‘Hunter’s’ oligarch
‘Sold’ info on shady under-probe Russian
Hunter Biden boasted he could provide intelligence on the shady Russian oligarch whose Greenwich Village townhouse was raided by the FBI on Tuesday.
The president’s son said he could provide Alcoa, a giant US aluminum firm, with knowledge about the “elite networks” connected to Oleg Deripaska in a proposal from his company Rosemont Seneca, e-mails on Hunter’s laptop show.
Federal agents carried out “law-enforcement activity” Tuesday at the Gay Street townhouse and a Washington mansion tied to Deripaska, a close ally of Russian President Vladimir Putin. Deripaska was investigated for money laundering and extortion and sanctioned by the US in 2018.
A spokesperson for Deripaska told The Associated Press that the searches were “connected to US sanctions” and that the homes didn’t belong to him but to relatives.
Hunter Biden in 2011 offered to “provide Alcoa with statistical analysis of political and corporate risks, elite networks associated with Oleg Deripaska (OD), Russian CEO of Basic Element company and United company RUSAL,” according to documents on the laptop he abandoned at a MacBook repair shop in Delaware in April 2019.
RUSAL is a Russian aluminum company.
In an e-mail to Daniel Cruise, Alcoa’s then-VP of government and public affairs, on June 3, 2011, Hunter wrote: “Please see the attached proposal per our last conversation . . . we tried to provide a little better sense of the product by attaching some of the raw data that is produced through the elite mapping procedure.”
Included in the proposal was a “list of elites of similar rank in Russia, map of OD’s [Deripaska’s] networks based on frequency of interaction with selected elites and countries.”
Hunter wanted to charge Alcoa fees of “$25,000 for phase one of the project [and] $55,000 for refined analysis.”
In a June 8, 2011, e-mail forwarded to Hunter, Cruise’s colleague at Alcoa, Pei Cheng, wrote to Cruise: “I don’t believe the data analysis is worth the full $55,000. I think the most valuable piece for us would be the list of Russian elites connected to OD [Deripaska] that would not otherwise be on Government Affairs team’s radar, including various Russian Committee Heads, Union leaders or Ministers.”
Cheng also noted Hunter’s political pedigree in her e-mail: “Rosemont Seneca [has] Co-chairmen: Hunter Biden, son of Joe Biden, and Christopher Heinz . . . stepson of Sen. John Kerry.”
Alcoa had just signed a two-year metal-supply agreement with RUSAL.
In an e-mail to Hunter from business associate Eric Schwerin, Rosemont Seneca proposed to charge Alcoa just $25,000 for information about Deripaska.
“Not horrible feedback,” wrote Schwerin in the June 10, 2011 e-mail. “Daniel’s guy [sic] missed the point that the price was $25k reduced from $55k.”
Hunter Biden had deep connections with oligarchs close to Putin, as I detail in my upcoming book “Laptop From Hell” (out on Nov. 30).
While his father was vice president, Hunter was paid $83,333 per month in board fees by the corrupt Ukrainian energy company owned by Russia-aligned oligarch Mykola Zlochevsky, the former ecology minister under then-Ukraine President Viktor Yanukovych.
The payment was cut in half shortly after Joe Biden left the VP’s office. In the five years that Hunter was on the Burisma payroll, to April 2019, he earned some $4 million in board fees.
Hunter also was involved with Moscow oligarchs in Putin’s inner sanctum, including Ara Abramyan, who was awarded one of Russia’s highest civilian honors by Putin, the Order of Merit to the Fatherland.
According to a diary on his laptop, Hunter flew to Russia in 2012 to meet Abramyan immediately after having lunch in Washington with then-VP dad Joe Biden, and then-Chinese Vice President Xi Jinping.
Hunter’s diary entry for Feb. 16, 2012, shows “breakfast board of directors ‘troika dialog,’ lunch w Ara Abramyan his home” in the upscale Odintsovsky district of west Moscow.
Some junior staff at the Obama State Department were alarmed by Hunter’s connections to Russian oligarchs and role in Burisma.
Amos Hochstein, special envoy on energy policy, tried twice to raise concerns about Hunter’s role, including directly with Joe in the West Wing in October 2015.
“I wanted to make sure that he was aware that there was an increase in chatter on media outlets close to Russians and corrupt oligarchowned media outlets [about] Hunter Biden being part of the board of Burisma,” Hochstein testified to the Senate Republican inquiry into “Hunter Biden, Burisma, and Corruption” by the Finance and Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs committees, chaired by Sens. Chuck Grassley and Ron Johnson.
The US sanctions imposed against Deripaska in 2018 were part of a crackdown on seven Russian oligarchs and 12 companies they own. Deripaska “has been investigated for money laundering, and has been accused of threatening the lives of business rivals, illegally wiretapping a government official and taking part in extortion and racketeering,” the Treasury Department said in a press release on April 6, 2018.
“There are also allegations that Deripaska bribed a government official, ordered the murder of a businessman and had links to a Russian organized-crime group.”
A spokesman for Alcoa Corporation, a spinoff of Alcoa Inc., said they officials were “not in a position to respond on behalf of our prior parent company.”
Cruise and Cheng, who are not associated with the new company, did not return requests for comment.