A Zelensky’s gift to Biden at the beginning of his Presidential campaign: Ukraine’s Supreme Court closed the case against the manager of Burisma Group and does not have more accusations against the company.
By Sergei Shevchuk,
The actions by the Ukrainian prosecutor general’s office and later by court instances in the case of the natural gas company Burisma Group Holdings have called the attention of the press and American politics because of the incredible similarity with the “Watergate” scandal. The reason, of course, is not the questionable contracts and affairs of the company, nor the systematic violation of environmental protection laws, but the fact that, from May 2014 to May 2019, Hunter Biden, son of ex-American Vice President and current U.S. President, was part of the Board of Directors of the company. Hunter joined Burisma during the crisis the company had with the Justice Department, specifically when its activities were blocked by Great Britain. (https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/apr/12/the-money-machine-howa-high-profile-corruption-investigation-fell-apart). At the beginning of 2015, the Ukrainian prosecutor general’s office issued an arrest warrant for illicit enrichment against the owner of the company, Mykola Zlochevski. By the end of that year, Vice President Biden, “a passionate defender of democracy and a transparent economy”, was blackmailing Piotr Poroshenko, the Ukrainian President at the time, with a credit for one billion dollars and forcing him to fire General Prosecutor Viktor Shokin. «We are leaving in six hours. If the prosecutor is not yet fired, you are not getting the money». Biden himself described this conversation this way (https://www.cfr.org/event/foreign-affairs-issue-launch-former-vicepresident joe-biden).
Such behavior would play a dirty trick on Biden later. It would be the reason why the Congressional Investigations Committee would start an investigation against him. https://www.cfr.org/event/foreign-affairs-issue-launch-former-vicepresident joe-biden We will talk about this later.
In June 2020 three persons were caught in fraganti in Kiev and arrested when trying to bribe the directors of NABU (National Anti-Corruption Bureau of Ukraine) and SAP (Specialized Anti-Corruption Prosecutor’s Office) (https://nv.ua/ukraine/politics/vzyatka-6-millionovdollarov-dlya-nabu-video figuranty-vse-podrobnosti-novosti-ukrainy50094230.html).
The photos of the dollars in transparent plastic bags were published in all media in Ukraine and spread throughout international media. This bribe was meant to close the legal case against the Ex-Minister of Ecology, Mykola Zlochevski and owner of Burisma Group. In this new criminal case about bribing state employees were incriminated: the sub-director of the State Fiscal Service of Kiev, Mykola Iliashenko; the director of the legal department of Burisma, Andrey Kicha and the ex director of one of the departments of the State Fiscal Office, Elena Mazurova.
nabu.com.ua
The most loyal Court in the world
A few weeks before the official inauguration of Joe Biden Junior’s campaign for presidential reelection, Ukraine’s Supreme Anti-Corruption Court confirmed the agreement between the charged Andrey Kicha and the Specialized Anti-Corruption Prosecutor’s Office. Kircha was convicted for an attempt of bribery to a state officer, (part 5, article 27, part 4 article 369 of the Criminal Code of Ukraine) to five years of prison. But, thanks to an agreement, the punishment was reduced to one year of conditional freedom. Besides, the agreement said that Kicha should cooperate with the prosecutor, and he should transfer 100 million UAH (2.7 million US dollars) to the account of the state fundraising platform United24, a company that raises money to help the Ukrainian Army. (https://hromadske.ua/ru/posts/popytka-podkupa-antikorrupcionerov zadollar6-mln-eks-menedzher-burisma-priznal-vinu-i-dolzhen-zaplatit-100- mlngrn-na-vsu)
But, which is the reason for such an unusual sentence? The redaction sources inside the order forces of Ukraine say that this decision of the College High Anti-Corruption Court of Ukraine was a personal order by Zelensky himself. Besides, there were made actions for hiding important investigation documents. The framed one, Kicha, was judged but not punished in fact. So, the 100 million of UAH he had to send to Zelensky’s fund was not from his personal accounts. Nevertheless, nor the court nor the justice organisms were interested in this part of the story.
The President’s order was followed. For public opinion and the press, a short official press release was published. But the real facts and the main actors of the case were not denounced and the investigation, of course, did not have any results.
