Bird’s Eye View on: Ukraine
An In-Depth Series by Back to Facts

Part IV: From ‘wanted man’ to ‘in demand’
How Burisma’s founder turned scrutiny into prestige

“I said I’m going to be leaving here in six hours. If the prosecutor’s not fired, you’re not getting a billion dollars. Well, son of a bitch. Got fired. And they put in place someone who was solid. At the time.”

— Former Vice President Joseph R. Biden, Jr., at a panel discussion in D.C. at the Council on Foreign Relations, Jan. 23, 2018.

By Tatiana Prophet

According to James Risen at The Intercept and Lucian Kim at National Public Radio, when Joe Biden called for a Ukrainian prosecutor to be fired in 2016, that prosecutor was not investigating Biden’s son Hunter; according to everyone in the Western world, Viktor Shokin was corrupt himself and had no interest in exposing corruption. Why, then, did Shokin’s replacement close the books on the investigation into Hunter’s employer, Burisma Holdings?

Wrote Risen: “The then-vice president issued his demands for greater anti-corruption measures by the Ukrainian government despite the possibility that those demands would actually increase – not lessen — the chances that Hunter Biden and Burisma would face legal trouble in Ukraine.”

Risen, who used to write for The New York Times, asserted in the very headline of the Intercept piece that his previous article on Hunter Biden’s unusual appointment, from 2015, was being used by the Trump-Giuliani team to “push conspiracy theories.”

Any good journalist would be able to see that the ultimate clearing of Burisma was neither a conspiracy, nor a theory. Rather, it was the culmination of careful planning and networking by Mykola Zlochevsky, Burisma’s owner, to ensure an escape route — even if cornered by the most powerful economies in the world. With the help of former U.S. Department of Justice attorney John Buretta retained as Burisma counsel, Zlochevsky succeeded in getting Burisma cleared in 2017. The “solid-at-the-time” prosecutor, Yuriy Lutsenko, closed the original Ukrainian case involving gas licenses, and instead got the billionaire to pay a tax settlement that was by all accounts “lenient.”

Burisma’s press release published in Kyiv Post as an advertisement declared Zlochevsky’s innocence:

”In mid-January, Burisma Group announced that all cases against its president, Nikolay Zlochevskyi, and Burisma companies were fully closed. The former Minister Nikolay Zlochevskyi is one of the few public officials from the previous government who voluntarily subjected himself to the investigation in Ukraine.”

The press release went on to quote John Buretta in the same writing style as stating that the British court had looked at evidence provided both by the SFO and Zlochevskyi, including “thousands of pages of material provided by Ukrainian authorities.”

So if the new prosecutor cleared Hunter Biden’s employer, doesn’t that mean the whole Shokin firing was in vain? Not necessarily. There could have been other cases he was allegedly blocking. Still, firing Shokin seems like a lot of effort to end up with the status quo. And the excuse? That Ukraine is just so corrupt! It seems that no matter how much help and money the U.S., E.U. and I.M.F. give to Ukraine, the money goes poof and the corruption continues. See Back to Facts, “Ukraine is good for the West, but is the West good for Ukraine?”

With the idea that Ukraine cannot manage itself pinging across the American media, and very little comprehensive coverage of Burisma founder Mykola Zlochevsky and his ties to the biggest alleged treasury heist in world history, the whistleblower complaint entered the American consciousness.

In the USA, the focus stayed on Joe Biden, polling ahead 17 months before the general election, and the idea that the impeachment inquiry centered on a Trump move to sway the election.

Again, Zlochevsky was not prosecuted by the new guy, but was allowed to walk away with his laundered money, and return to Ukraine from his self-imposed exile in Monte Carlo. Since then, very few Ukrainian assets have been recovered from offshore banks. It was this one truly bizarre case that embroiled the American President based on the idea that President Donald Trump was “looking for” already well-established “dirt” on his chief political rival, former Vice President Joe Biden, widely known to have taken the lead on the Obama administration’s Ukraine policy.

