Paging the FBI: You Might Want to Check This Info on Hunter Biden
We’ve reported previously about the $3.5 million that the firm, Rosemont Seneca Thornton, got from Yelena Baturina, the widow of the former Moscow mayor, as a “consultancy fee.” Rosemont Seneca Thornton is a consortium formed between Hunter’s investment company, Rosemont Seneca, and the Boston-based Thornton Group according to the NY Post.
The 2014 transfer was later scrutinized in a 2020 report commissioned by Senate Republicans probing Hunter’s ties to Ukraine after Baturina’s transfers were flagged in suspicious activity reports filed by banks to the US Treasury Department.
Hunter’s lawyer, George Mesires, denied Biden’s son profited from that transaction, telling CNN at the time: “Hunter Biden had no interest in and was not a co-founder of Rosemont Seneca Thornton, so the claim that he was paid $3.5 million is false.”
It’s not clear where the $3.5 million went. The Senate report said the company was co-founded by Hunter Biden.
Now there are new emails detailing that there was much more involved. Namely, a $40 million investment in Hunter’s company, Rosemont Realty. Baturina’s brother, Viktor Baturin said it was “a payment to enter the American market.”
In 2012 Hunter’s firm had a $69.7million plan to invest in 2.15million sq ft of office space in seven US cities.
Documents outlining the plan said the money came from a mix of investors, including $40million from Inteco Management AG, a Swiss company owned by Baturina.
The Inteco group is a plastics and construction behemoth that made Baturina the richest woman in Russia at the time. She has a current net worth of $1.4billion according to Forbes.
The emails about the Inteco investment came from a leak by obtained by the Kazakhstani Initiative on Asset Recovery, an anti-corruption group. Hunter’s partner in Rosemont Realty Devon Archer was communicating with Kenes Rakishev, a Kazakh businessman, trying to get him to invest.
“Inteco, who I know you know, is taking a significant equity piece … We’d love to have you on board,” Archer wrote in an email to Rakishev.
“I know you mentioned you were less interested in real estate but this is a deal we’re closing next month and it’s just too attractive not to share.”
Archer laid out the deal in an attached document.
The document says the seven offices would be bought by a partnership set up in March 2012, and that ‘Rosemont Realty has entered into property acquisition contracts for $212,580,000’.
The deal comprised about $52million in cash and $160million in mortgages.
Rosemont Realty was putting up at least $15million of its own cash alongside Baturina’s and other investors, the document said.
‘The Managing Partnership will receive a total investment of $69,700,000 from the partners. The Managing General Partner will invest at least $15,000,000 of share capital on the same terms as all partners in the Investment Partnership,’ an approximate Russian translation states.
Rakishev was among the people who were photographed at a dinner with Hunter and Joe Biden at Cafe Milano. Baturina was also invited to the dinner but didn’t go.
The New York Post has sources that claim there was even more that the $40 million, that that was one deal, but that there were investments of more than $100 million from Baturina to Rosemont Realty.
The FBI is allegedly looking into Hunter Biden over taxes and a possible gun violation. It’s not clear how much they’re looking into the foreign dealing and given the bias that whistleblowers have reported generally and in the case specifically, many have speculated that they might make a deal on some minor things that wouldn’t touch on Joe Biden or the foreign dealing. At this point, I don’t have any faith that they are looking seriously at the foreign dealing, but if they were truly taking a serious look at things, this seems pretty darn relevant on many levels.
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