If Joseph Biden enters the race for U.S. president in 2020, he’ll face renewed questions about his son Hunter’s association with Ukraine’s Burisma energy company during his eight years as U.S. vice president.
The allegations are resurfacing as Peter Schweizer, the president of the conservative non-profit think tank Government Accountability Institute, made sensational comments on American news channel Fox News on March 23.
Schweizer claimed that, according to financial records, Hunter Biden, is connected to a bank account in which $3.1 million were deposited over a period of 14 months – a time period during which Joe Biden went to Ukraine several times as vice president.
It is not the first time that Biden’s visits to Ukraine are being used against him.
Some had already criticized what they perceive as possible signs of corruption and even cynicism on Joe Biden’s part – promoting anticorruption in Ukraine while simultaneously pushing for his son’s interests in a faraway country.
Hunter Biden, a former Washington lobbyist, ended up sitting on the supervisory board of Burisma Holding, one of Ukraine’s largest natural gas companies owned, at the same time that his father started to visit the country in order to support the EuroMaidan Revolution that drove President Viktor Yanukovych from power on Feb. 22, 2014.
The owner of Burisma Holding – Mykola Zlochevsky, a former ecology minister under Yanukovych – remains accused of money laundering and illegally issuing oil and gas licenses his own companies throughout 2010-2012.
The former minister owns 38 oil and gas extraction permits through 14 separate companies, which gives him big control over the Ukrainian market.
A criminal proceeding was opened in 2014 against Zlochevsky, but the Burisma Group announced in January 2017 that all judicial proceedings against him and his operating companies in Ukraine were closed.
Zlochevsky was also put under investigation in the United Kingdom, where a bank account under his name of $23 million was temporarily frozen, until Ukrainian prosecutors refused to give the necessary documents for British authorities to continue the investigation, according to the New York Times.
A British judge ultimately decided to stop the inquiry and unfreeze the former minister’s account due to a lack of evidence.
According to Schweizer, the latest financial findings about Hunter Biden constitute “a very troublesome issue” that “has all the markings of payoffs going to the Bidens.”
Former U.S. Attorney Joe Digenova had no doubt while speaking on air, saying that this case “deserves a full-blown investigation into the conduct of the Biden family in Ukraine.”
The Kyiv Post interviewed former U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine from 1998 to 2000 Steven Pifer, in September 2018, during the 15th edition of the Yalta European Strategy conference, and the subject came up.
Even though Hunter Biden’s entrance to Burisma’s supervisory board appears suspicious, Pifer said the former vice president “genuinely feels sympathy and support for Ukraine, so it was something he chose to engage in, whether or not his son was working (in Ukraine).”
Kate Bedingfield, a Biden spokeswoman, stressed to the New York Times in December 2015 that Hunter Biden’s professional life was totally independent from his father’s diplomatic mission.