“Looking for dirt” is a mantra, ever since the whistleblower complaint came out about Trump’s July 25 phone call with newly elected President Volodymyr Zelenskyy. That Hunter Biden had been hired by Burisma is viewed by Democrats as “the dirt.” Hence the flurry of articles quoting Ukrainian prosecutors say they had no evidence of wrongdoing by the younger Biden.

But to Republicans, the Biden privilege is simply the dirt showing above ground, when the whole dirt could implicate many more people than Joe and Hunter Biden. We’re talking about the wholesale defeat of the stolen asset recovery effort by banks around the world to to the tune of more than $6 billion (mostly in Western loans and aid) that had vanished from Ukraine through corruption. See Back to Facts, “Follow the Money … If You Can.”

Stolen asset recovery historically has not gone well, and this time was no exception. But in 2014, right before Hunter Biden was added to the board, the Burisma probe was actually touted by the British government as a signal that there was a new sheriff in town. Unfortunately, all the new sheriffs in both Britain and Ukraine failed.

This is the story of how the founder of Burisma Holdings, Mykola Zlochevsky, went from being a cabinet minister implicated in the Russia-influenced “crime family” of outgoing President Viktor Yanukovych, to the darling of the international renewable energy community. And how he also – somehow -- gained the protection of the U.S. political establishment and – indirectly -- the anti-corruption establishment in Ukraine. And how he kept his laundered money.

Case in point: Zlochevsky’s name is noticeably absent from the thousands of blog posts and articles published over the years by Washington, D.C., think tank The Atlantic Council about how bad corruption is in Ukraine.

THE BACKGROUND

In 2013, Zlochevsky was ecology minister under President Viktor Yanukovych, overseeing the country’s natural resources. After allegedly awarding himself drilling rights, Zlochevsky fled the country when the U.S.-backed revolution went down in February 2014. He had already beefed up his team with an American G-man and a Wall Street lawyer the year before (See Back to Facts’ article, “Burisma’s Top Men.”)

But then, the London Serious Fraud Office froze a paltry $23 million held by Burisma in the London branch of a French bank -- right during an international conference on recovering stolen money abroad that belonged to Ukraine — attended by Attorney General Eric Holder, no less. According to court records, the $23 million had made its way to London via Latvia.

Wrote Oliver Bullough in the Guardian: “The SFO investigator Richard Gould claimed in the April 2014 court hearing that Zlochevsky’s dual position in Ukraine as both a politician and a businessman gave “rise to a clear inference of a willful and dishonest exploitation of a direct conflict of interest by a man holding an important public office such as to amount to an abuse of the public’s trust in him.”

“The SFO further argued that ‘the complicated pattern of offshore holding companies established when he was still a serving minister was effectively to conceal his beneficial ownership of Burisma,’ which it deemed inherently suspicious.

“By 20 May 2014, Gould had obtained 6,170 electronic documents from [the French bank] BNP Paribas related to Zlochevsky’s money, and assembled a special team to examine them. He also wanted evidence from Ukraine, so he wrote to the head of the international department of the general prosecutors’ office, Vitaly Kasko, in Kiev.”

THE REHABILITATION PLAN

In 2016, while his case was pending in Ukraine and a British court was asking Ukrainian prosecutors for evidence, Zlochevsky was busy co-founding the International Forum on Energy Security with Prince Albert of Monaco and former Polish President Alexander Kwasniewski, with its inaugural summit on June 2 in Monte Carlo (Zlochevsky’s home in exile).

Speakers included Kwasniewski; Joschka Fischer, former vice chancellor of Germany; Andris Piebalgs, adviser to the president of Latvia; Hunter Biden, independent director at Burisma Group; TJ Glauthier, US deputy secretary of energy; and David Eades, presenter for BBC World News.

