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

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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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?

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