Hunter Biden’s investment firm helped broker a 2016 deal that gave a Chinese state-backed company control of a massive African mine rich in cobalt — a mineral essential for the production of electric car batteries.
The deal would be boosted by President Biden’s $2 trillion social spending plan, which earmarks billions of dollars to promote electric vehicles.
In 2016, an investment firm founded by Hunter Biden with several Chinese partners was cut into a complex $3.8 billion transaction that transferred 80 percent of Congo’s Tenke Fungurum mine from an American company to Beijing-backed China Molybdenum.
Joe Biden was vice president when the deal was struck.
The mine is one of the world’s largest sources of cobalt — and China’s control of the mineral “presents a critical vulnerability to the future of the U.S. domestic auto industry,” Biden’s White House reported in June.
A White House spokesman said that Joe Biden had no knowledge of his son’s involvement with the sale, the New York Times reported.
Fox News explained it was Hunter Biden’s Bohai Harvest RST Equity Investment Fund Management Company that worked with other Americans and some Chinese partners.
The American members controlled 30 percent of the Shanghai-based operation and served on the board, the report said.
“The company notably completed a deal in 2016 that saw a Congo cobalt and copper mine transfer from American company Freeport-McMoRan to Chinese outfit China Molybdenum for the sum of $2.65 billion,” Fox News said.
The maneuver worked like this, the report said: “BHR served as a minority stakeholder to buy out around $1.14 billion of shares from Lundin Mining of Canada, who owned a portion of the Congo mine. China Molybdenum then bought BHR’s shares of the mine two years later, according to Hong Kong filings. The deal resulted in China Molybdenum owning 80% of the mine, with the remaining portion owned by Congo’s state mining enterprise.”
Hunter Biden controlled 10% of BHR at the time, the report said, but a lawyer said the president’s son “”no longer holds any interest, directly or indirectly, in either BHR…”
However, the report said Chinese business records reviewed by Fox News in April 2021 showed that Hunter Biden continued to hold a 10% stake in Chinese private equity firm Bohai Harvest RST Equity Investment Fund Management Co. through Hunter’s company, Skaneateles LLC.
WND has reported that Republicans in Congress are demanding that Attorney General Merrick Garland appoint a special counsel to investigate and reveal the inner workings of Hunter Biden’s latest scandal – his plan to sell novice works of art for hundreds of thousands of dollars.
According to a Daily Mail report, Rep. Ken Buck, R-Colo., wants the details about the scheme since “the president’s son was selling his work for the same amount as renowned artists Edgar Degas and Claude Monet.”
Buck, during a House Judiciary Committee hearing, held up images of a Monet work that sold for $700,000, one from Degas that went for $500,000, and an image from Hunter Biden that reportedly sold for $500,000.
And he pointed out that Hunter Biden has no background in art.
Rep. Tom McClintock, R-Calif., also asked for an independent review, explaining, “There have been multiple reports that Hunter Biden made enormous sums of money, and he’s admitted that’s because of his family ties. Now that, by itself, might not be a crime.”
But he pointed out that there now have been reports that President Joe Biden mingled his bank accounts with his son, and, “If that doesn’t call for an independent investigation [of] the president, what would?”
Buck noted, “Having a fake skill set is nothing new to Hunter Biden,” and cited his $50,000 monthly pay to be on the board of a Ukrainian gas company while his father was vice president and in charge of Ukraine policy for Barack Obama.
The report explained the massive amounts being paid for Hunter Biden’s work raises questions “of whether purchasers might believe they are buying the president’s favor.”
WND previously reported that the White House says such sales shouldn’t even be questioned.
In actuality, Hunter Biden’s strategy for pulling in more money has been alarming to many because of the possibility – despite White House promises he wouldn’t know any purchasers – that it would be a conduit to funnel money into the Biden family coffers while Joe Biden is president, and in a position to dispense significant favors.
It is a legitimate issue, and needs to be addressed, according to one of Barack Obama’s advisers.
According to the Daily Mail, it is Walter Shaub, former chief of the Office of Government Ethics, who is raising concerns that White House spokeswoman Jen Psaki refuses to discuss the problem.
Shaub had regularly criticized President Trump’s administration when he perceived issues with various federal requirements for officials.
Now he’s commented on social media that it’s wrong for Psaki to brush aside questions about the financial maneuverings of Hunter Biden.
“These are legitimate questions,” he said.
Peter Schweizer, chief of the Governmental Accountability Institute and author of the best-selling books “Profiles in Corruption,” “Secret Empires” and “Clinton Cash,” recently wrote in a column that he wanted to know why Congress is not investigating the “scam” by Hunter Biden to channel money into his family’s coffers.
Schweizer raised the questions in a column at the Gatestone Institute, where he is a distinguished senior fellow.
The issue is Hunter Biden’s plan, as a novice artist, to sell paintings for as much as $500,000.
“Why is this not being scrutinized?” Schweizer wrote. “The ranking member of the House Oversight Committee, Rep. James Comer, R-Ky., has sent letters to Bergès demanding the complete documentation of transactions involving Hunter’s art sales. Comer is unlikely to get it: only the Democrat majority on the committee can authorize subpoenas to compel those records. As the Wall Street Journal noted in a recent editorial, the committee’s chairwoman, Rep. Carolyn Maloney, D-N,Y., seems uninterested in doing so.
“Why are they failing to scrutinize what is so obviously a back-door scheme to funnel money to the president’s son from foreign sources? Every American who cares about transparency in government should be outraged.”
Joe Biden in the past has shown a willingness to intervene in his son’s activities.
He met, as vice president for Barack Obama, with Ukrainian officials at a time that Burisma was under investigation for corruption, and he returned home to brag about how he threatened the nation with withholding $1 billion in American aid if they didn’t get rid of the prosecutor.
Hunter Biden also has been revealed to have been involved in various other Chinese business deals, with Russian interests and more. He reportedly traveled aboard Air Force Two with his then-vice president father for business deals in Mexico and China.
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