Biden is quoted on the group’s web site: “So whatever we do as it relates to electric cars, whatever we do as it relates to geothermal, whatever we do as it relates to solar energy, the truth of the matter is that we need, we absolutely one hundred percent need to make a radical change in the way we approach energy. And one of the reasons that I am proud to be a member of the Board at Burisma is that I believe we are trying to figure out the way to create a radical change in the way we look at energy.“

HIRING BIDEN

In April 2014, shortly after the Revolution of Dignity, Zlochevsky met Devon Archer. According to The New Yorker, Archer had traveled to Kyiv to “pitch investors on a real-estate fund he managed, called Rosemont Realty.”

“There, he met Mykola Zlochevsky, the co-founder of Burisma, one of Ukraine’s largest natural-gas producers,” wrote Adam Entous in July 2019. “In early 2014, Zlochevsky sought to assemble a high-profile international board to oversee Burisma, telling prospective members that he wanted the company to adopt Western standards of transparency,” wrote Entous. Apparently, in spite of already having two American titans on its board, Burisma was still doing things the “hayseed” Ukraine kind of way, and wanted to add more experts to his brain trust. Cough.

One of the prospective experts just happened to be an attorney educated in corporate governance — Devon Archer’s business partner, Hunter Biden. The Wall Street Journal states that it was Zlochevsky’s deputy, Vadym Pozharsky, who met Hunter Biden in Kyiv and showed him around.

The New Yorker article goes on to explain these events of happenstance thusly: “Among the board members he recruited was a former President of Poland, Aleksander Kwaśniewski, who had a reputation as a dedicated reformer. In early 2014, at Zlochevsky’s suggestion, Kwaśniewski met with Archer in Warsaw and encouraged him to join Burisma’s board, arguing that the company was critical to Ukraine’s independence from Russia. Archer agreed.”

This is the same article that with a straight face disclosed Biden’s dismissal from the U.S. Navy after he tested positive for cocaine, saying Biden claimed that “the cigarettes he’d smoked outside the bar might have been laced with cocaine.”

ELUSIVE ASSETS

Biden’s dismissal from the Navy was likely far from his mind as he took the stage with Prince Albert of Monaco on June 2, 2016 in Monte Carlo. They both held a gold-plated trophy in the shape of the International Energy Security logo. Renewable, alternative and sustainable practices were obviously a big part of the fledgling operation, and it appears Biden was inspired by the philanthropic nature of his work. What he lacked in knowledge of gas exploration (Burisma’s actual business), he made up for in starry-eyed altruism.

Two months earlier, in London, the freezing of Burisma’s millions (from the sale of a gas storage facility according to court documents), had two purposes, according to Bullough in The Guardian: “First, it was meant to be the initial installment of many billions that would eventually help to rebuild Ukraine. If that sum could be confiscated and returned, perhaps so too could the hundreds of millions stashed in London, Latvia, Luxembourg, Liechtenstein and elsewhere. Second, the successful prosecution of a regime insider would send a message to the world’s kleptocrats: your money isn’t safe in London any more.”

Neither of those two things happened.

Zlochevsky’s London-based attorney insisted on his innocence: “Mr Zlochevsky’s wealth is not a result of corruption or criminal conduct,” he told Bullough. “He made his wealth before entering office.”

THE CASE FAILS

The case failed in short order, but the blame hasn’t been sorted out. How far had the great Western democracies fallen from the bluster they displayed after Yanukovych fled to Russia.

Again from The Guardian’s Bullough: “The message is clear,” May said. “We are making it harder than ever for corrupt regimes or individuals around the world to move, hide and profit from the proceeds of their crime.”

