Hunter Biden coordinated with executives at Ukrainian natural gas company Burisma Holdings to open an account at a corrupt Maltese bank, according to emails from the first son’s abandoned laptop.
Hunter, now 53, passed along income statements, passport information and utility bills in 2016 to Burisma board adviser Vadym Pozharskyi, who used the information to open an account with Satabank.
“Dear colleagues, Hope, all is well. Taking into account that Burisma will be opening an account at the Maltese bank, could you kindly provide us with your latest utility bills and a bank reference?” Pozharskyi wrote in an email to Hunter, his fellow board member Devon Archer, and others dated April 24, 2016.
“We are working on this – I was traveling with my Dad and had my passport abroad last week,” Hunter responded on May 3.
Subsequent emails from Pozharskyi over the following weeks asked for Hunter’s “certified and apostilled passport copy in color,” “a certified declaration of source wealth including profile” and “a certified declaration from a leading European/US Law Firm confirming that he has no pending legal issues with authorities.”
Pozharskyi, in a separate email chain with Hunter, identified the financial institution as Satabank, and an assistant for the then-second son later sent an accompanying tax identification number and signature.
The information was sent to the owner of an auction house in Malta, Pierre Pillow, who was later charged in December 2020 with laundering “millions of euro,” according to the Times of Malta newspaper.
Prosecutors in the island nation launched the investigation after receiving a tip about a suspicious transaction involving Pillow, Burisma and a disassembled oil rig, the outlet reported.
The case revealed that Burisma founder Mykola Zolchevsky in 2014 had rented Pillow’s apartment in the seaside village of Ta’ Xbiex while seeking a Maltese visa.
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Pillow was never convicted of any crime, and his attorney said “due diligence was done and it was approved by a bank,” according to the reports.
Satabank closed in 2018 after Malta’s Financial Intelligence Analysis Unit found “gross deficiencies” in the bank’s ability to abide by money laundering and terrorism finance laws.
The Satabank emails were first reported by independent journalist KanekoaTheGreat on Substack.
The report comes on the heels of allegations that Hunter Biden and Joe Biden each accepted $5 million bribes to help Zlochevsky dodge a corruption probe around the same time that the bank accounts were opened.
“It was all a brib[e] to get [Ukrainian prosecutor general Viktor] Shokin fired,” Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) said earlier this month after viewing an FBI file from an informant that reportedly contains the allegations.
The informant, who had been paid $200,000 by the bureau since 2010 fortheir assistance, first heard the allegations when meeting Zlochevsky in 2015 and elaborated on them in a June 2020 interview with investigators.
Members of the House Oversight Committee reviewed the document earlier this month after Chairman James Comer (R-Ky.) threatened to hold FBI Director Christopher Wray in contempt of Congress.
Zlochevsky allegedly told the FBI informant “it would take 10 years” for investigators “to find out the payments made to the Bidens because of how many bank accounts there were,” according to Greene.
Hunter, who earned up to $1 million annually while serving on Burisma’s board from 2014 to 2019, introduced Pozharskyi to his dad in April 2015 at a DC dinner. Shokin was dismissed from his position 11 months later, in March 2016 — weeks before the Satabank accounts were opened.
