When Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. traveled to Kiev , Ukraine, on Sunday for a series of meetings with the country’s leaders, one of the issues on his agenda was to encourage a more aggressive fight against Ukraine’s rampant corruption and stronger efforts to rein in the power of its oligarchs.
But the credibility of the vice president’s anticorruption message may have been undermined by the association of his son, Hunter Biden, with one of Ukraine’s largest natural gas companies, Burisma Holdings, and with its owner, Mykola Zlochevsky, who was Ukraine’s ecology minister under former President Viktor F. Yanukovych before he was forced into exile.
Hunter Biden, 45, a former Washington lobbyist, joined the Burisma board in April 2014. That month, as part of an investigation into money laundering, British officials froze London bank accounts containing $23 million that allegedly belonged to Mr. Zlochevsky.
Britain’s Serious Fraud Office, an independent government agency, specifically forbade Mr. Zlochevksy, as well as Burisma Holdings, the company’s chief legal officer and another company owned by Mr. Zlochevsky, to have any access to the accounts.
But after Ukrainian prosecutors refused to provide documents needed in the investigation, a British court in January ordered the Serious Fraud Office to unfreeze the assets. The refusal by the Ukrainian prosecutor general’s office to cooperate was the target of a stinging attack by the American ambassador to Ukraine, Geoffrey R. Pyatt, who called out Burisma’s owner by name in a speech in September.…New York Times (reprinted in Russian Insider)
Biden Lectures Ukraine on Corruption While His Son Is Reaping Rewards From It
James Risen
With the oil and gas both down in the toilet there is not enough to rob out of the place to go around...
ReplyDeleteNot just resources, Matt. As Michael Hudson pointed out long ago, the prize is Ukrainian agricultural land and that is now being bought up by Western interests since the land ownership laws were changed recently under the new regime. This was the real objective.
ReplyDeleteSo Germany its securing it's Lebensraum after all...
ReplyDelete100% correct, Tom. AND there is the Russian abiotic oil technology in the Dneiper-Donetz Basin that they want to get their mitts on. Khodorkovsky was going to sell this technology (Yuko or Yukos Oil) to Cheney's buddies in 2003 (think that was the year-thereabouts) and Putin chased him around Europe until he nabbed him and put him in jail. Don't forget that Putin's doctorate was 'how to bring a totalitarian state into the 21st C using natural resources'.
ReplyDeleteThe abiotic oil technology brought in the Dneiper-Donetz Basin, and it was bigger than the north slope of Alaska.
When Khodorkovsky went to jail, Jacob Rothschild managed his affairs. Khodorkovsky didn't have the dough to buy the Yuko/Yukos shares when they were offered up by the Clinton admin to every Russian (who sold them for pennies on the dollar in order to eat), so it is assumed that Rothschild was the money behind it.
The abiotic oil technology was offered to the White House in 1992 or 1993 in return for hiring desperately broke Russian scientists, and the oil czar at the time (Eisenstadt?) scoffed that the Ruskies knew an oil technology that the Americans and Brits knew nothing about. Americans and Brits use the ole' let's drill here and see if somethin's up technique. So he declined. In addition, the price of oil was only about $10 at the time, so no one was jumping up and down. Fast forward to 2008 and the Russians were the #1 exporter of oil worldwide. They did the Dneiper-Donetz Basin--developed it and brought it in--as well as new fields they developed in Siberia.
The really fertile agricultural land is in west Ukraine. The land in the east is fertile as well but the prize is the abiotic oil technology which western geologists sneer at. There are 4,000 Russian scientific papers describing this tech, and not one of them has been translated.
One American geophysicist was involved: Dr. J F Kenney. Here he is describing it on NPR's Science Friday after his 2002 paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Archived here, short, fascinating: http://web.archive.org/web/20111025151824/http://www.gasresources.net/Kenney-NPR.mp3
An astronomer by the name of Thomas Gold found out about it in 1979. He spoke Russian. He published some of the info in articles, NOT in refereed journals, as if he invented it himself. http://www.gasresources.net/Gold_plagiarism(complaints).htm. The Russian scientists objected, but it was 1979 and no one gave a damn if anyone purloined shit from Russians. The problem was that Gold got a lot of the info wrong and was laughed at in the west.
I don't think that Hudson knows about this.
You'll notice that Biden Jr isn't the board member of an agriculture company. He's the board member of Ukraine's largest energy company. Risen calls it a natural gas company, but it's way more than that. They want that technology.
ReplyDeleteF William Engdahl on the full story from 2007: http://www.engdahl.oilgeopolitics.net/Geopolitics___Eurasia/Peak_Oil___Russia/peak_oil___russia.html
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