Burisma's Top Men

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

Part III: Burisma’s Top Men

Billionaire Mykola Zlochevsky’s board has some unusual directors

 By Tatiana Prophet

The Zlocci boutique on Horodetskoho Street in Kyiv, appeared in a lifestyle blog in Kyiv Post in August 2015. At that time, Zlochevsky was on the prosecutor general’s wanted list and was living abroad. Zlochevsky is back in Ukraine according to Kyiv Post.

Before Hunter Biden, there were Joseph Cofer Black and Alan Apter. Black, currently a Burisma director and speaker at Burisma’s annual Energy Security Forum, is not a bean counter.

For the CIA, he spent 20 years in Africa, and in 1994, he helped capture Carlos the Jackal in Khartoum, Sudan, according to a profile in The New York Times.

Leading up to 9/11 saw Black in the top counterterrorism spot at the CIA. He was praised for predicting the event, and criticized for not having a better response plan. Black went to the State Department in 2002. As if that weren’t weird enough, he then went to military personnel contractor Blackwater from 2006 to 2008, and advised Mitt Romney in the 2008 campaign cycle.

The other Burisma exec is Alan Apter. He’s the chairman of the board at Burisma to this day, and has another CIA connection, albeit illicit. Before being appointed to Burisma in 2013, Alan Apter was a corporate lawyer at the New York City firm Sullivan & Cromwell, yes THE Sullivan & Cromwell that decades ago had continued its clients’ funding of the Nazis, and later figured heavily into the CIA’s founding by its managing partner, Mr. Allen Dulles himself. (Dulles was fired by President John F. Kennedy after he engineered the covert Bay of Pigs operation to overthrow Fidel Castro. Kennedy refused to send back-up, having been informed by Dulles of the mission only after it failed.) Obviously it’s been a long time since the Bay of Pigs, yet still it’s noteworthy that one of the firm’s former lawyers is sitting on the board of a Cyprus-based Ukrainian energy company.

Both men joined the board in 2013. It was almost as if Zlochevsky anticipated the lurch toward the West, and wanted to start greasing the right palms. After his buddy Yanukovych fled to Russia, he fled to Europe. Suspicion was growing about the rights to those natural gas wells, and how he acquired them.

In August 2015, Kyiv Post (normally Western friendly and left-leaning according to Media Bias Fact Check), published a lifestyle blog on the Zlocci store in Kyiv. It says the boutique, which sells shoes made of ostrich and crocodile, is owned by none other than Zlochevsky. The item refers to Zlochevsky as “wanted” and “presumably living abroad.”

The same article notes that the Zlochevsky-boutique connection emerged after his daughter, Karina Zlochevska, posted photos from the Zlocci Facebook page on her Instagram account. Zlochevska sits on the Burisma board with Apter, Black and the former president of Poland, Alexander Kwasniewski.

Zlochevsky is now back in Ukraine, as this story from Ukrainian news agency Interfax reported. This was after former U.S. Department of Justice attorney John Buretta, retained by Burisma, had met with the Ukraine prosecutor general Yuriy Lutsenko (the man who replaced the prosecutor fired under pressure from Vice President Joe Biden), and then gave an interview noting that there had never been any evidence of wrongdoing both in the United Kingdom and Ukraine (see Part IV: How Burisma’s founder turned scrutiny into prestige).

Of course, the fact that Buretta is former DOJ leadership is not weird at all. See his full resume here.