Hunter Biden’s Ukraine pay cut revealed
US President Joe Biden’s son suffered a sharp cut in pay from Ukraine’s Burisma Holdings when his father left office as vice president in 2017 and Donald Trump’s administration took charge in Washington, a new criminal indictment against Hunter Biden has revealed.
The Ukrainian energy company hired Hunter Biden as a board member in 2014, despite his lack of industry expertise, and was paying him $1 million annually while then-Vice President Joe Biden was overseeing Washington’s support for Kiev. In March 2017, two months after the Obama-Biden administration left office and Trump took over as president, Hunter Biden’s compensation was cut in half, according to a federal indictment filed on Thursday.
The case was brought by US Department of Justice special counsel David Weiss, who persuaded a grand jury to indict the president’s son on three felony tax offenses and six misdemeanors. The charges against Hunter Biden include tax evasion, failing to pay taxes, and filing a false tax return.
Hunter Biden didn’t report his income from Burisma; rather, the money was funneled into the bank account of a company that he and a business associate controlled, according to the indictment. That associate also served on Burisma’s board of directors. Burisma paid Hunter Biden a combined $2.3 million from 2016 through April 2019, when he left the company’s board of directors.
Republican lawmakers have claimed that Hunter Biden was given a lucrative, no-show job at Burisma as part of an influence-peddling operation in which the president’s son solicited overseas bribes in return for political favors.
Devon Archer, the Biden business associate who served on the Burisma board, testified to a US House committee in July that the Biden family “brand” protected the Ukrainian energy company from scrutiny.
Former Ukrainian Prosecutor General Viktor Shokin claimed in an August interview that then-Vice President Joe Biden got him fired because he was investigating corruption at Burisma. Biden boasted in a 2018 interview that he threatened to withhold $1 billion in US loan guarantees for Ukraine unless Shokin was sacked. “Well, son of a bitch, he got fired,” Biden chortled.
Thursday’s indictment alleged that Hunter Biden engaged in a scheme to avert at least $1.4 million in taxes that he should have paid from 2016 to 2019 while spending millions of dollars on an extravagant lifestyle. His expenses over the four-year period included nearly $1.7 million in ATM withdrawals, $189,000 for “adult entertainment,” $683,000 in payments to various women, $72,000 for drug and alcohol rehabilitation, and nearly $400,000 for clothing and accessories.
