Moscow’s mayor’s widow, a Kazakh oligarch and a Romanian tycoon

Yelena Baturina, the billionaire widow of Moscow’s longtime mayor Yuri Luzhkov, wired $3.5 million in February 2014 to Rosemont Seneca Thornton. The Oversight Committee said about $1 million went to Devon Archer and the rest seeded the Rosemont Seneca Bohai account that later took Burisma’s payments. In April 2014 the Kazakh businessman Kenes Rakishev wired $142,300 to Rosemont Seneca Bohai; the next day the same amount went to a New Jersey car dealer for a sports car for Hunter. [1]

Archer testified that both were at a spring 2014 dinner at Café Milano in Washington that Joe Biden attended, along with Kazakhstan’s former prime minister Karim Massimov. Hunter said his father often stopped to eat with him there because it was near the vice president’s residence, and “would stop and have a bowl of spaghetti with me or whoever I was sitting with.” [2][3]

Gabriel Popoviciu, a Romanian property developer, was under investigation and later convicted in Romania in a land-deal corruption case. From November 2015 to May 2017 his company Bladon Enterprises paid Robinson Walker LLC more than $3 million, roughly a third of which reached Biden accounts. Joe Biden, as vice president, was publicly urging Romania to fight corruption at the time. [1]

In an August 2024 filing in Hunter’s tax case, Weiss’s prosecutors said Hunter and an associate were paid by a foreign principal “attempting to influence U.S. policy and public opinion and cause the United States to investigate” the Romanian case against Popoviciu, and that Hunter and his associate “were concerned that lobbying work might cause political ramifications” for his father. Hunter pleaded guilty to the tax counts that September, so the evidence was never tested at trial. [2][3]