New ruling in tribal bond scheme draws scrutiny of Biden business deals
PHOTO: The Biden family in happier times.
Hunter Biden’s longtime business partner, Devon Archer, was convicted of defrauding an Indian tribe in South Dakota, but his conviction was vacated by Judge Ronnie Abrams, sister of ABC Legal Correspondent Dan Abrams and wife of Robert Mueller team’s lawyer Greg Andres. This month, the appeals court asserted there was plenty of evidence Archer knew what he was doing, and bank statements bear that out. But the bank statements also show a lot of activity involving Hunter Biden. Here’s how.
By Tatiana Prophet
On October 7, 2020, the 2nd district court of appeals reinstated the conviction of Hunter Biden’s business partner, Devon Archer, for enacting a fraudulent bond issue by a division of the Oglala Sioux Nation for a Ponzi scheme that had Archer and his posse running all ends of the deal.
But while Archer and the six other clowns all got caught and arrested, Biden succeeded in distancing himself from the scandal – in spite of payments made to him from the same bank account that Archer used to receive the $15 million in fraudulent bonds, then wire the proceeds to another co-conspirator.
The money was supposed to be invested in an annuity for the tribe, but was diverted as a slush fund for the group’s multiple business deals and personal expenses. That’s the thing about Ponzi schemes; you always think you’ll be able to pay the first clients back with money from the next.
All this has come to light in the last month before the 2020 Presidential election, and the Biden family name is on countless lips for all the wrong reasons. Evidence has emerged showing much greater involvement by the candidate himself in his son and brother’s foreign business deals than he originally stated.
Despite a trove of evidence released by a co-conspirator in this tribal bond scheme, most centrist and leftist media have dismissed the evidence of the Bidens shopping and selling influence over U.S. policy as Russian fabrication. In late October, co-conspirator Bevan Cooney (once a co-owner of the Viper Room) authorized from jail the release of 26,000 emails, claiming that they detail Hunter Biden’s involvement in their various business ventures.
The arrests of Archer and his team all happened under the Obama administration’s U.S. attorney Preet Bahrara, while the trial was completed under the Trump-appointed U.S. attorney Geoffrey Berman. Berman was allegedly forced out by A.G. William Barr, prompting House Democrats to allege that Barr was tampering with investigations into the Trump family’s deals.
All three men – Biden, Archer and Cooney – were affiliated with Burnham Securities, the placement agent for the tribal bonds. Yet Biden’s name is absent from both the SEC and criminal complaints, despite the fact that the firm he co-founded – Rosemont Seneca Bohai Ltd. – used Burnham Securities as a holding company.
In fact, regulators almost seem to be going out of their way to point out that “as of August 12, 2014,” Archer “wholly owned” Rosemont Seneca Bohai Ltd. – when previous references show that it was founded by Biden and Archer for the purpose of a first-of-its-kind “cross-border” investment fund authorized by the Chinese government for the Shanghai “Free Trade Zone.” Further, Biden continued to be paid for his role on the board of Burisma Holdings through the firm’s account through 2015.
At its inception, the cross-border investment fund deal was heralded by the Wall Street Journal at the time in a glorified press release written by WSJ correspondent Chao Deng.
She wrote: “The fund—launched by Chinese asset managers Bohai Industrial Investment Fund Management Co. and Harvest Fund Management Co. alongside U.S. investment and advisory firms Rosemont Seneca Partners and Thornton Group LLC—started fundraising in the second quarter, and has raised its target to $1.5 billion from an original $1 billion plan, a spokesman at Bank of China International Holdings Ltd. said.
“The Bohai-Harvest fund is likely one of the biggest Sino-foreign collaborations in private equity to take advantage of the free-trade zone's benefits in converting yuan to dollars that can then be invested in foreign companies. The funds are raising a combination of yuan and U.S. dollars. The effort is the latest example private equity pushing boundaries in an area that China hopes will help drive the country's economic transformation. Normally, China restricts free conversion of its currency.”
“Rosemont Seneca is a Washington, D. C-based investment and advisory firm run by Hunter Biden, the son of U.S. Vice President Joe Biden. Thornton Group is a Boston-based cross-border investment advisory firm.
The joint fund will focus on cross-border merger and acquisition opportunities, focused in four sectors—high-end manufacturing, financials, consumer, and energy and resources. Within the latter, the fund will focus on natural gas, according to Ms. Wright.