Bullough continued: “For decades, hundreds of billions of dollars have vanished from the world’s poorest countries, finding their way – via the tax and secrecy havens of Europe, south-east Asia and the Caribbean – into the banking system, real estate and luxury goods markets of the west. According to the World Bank, between $20bn and $40bn is stolen each year by public officials from developing countries. Rich countries returned only $147.2m worth of these assets between 2010 and 2012 – far less than one cent out of every misappropriated dollar. And that may even understate the scale of the problem. Some lawyers involved in asset-recovery cases estimate the volume of money embezzled globally at around $1tn a year, which makes the tiny amount of money recovered look even feebler.”

So, what happened? Bullough’s article, which became a book, tells of one helpful character in this play who blamed it on his boss in the General Prosecutor’s Office. But the article never names the superior. The man blaming his superior was Vitaly Kasko. Kasko was recommended by AnTAC, the Anti-Corruption Action Centre (an activist group and not a government agency) as someone not tainted by Viktor Yanukovych, and was hired by the General Prosecutor’s Office with the specific role of interfacing with the Western governments working to recover the hidden assets of the regime.

AnTAC is half funded by George Soros’ International Renaissance Foundation and half by the U.S. government (I kid you not, Soros has personally been involved in Ukraine since 1990).

Kasko told The Guardian that this superior of his did nothing to reply to British prosecutor Gould’s request for evidence in the case. Finally, Kasko said, he got tired of waiting, overstepped his position and sent evidence himself to Gould (wasn’t he the liaison?). The ball was now in a British court, but in January 2015, Mr. Justice Nicholas Blake threw the case out, saying the government had failed to show a specific crime connected to the frozen money.

Burisma’s owner received his $23 million, plus an “exoneration” by someone in Kasko’s office.

“Justice Blake’s 21-page judgment made reference half a dozen times to a letter, dated 2 December 2014, signed by someone in the Ukrainian prosecutor’s office, which stated baldly that Zlochevsky was not suspected of any crime.”

A letter stating Zlochevsky was not a suspect is called evidence? What about the evidence Kasko had already sent?

Kasko by his own account stated that the unnamed superior who wrote the letter was “either incompetent, corrupt, or both,” quoted Bullough.

THE COVER-UP

Long story short, according to Kasko, it seems the letter “exonerating” Burisma owner Zlochevsky came from two prosecutors in the Prosecutor General’s Office who had accepted a bribe by the oligarch to dump the case. And according to a new article coming out in the Dec. 23 issue of The New Yorker, also by Adam Entous, the information that these two prosecutors had taken a bribe came from none other than the Federal Bureau of Investigation.

After the British case was dropped, the FBI decided it was fed up. The regular prosecutor’s office was not returning agents’ calls and was avoiding them in alleyways. At the insistence of U.S. Ambassador Geoffrey Pyatt, President Poroshenko and the legislators in the Verkhovna Rada rushed the creation of a special new agency to prosecute corruption: it was called the National Anti-Corruption Bureau of Ukraine (NABU).

According to former general prosecutor Yuriy Lutsenko, the guy telling everyone that fired Ambassador Marie Yovanovitch gave him a do-not-prosecute list in 2016, intense pressure to found the NABU also came from the Soros-funded NGO AnTAC, the EU, the United States and the International Monetary Fund. Incidentally, the alleged do-not-prosecute list included names from the Anti-Corruption Action Centre. Yovanovitch told Congress that she did no such thing.

REALITY CHECK

All this for $23 million dollars? But the story goes on. Ambassador Pyatt in his fiery speech directed at Poroshenko, said the bribe takers should be fired from the Prosecutor General’s Office.

Then things got really interesting. Poroshenko appointed a new prosecutor to the Prosecutor General’s Office, Viktor Shokin. Shokin was a friend of Poroshenko’s. He immediately opened a case into Vitaly Kasko. According to Shokin, it was Kasko who delayed responding to the London Serious Fraud Office, thus causing the case to be closed due to lack of evidence.

