25 September 2020, Friday, 10:10 847

Conflict Of Interests And USD 4 Million From Burisma: US Senate Releases Report On Biden's Son's Activity In Ukraine

Editor: Daria Zubkova

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Former deputy chief of mission at the United States’ embassy in Kyiv George Kent raised concerns to officials in former vice president Joe Biden’s office about the perception of a conflict of interest with respect to Hunter Biden’s role on the board of the Burisma gas company in 2015.

This is stated in a United States Senate report prepared by Republican senators Ron Johnson and Chuck Grassley.

According to the report, Kent, who is now the United States’ deputy assistant secretary of state for European and Eurasian affairs, raised concerns to officials in Joe Biden’s office about the perception of a conflict of interest with respect to Hunter Biden’s role on Burisma’s board in in early 2015.

However, according to the report, Kent’s concerns went unaddressed.

“Kent’s concerns went unaddressed and in September 2016, he emphasized in an email to his colleagues, ‘Furthermore, the presence of Hunter Biden on the Burisma board was very awkward for all U.S. officials pushing an anticorruption agenda in Ukraine,’” the report states.

According to the report, Burisma paid over USD 4 million for the board memberships of Hunter Biden and his business partner Devon Archer, and they were serving on Burisma’s board when Burisma’s owner Mykola Zlochevskyi allegedly paid a USD 7 million bribe to officials serving under Ukraine’s prosecutor general Vitalii Yarema to close a case against Zlochevskyi.

However, in December 2015, Joe Biden’s staff advised Kent to avoid commenting on Zlochevskyi.

According to the report, in October 2015, senior State Department official Amos Hochstein raised concerns with Joe Biden, as well as with Hunter Biden, that Hunter Biden’s position on Burisma’s board enabled Russian disinformation efforts and risked undermining the United States’ policy in Ukraine.

The report also states that former secretary of state John Kerry had knowledge of Hunter Biden’s role on Burisma’s board, but he denied knowledge of it when asked about it later.

As Ukrainian News Agency earlier reported, former prosecutor general Viktor Shokin announced in February 2020 that he came under pressure from Joe Biden in connection with the Burisma case.

The Specialized Anti-Corruption Prosecutor's Office and the National Anti-Corruption Bureau detained the first deputy head of the Kyiv Tax Service and two authorized representatives of former environment minister Zlochevskyi in June 2019 on suspicion of paying a bribe of USD 5 million to the National Anti-Corruption Bureau’s Director Artem Sytnyk and the Specialized Anti-Corruption Prosecutor's Office’s head Nazar Kholodnytskyi to close a case that was filed against Zlochevskyi in connection with a stabilization loan that the National Bank of Ukraine provided to businessman Serhii Kurchenko’s Real Bank.

United States President Donald Trump raised the issue of investigation of the Hunter Biden case by the Ukrainian authorities during a conversation with President Volodymyr Zelenskyy and, according to Trump's former national security adviser John Bolton, Trump conditioned provision of United States military assistance to Ukraine on investigation of the case. Trump denied Bolton’s claim.

This led to a serious political scandal in the United States and served as the basis for the initiation of impeachment proceedings against Trump.

Joe Biden was the vice president of the United States under former president Barack Obama, and he is the Democratic Party’s candidate and Trump's main rival in the 2020 presidential election.