Hunter Biden has experience in natural gas, having joined the board of Ukrainian gas producer Burisma Holdings Ltd. earlier this year. Burisma is controlled by a former top security and energy official for deposed President Viktor Yanukovych.
Bohai, Harvest, and Rosemont and Thornton as a pair, each own a 30% stake in the joint management firm, according to Ms. Wright.”
In December 2013, Hunter accompanied the vice president on his trip to China, where the deal was sealed. New emails have come out indicating that Joe Biden met his son’s business partner, Jonathan Li, on that trip.
Most accounts of the tribal bond scheme portray it as completely unrelated to the Rosemont Seneca Bohai deal in China, and for the most part it was. But money going in and out of the bank account Archer maintained for the firm, show cash infusions from the bond investment, payments from Ukrainian natural gas company Burisma, on whose board both Biden and Archer sat, and payments to Hunter Biden of roughly 50,000 per month (sometimes more). See the bank statements that were submitted at Archer’s trial.
There was even a deposit of $142,300 from a bank in Latvia, then a payment for the same amount the very next day, to Schneider & Nelson Porsche-Audi in Long Branch, N.J. And Burnham Securities, the placement agent for the tribal bonds and the holding company for Rosemont Seneca Bohai, deposited another oddball amount that was then transferred a couple months later to an unknown account.
The original plot was hatched by John Galanis, aka Yanni, and his son Jason Galanis, both of Southern California. The elder Galanis’s “various criminal proceedings and enforcements” date back to the late 1960s, according to the SEC complaint. John Galanis went to Las Vegas and met a representative of the Wakpamni Community Center at Pine Ridge, N.D., in what the criminal complaint described as “one of the poorest areas of the country.”
He convinced the tribal council to issue the bonds, promising to invest the proceeds for the tribe in an annuity that would pay both the interest and community upkeep.
Galanis and his best friend Cooney, along with three other agents, acquired fund management companies for the purpose of using customers’ money to buy the bonds; they even used the proceeds from the first tranche to buy the second tranche, according to the government complaint. And they largely defrauded pension funds that had placed their trust in Burnham to invest their money, which was then diverted by the Galanises’ co-conspirators into their own pockets in exchange for bonds that were worthless. According to one law firm advocating for bilked investors, Burnham Securities was closed the day before the SEC complaint was filed, and its CEO, founder and manager stepped down. The funds and trusts were rebranded into another entity, the law firm said.
They almost got away with it. And even after Galanis was arrested in an unrelated case, he continued to move money around to fulfill various obligations associated with the bond issuance. But the SEC and the Department of Justice stopped them before they could pay the tribe, or the investors, with money from other projects they had going. Once the conspirators were arrested, the Wakpamni were left holding $60 million in debt, and the fund investors lost over $40 million.
And with even a cursory examination of the available evidence, it seems that Hunter Biden’s longstanding business relationship with Archer and their concurrent posts on the board of Burisma, come up very close to the elaborate web of deceit woven around the Wakpamni Lake Community Association. Not a smoking gun, but enough affiliations that the government would have easily been able to look into the matter further. As stated above, the criminal complaint and SEC action were initiated under the Obama Administration, while Joe Biden was still Vice President. As reporter Jon Solomon recently observed, there appear to be two systems of justice in this country; justice, and “just us.”
Related links show how Paradigm, a hedge fund controlled by Jim and Hunter Biden was jointly branded with an entity of the Stanford Financial Group, which was charged by regulators in 2009 for an $8 billion fraud. The Stanford Companies handled the marketing for Paradigm, as well as investing $2.7 million of the $50 million hedge fund with money that went up in smoke. At the time, the Bidens offered to refund the $2.7 million to Stanford’s investors.
Editor’s note about why we chose to publish this story: We have been researching U.S. involvement in Ukraine for more than a year, along with the various activities of government officials abroad
We feel there is sufficient evidence to suggest a much broader criminal web that extends beyond the Bidens, of wanton disregard for U.S. taxpayer money and for the countries where deals are being made.
We have not looked as extensively into some of the accusations of wrongdoing by the Trump family, as that has been covered by nearly every single media outlet for four years.
So far we see self-dealing at the Trump Foundation (started to pass Apprentice income to charity); Trump University; multiple investigations by The New York Times and the Washington Post, including showing how the Trump family in earlier years undervalued their properties for tax purposes; and patents in China that appear to be timed right after the inauguration to perhaps curry favor with Adviser to the President Ivanka Trump. If there is other evidence of criminal actions by the Trump family, please comment below or send us an email at editor@back2facts.com.