The AnTAC, known for its publicity stunts in front of the Ukrainian parliament, and co-founded by Fullbright Scholar and journalist Daria Kaleniuk, began staging protests demanding Shokin’s removal. Shokin himself came under suspicion for having an unusual quantity of diamonds. Shokin would later state under oath that he had been actively pursuing a case against Burisma. Both Shokin and Lutsenko have been in contact with reporter John Solomon and former NYC Mayor Giuliani. They have been labeled as trying to curry favor with Trump by American media.

The Washington Post, The Independent, The New York Times and USA Today all cast aspersions on Shokin (just as many of them cast aspersions on the new president of Ukraine, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, after he told the press that Trump had not pressured him on the July 25 phone call).

Even the Washington Examiner, normally a defender of Trump, called Viktor Shokin “Ukraine’s swamp monster.”

What had Shokin done? He had dared to open an investigation into the man tasked as liaison to the London Fraud office — Vitaly Kasko.

ANALYSIS

Burisma is a complex case; and one that makes very little sense. It was a small case, and yet it was touted as the beginning of the end of stolen money from Ukraine. When it summarily failed by the ruling of a British judge, Ukrainians started pointing fingers at each other for not giving the British court enough evidence. And less than one percent of the roughly $6 billion lost since the Revolution of Dignity has been recovered. Donald Trump sold anti-tank Javelin missiles to Ukraine in 2017, something President Obama would not do, so as not to escalate conflict with Russia.

When the new president was elected, he spoke with him about various topics known to both men. In Trump’s mind, the prosecutor who was being blamed for sitting on corruption, Viktor Shokin, was a scapegoat. He called him a good prosecutor, and American media pounced. Pretty odd considering most of those same American media have no idea that Burisma’s founder was hobnobbing in Monaco with various European government officials fawning over his new interest in renewable energy. What this shows is that American media is getting their information from one viewpoint, maybe even one source. Is that source interested in ending corruption in Ukraine? Not if they’re protecting Burisma’s founder, an accused member of the Yanukovych crime family.

Now that the House of Representatives has voted to impeach Donald Trump in a Senate trial, the focus of the American media has shifted to the idea that Trump was not interested in corruption in Ukraine. The logic goes that because he was ordered by a judge to pay $2 million for violations of U.S. nonprofit regulations in the administration of the Trump Foundation, he would be hopelessly focused on his own fortunes and not on the disappearance of U.S. taxpayer money (which has disappeared in cycles under various Ukrainian administrations).

Yet Trump’s focus on getting NATO to pay more for each country’s own defense, while the U.S. pays a larger percentage of its own GDP for their countries’ defenses, is widely viewed by the left as ill-advised, a manufactured need, and destabilizing to U.S. alliances. Yet it is precisely Trump’s efforts to rein in our spending abroad that has been a key platform of his since he first stuck a toe in the water in the early 1990s to run for President.

It used to be a popular idea, watching the American treasury and making sure we weren’t getting taken for a ride so that we could ensure the health and safety of our own citizens first.

And it might well be Trump’s most lasting policy achievement. The Trump Foundation, while showing some sloppy double dealing, was started as a place for Trump to donate his book earnings, though he stopped contributing sometime in 2008 and instead used other people’s donations to nonprofits while also spending their money to boost auctions.

To equate the two situations is to miss the full scope of the mismanagement of taxpayer funds (see Back to Facts, “Follow the Money … If You Can.” In fact, this writer has had to re-read over and over the documented theft from the Ukraine treasury to fully appreciate the scope of the corruption and mismanagement by Europeans and Americans alike.

JUSTICE

Where is the justice for the people of Ukraine, thousands of whom have fled the country in search of better lives and job?. One-third of the Estonian economy is now supported by Ukrainian workers, according to Estonian newspaper Postimees. They live in an underground economy, often work double the allowable hours, and aren’t paid overtime according to the article.

So where is the money and where is justice? In Cyprus, the British Virgin Islands, the Isle of Man, Monaco, Switzerland, and so many more places where it’s not helping the Ukrainian nation or people.

And that’s the real impeachment of justice.