In the Congress at the meanwhile…
Hunter Biden has been under the sight of American journalists for a while. They had denounced his drug addiction, as well as his not-very-clear business in Ukraine and China. We do remember well the first political trial against American Ex-President Donald Trump, linked to a phone call in which he was pressing Ukrainian President Vladimir Zelensky to open an investigation respecting the Bidens.
Since the autumn of 2022, when Republicans got the majority in the elections to the U.S. House of Representatives and could take control of the Investigation Committee, the attention to Hunter Biden considerably increased, since the Congressmen started to investigate his commercial relationships and how they could have affected the Joe Biden’s decisions as Vice President and as President. Hunter Biden was included in some of those criminal cases as well.
James Comer, Kentucky’s Congressman and new president of the Supervision Committee from the House of Representatives, declared in October 2022 that the Committee was not persecuting Hunter Biden for political reasons. “We are investigation Hunter Biden’s case because we believe that it is a menace for national security and we are afraid that it can compromise Joe Biden», said Comer.
(https://time.com/6218879/hunter-biden-investigations-james-comer houserepublicans/)
On 3 April 2023 in an interview on Fox News, James Comer claimed his suspicion concerning the document sent by Hunter Biden to the direction of Burisma in Ukraine. «It was a government document, and we are concerned that it was a secret document», the senator said.
The Legal Committee of the House of Representatives, headed by the Congressman from de Ohio Jim Jordan, executes its own series of audiences for the case of Hunter Biden. Particularly, Jordan and his Republican college Mike Turner, President of the Intelligence Committee of the House of Representatives, were investigating the origin of the correspondence taken from Hunter Biden’s laptop which was presented as proof in his case and published by the New York Post few weeks before of the Presidential elections in 2020. (https://nypost.com/2020/10/14/email-revealshowhunter-biden-introduced-ukrainian-biz-man-to-dad/)
In these letters was included the name of the Ukrainian businessman Vadim Pozharski, the director’s adviser of Burisma Group. Pozharski, in 2015, thanked Hunter Biden for having organized a meeting with his father (American Vice President at the time Joe Biden) and claimed that he was “very happy and flattered for having had the chance to spend some time with him in Washington».
American congressmen are intended to make clear whether the laptop presented by journalists of the New York Post belongs in fact to Hunter and whether the letters are real. Besides, politicians have serious questions for the workers on Twitter about the temporary blocking of the possibility for users to twit and retweet the NYP article about Hunter’s deals in Ukraine back in October 2020. The ban lasted two days, exactly the time the most active part of the presidential electoral campaign in the USA lasted.
Nevertheless, so far, Congress has not been interested in the financial scams of the President’s son, although back in 2014 the Prosecutor of Ukraine had documents about the illegal sale of the natural gas station in Kherson and proof of the illegal money that was paid to the Directive Counsel of Burisma.
(https://www.unian.info/politics/10709259-ukraine-starts-legal-due diligenceof-case-of-hunter-biden-related-burisma-riaboshapka.html) Reuters reported an amount of $3,4 million paid to the company Rosemont Seneca, which represented Hunter Biden’s interests from April 2014 until November 2015. The payments were made for “Consulting service”, which leaves a space for assuming the value of Hunter in the working frame of the gas extraction company and his father’s role in defending Zlochevski’s interests. (https://www.reuters.com/article/us-hunter-biden ukraineidUSKBN1WX1P7)
The silence as the best P.R instrument
After all that has been said, written, and recorded about Biden’s family interests in other countries, and considering the research made by Republican politics, the most effective strategy for Joe Biden’s political career in the future, has been the silence the Ukrainian side in the Burisma scandal. They have effectively kept silent about the bribery and not very clear activities of the NAB.
Most probably is that considering his own and Trump’s mistakes, the current American President is not expressing any public requirements to Zelensky. However, when a huge scale war is running against Russia and Ukraine is depending on the USA and its allies literally in everything, Ukrainian Court closes all criminal cases linked to Hunter and allows the culprit to elude his responsibility, the Specialized Anti-Corruption Prosecutor’s Office publishes a triumphant press release about the 100 million or UAH given to the Military Forces of Ukraine. An amazing stroke of luck for the 84-year-old Democratic presidential candidate, and the disgraced ex-minister Zlochevsky who was also a little bit lucky.
Sergei Shevchuk, Ukrainian political scientist. Graduated from Kiev University. Expert in relations between the countries of Eastern Europe and the USA
