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The laptop abandoned in Delaware by Hunter Biden continues to yield important developments. This time, it was revealed that President Joe Biden dined with controversial Hunter Biden business associates at a Washington DC restaurant.
The New York Post published the exclusive revealing an email from Vadym Pozharskyi, an executive of the controversial Ukrainian energy company Burisma, where he thanked Hunter Biden for introducing him to his father when he was vice president. The president’s son was a member of Burisma’s board of directors and was paid a juicy salary of $83,333 ($1 million a year) for sitting at the table.
“Dear Hunter, thank you for inviting me to DC and giving an opportunity to meet your father and spent some time together. It’s realty an honor and pleasure,” Vadym Pozharskyi wrote to the son of the current president of the United States.
The meeting place was in the private “Garden Room” of Café Milano on April 16, 2015.
Other associates invited
In addition to Vadym Pozharskyi, the dinner was also attended by Russian billionaire Yelena Baturina and her husband, Yury Luzhkov, former mayor of Moscow, who died in 2019 and was involved in various corruption cases when he was mayor of the Russian capital.
According to the New York newspaper, Luzkhov’s widow, Baturina, transferred the sum of $ 3.5 million on February 14, 2014 to Rosemont Seneca Thornton LLC, “a Delaware-based investment firm co-founded by Hunter and Devon Archer, a former adviser to Secretary of State John Kerry.”
According to a Hunter Biden email to Archer, three Kazakhstan officials were also invited, “including Marc Holtzman, then chairman of the former Soviet republic’s largest bank, Kazkommertsbank.” They also invited three representatives of the World Food Program U.S.; and some three ambassadors (including one from Mexico), whose names are not mentioned in the emails. In total, the dinner was scheduled for 14 people, but it is not clear how many attended.
While it is also not known who the other Kazakhs who attended the dinner were, the Post reveals that “Archer was invited to a ‘small private breakfast’ with Kazakhstan’s Prime Minister Karim Massimov in his suite at the Willard Hotel.”
“There are several matters the Prime Minister is eager to discuss with you and he will be grateful for the opportunity to spend quality time together,” the invitation reads.
In 2016, Hunter Biden described Kazakhstan’s prime minister in a mail as a “close friend” and, according to the exclusive, the president’s son “had business dealings in Kazakhstan with an associate of Massimov, oligarch Kenes Rakishev.”
Just as some guests were Hunter’s business associates, others also had no business ties to the president’s son. However, the dinner puts into dispute Joe Biden’s claims that he was unaware of his son’s foreign business activities that are now under federal scrutiny.
Hunter Biden’s salary at Burisma was reduced after Joe Biden stepped down as VP
According to the Post, in another exclusive, Hunter saw his salary as a Burisma board member reduced two months after Joe Biden stepped down as VP.
“From May 2014, Burisma Holdings Ltd. was paying Hunter $83,333 a month to sit on its board, invoices on his abandoned laptop show. But in an email on March 19, 2017, Burisma executive Vadym Pozharskyi asked Hunter to sign a new director’s agreement and informed him “the only thing that was amended is the compensation rate.” Biden went from being paid $83,333 to $41,500 after that email.
According to the exclusive, there was no explanation as to why Biden’s salary as a Burisma board member was reduced, the only situation that changed in those two months was that Joe Biden left the White House.
Hunter Biden left the Burisma board in 2019, when the company’s corruption scandals damaged his father’s presidential campaign. Also, one of the main controversies surrounding the energy company is that in 2015, when Joe Biden was vice president, he pressured the Ukrainian government to fire prosecutor Viktor Shokin, who was investigating Burisma’s shady business dealings.
Joe Biden previously said that the pressures on Shokin were unrelated to his son being on Burisma’s board of directors.
Emmanuel Alejandro Rondón is a journalist at El American specializing in the areas of American politics and media analysis // Emmanuel Alejandro Rondón es periodista de El American especializado en las áreas de política americana y análisis de medios de comunicación.
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