A Biden family-linked Ukrainian business has been named in a criminal probe into the financing of terrorism, Russia’s Investigative Committee announced on Tuesday. The industrial conglomerate Burisma Holdings, which employed Hunter Biden as a highly paid director in the 2010s, is included among several entities listed by investigators.
The focus on the company stems from a complaint filed by a group of Russian MPs and public figures in the aftermath of the deadly Crocus City Hall attack outside Moscow last month. The original petition claims that the US and its allies have allegedly organized a string of attacks on Russian soil.
So far, investigators have “established that the funds, flowing through commercial organizations, including the oil and gas conglomerate Burisma Holdings, operating in Ukraine, have been used in recent years to carry out terrorist attacks in Russia,” committee spokeswoman Svetlana Petrenko said. Terrorist activities have also taken place in third countries, aimed at the “elimination of prominent political and public figures, as well as causing economic damage,” she added.
The committee’s specialists have been working “in cooperation with other intelligence services and financial intelligence,” Petrenko noted. The scrutiny currently revolves around “checking sources of income and further movement of funds in the amount of several million US dollars,” and examining the potential involvement of “specific individuals from among government officials, people with civic and commercial organizations of Western countries,” the spokeswoman stated.
Burisma is probably best known internationally for its controversial ties to the current first family in the US. In the spring of 2014, following the US-backed Maidan coup in Kiev, the Ukrainian energy firm employed Hunter Biden and his business partner Devon Archer as directors, offering $1 million a year in pay.
Biden’s father Joe was President Barack Obama’s vice president at the time, and oversaw Washington’s Ukraine policy. He once famously bragged about getting a corruption prosecutor fired – which just happened to occur after the official began investigating Burisma.
The company also offered protection payments to the government in Kiev, according to former Ukrainian MP Andrey Derkach. Its co-founder Nikolay Zlochevsky paid some “800 million hryvnias [over $21 million] for terrorism financing” in “various jurisdictions,” Derkach claimed in January.
“The leaders of Ukraine’s security services make no secret of the fact that they carry out terrorist acts and political assassinations for extra-budgetary cash,” he said at the time. “Once again: Biden’s partners in the corruption business in Ukraine finance terrorist acts, thus avoiding responsibility for corruption in Ukraine.”
Derkach claimed it was common practice for the owners of large businesses in Ukraine to ‘donate’ to the war effort in exchange for immunity from prosecution. He pointed to a criminal case against Zlochevsky relating to a $6 million cash bribe that ended with the Burisma owner paying a $1,800 fine.