulia Tymoshenko. Yatsenyuk had actually been her agent. Kolomoysky was perhaps her main financial backer. But she lost the election to Obama’s second choice, Poroshenko. Kolomoysky was enough of a supporter of Tymoshenko so that even after he returned to Ukraine on 16 May 2019 just prior to the latest Presidential election, he backed her even above Zelensky. But above all, he opposed Poroshenko, because Poroshenko had been forced by the main lenders to his Government to fire Kolomoysky as governor of Dnipropetrovsk and to nationalize his bankrupt PrivatBank due to Kolomoysky’s having been looting from Ukraine’s Government too much money via his bank and via his minority ownership of the Government’s gas company. Obama had wanted that money to go toward the war against Donbass, not into Kolomoysky’s pockets. (However, America’s Democratic-Party propaganda ‘non-profit’ Public Radio International gave a positive spin to Obama-team-member Kolomoysky even at the time of his firing by Poroshenko on 28 March 2015, saying of him, “He offered $10,000 bounties for captured pro-Russian insurgents. ‘People understand that this person came here to ensure stability,’ said Stanislav Zholudev, a local political analyst.” The euphemism “captured pro-Russian insurgents” was actually referring to their corpses — Kolomoysky was paying only for their corpses. Maybe for Obama-ites that’s “stability.” Kolomoysky was already paying the nazi Azov Battalion more than that per pro-Russian corpse, and now the Trump Administration wants Kolomoysky to be prosecuted for financial crimes instead of Zlochevsky to be prosecuted, and so Zelensky is being pushed one way by Democrats, and the opposite way by Republicans.) Kolomoysky has many enemies. The main holders of Ukraine’s debt are unknown, but besides Russia which had lent to the pre-coup Government (and were thus trying to get their senior money that’s owing from Ukraine to be paid to Russia before the newer creditors get theirs), they were said to be the IMF, America’s Franklin Templeton Fund, and Blackstone Group, the World Bank, and a group of mainly American billionaires “and private Eurobond holders” who are represented by the law firm of Weil Gotshal & Manges. The U.S. Government and EU countries were also said to be indirectly such holders via their ownership shares in the IMF and World Bank, but also perhaps more directly. (If Trump were a decent President, he’d be publicly pressing for the exact numbers on all of this.) Kolomoysky’s siphonings from Ukraine’s Government were at the expense of all of them. The pressures upon Poroshenko to halt it were mounting. And, so, Kolomoysky was fired; and, now, to the extent that Zelensky has to satisfy Kolomoysky, Zelensky (who publicly said of Kolomoysky “He is my business partner”) needs to resist some of the demands of the U.S. regime and of many other billionaires. Without their continued support, Ukraine’s Government will collapse in the short term instead of only (which is inevitable) in the long term. It’s no longer just a question of the Ukrainian regime’s war against Donbass. The change that Obama wrought is permanent, and Trump dithers back and forth about how to deal with it. He apparently has no strategy on that.

Zelensky might fear that if he complies with Trump’s request, then his own major benefactor, Kolomoysky, could end up in prison somewhere; and Trump might fear that if he presses Zelensky on that (as he did not do but Democrats say he did), then the entire Deep State — not only Democratic Party billionaires, but also now Republican ones — will become Trump’s enemies, and his 2020 re-election chances will therefore go to zero. Consequently: Trump will probably abandon the matter, and the till-now-unsupported and maybe unsupportable mere assumption, that Hunter Biden’s Ukrainian benefactor was Zlochevsky instead of Kolomoysky, will continue to be asserted virtually everywhere throughout the U.S. empire, for as long a time as the matter continues to remain in the ‘news’. Of course, if that turns out to be the case, then Joe Biden will continue to be portrayed in this matter as having been a crusader against corruption in Ukraine, instead of as having been the aspiring founder of yet another billionaire American dynasty.

Basically, the new Russiagate charges to replace Trump by Pence, Ukrainegate (as those charges were presented by the CIA ‘whistleblower’ on August 12th and published on September 26th), represent all of the Democratic Party’s billionaires, and many of the Republican Party’s ones, as well. It’s the pinnacle of the Obama-versus-Trump feud, because it represents the Democratic Party’s position on what was Obama’s top international achievement — his conquest (via a coup) against Ukraine. Trump refuses to condemn Obama’s coup against Ukraine, but if he cared about the truth, he would, and the worst that could happen to him then would be that, for once in his life, he’d be fighting for truth, and not just for himself. Apparently, that’s too big a leap for him to take.

What’s especially pathetic in all of this is that whenever the U.S. Government overthrows and destroys a country, it’s trumpeted as reflecting America’s standing-up for rule-of-law and opposition to corruption, and for support of democracy and protection of human rights; but whenever Russia or a nation that’s friendly toward Russia resists control by the U.S. and its allies, it’s portrayed as being a dictatorship and an opponent of democracy and of human rights. So, go figure.

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Investigative historian Eric Zuesse is the author, most recently, of  They’re Not Even Close: The Democratic vs. Republican Economic Records, 1910-2010, and of  CHRIST’S VENTRILOQUISTS: The Event that Created Christianity.