Honestly pretty amazing ties

The Ukrainian oligarch whom the Biden administration banned from the United States this month previously had overlapping financial interests with President Joe Biden’s son Hunter, according to government documents and earlier news reports.

Igor Kolomoisky, a Ukrainian billionaire known for hardball actions against competing companies, is a former government official in Ukraine and also used to be an owner of one of that nation’s largest financial institutions, PrivatBank.

Last year, under the Trump administration, as the Justice Department investigated Kolomoisky’s U.S. assets, the FBI raided Optima Management Group, a U.S. real estate company that Kolomoisky has a stake in.

The Biden administration has cranked matters up, with Secretary of State Antony Blinken announcing March 6 that the U.S. would freeze Kolomoisky’s U.S. assets and ban him from reentering the country.

In a separate probe, the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Delaware has been investigating Hunter Biden’s overseas business relationships and taxes since 2018.

Moving against Kolomoisky could indicate the Biden administration won’t take the political risk of interfering in legal matters that could lead back to the younger Biden, said Peter Flaherty, chairman of the National Legal and Policy Center, a conservative government watchdog group.

“The investigation into Kolomoisky proves that the administration isn’t just going to make this [investigation] go away, and that is a good thing,” Flaherty told The Daily Signal in a statement.

Flaherty said it is “almost impossible” to operate in Ukraine’s business environment without the oligarch. Still, Flaherty said, he has not seen evidence that Hunter Biden and Kolomoisky directly met.

“Clearly, their interests overlapped,” Flaherty said. “Even if there was not conspiracy or coordination between the two, Hunter was clearly in Kolomoisky’s web.”

And the absolutely vital bullet points:

Among the indirect connections between Kolomoisky and the younger Biden:

Kolomoisky had a “controlling interest” in Burisma Holdings, the New York Post reported. Burisma employed Hunter Biden as a board member for a widely reported salary of $50,000 per month. Russian media, quoted in State Department emails, referred to Burisma as “part of Kolomoisky’s financial empire.” Kolomoisky publicly said in 2019 that he refused to cooperate with efforts by President Donald Trump’s personal lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, to get his help in investigating Hunter Biden and Burisma—and potentially Joe Biden, multiple news outlets reported. House Democrats’ impeachment report on Trump also cited the incident in late 2019.
Emails from 2015, published last year by the New York Post, show a Kolomoisky protege communicated with Hunter Biden about a meeting between the protege and Joe Biden, then vice president under President Barack Obama. **Court filings from 2019 by a private investigatory firm allege that legally obtained bank records of Hunter Biden show payments to him from the Kolomoisky-owned PrivatBank. **

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In 2015, Russian journalist John Helmer wrote in his book “The Man Who Knows Too Much About Russia” that both Burisma chief Mykola Zlochevsky and Pozharskyi were front men for Kolomoisky at Burisma, the New York Post reported.

Kolomoisky’s former bank, PrivatBank, also came up in court filings in a 2019 lawsuit involving Hunter Biden in Arkansas.

D&A Investigations, a private firm, said it legally obtained Hunter Biden’s bank records showing payments from Kolomoisky’s PrivatBank, among others, Fox News reported.

The firm’s court filing says bank records “provide the source and destination bank account numbers of Burisma Holdings Limited, PrivatBank, Bank of China, [Hunter Biden’s] business partners, Rosemont Seneca Bohai,” and others.

Hunter Biden’s legal team denied the unverified claim and decried a “scheme by a nonparty simply to make scandalous allegations in the pending suit to gain media attention without any material or pertinent material.”

Kolomoisky is a citizen of Israel and Cyprus as well as Ukraine. With a net worth of $1.2 billion, he deploys a private army for business interests and also has used the thousands of fighters to go after Russian separatists at war in Ukraine.

In June 2014, someone set a large fire at a Lisichansk refinery owned by Rosneft, a company owned by Russia. Some Russians reportedly suspected that Kolomoisky’s army started the fire to increase his share of the energy market, according to Russian media. No formal charges were brought.

Check out the whole article for more information.