by Daniel Greenfield, FrontPage Mag:
Was Joe Biden planning to buy his way back into the White House using Burisma’s money?
The release of an FBI informant’s allegations about the Biden family’s dealings with Burisma finally explains what a Ukrainian energy company wanted with a corrupt American political clan.
Why was Burisma paying a vice president’s son tens of thousands of dollars a month?
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According to the allegations on the FBI’s FD-1023 form released to Sen. Chuck Grassley by whistleblowers, Burisma wanted to launch an IPO in the United States and was looking to first buy an American energy company. Such a move would have required regulatory approval and would have also potentially been very lucrative for anyone on the inside.
The allegations by the FBI informant describes Mykola Zlochevsky, Burisma’s co-founder and a former minister in the ousted pro-Russian Yanukovych government, saying that “it costs 5 (million) to pay one Biden, and 5 (million) to another Biden”.
And yet the rewards could have been even richer.
While the informant urged Zlochevsky to launch his IPO by forming an American company or buying a shell company, Hunter Biden had allegedly told the energy boss that his company “could raise much more capital if Burisma purchased a larger US-based business that already had a history In the US oil and gas sector.” Allegedly some Texas companies were on the table.
Why did Hunter Biden allegedly pitch Burisma on a messier and more expensive process? An obvious potential answer is that the Biden family may have hoped to cash in by being on the inside. To understand Burisma’s plans and those of the Biden family, we need to look at what was going on with the oil and gas sector beginning in 2014, when Hunter started being paid a small fortune to sit on the Ukrainian energy company’s board, through 2016 when some of the initial conversations that the informant reported to the FBI were first taking place.
2014 was a good year for oil and gas IPOs. Texas’ Parsley Energy rode annual revenues below Burisma’s estimated $400 million to a big IPO, rising revenues and an eventual $4.5 billion sale. Looking at examples like these, Hunter and Zlochevsky could have envisioned bringing together a Texas oil company and a Ukrainian oil company united around a similar political business model. The Biden name would have cleared the way for permits in Texas and political cover in Ukraine. Indeed the one thing we know that Joe Biden did for Burisma was threaten to pull foreign aid unless the Ukrainian government fired Viktor Shokin, a prosecutor who had been looking into Burisma’s affairs, and was seen as a block to any successful IPO in America.
The plan, implied by the FBI informant, was for Joe Biden to clear away Burisma’s problems in Ukraine and pave the way for the takeover of a Texas energy company. The Biden family would have potentially been on the ground floor of the Texas deal (and Hunter and other Biden family members could have been cut sizable checks or received shares on the American end) before being on the inside of an IPO for a combined company that would potentially be worth billions.
But political developments in Ukraine and a roller coaster ride in the energy markets, made that a shaky proposition. The Texas deal and the IPO never happened. Burisma and the Bidens didn’t look like they had much of a future. In the fall of 2015, Joe Biden held a press conference with Barack Obama at which he announced that he would not run for president.
This is when the FBI informant began meeting with Burisma officials and they vented about Hunter Biden who was increasingly outliving his purpose, but who was also too dangerous to let go. Only in March 2017 was Hunter’s $1 million a year salary finally cut. By then Zlochevsky had been entangled in legal proceedings and a Burisma launch in the United States was impossible.
Any political future for Joe Biden or financial future for Hunter Biden seemed to be equally done.
