Burisma: what was Hunter paid to do?

Burisma Holdings is Ukraine’s biggest private gas producer. Its owner, Mykola Zlochevsky, was ecology minister under the pro-Russian president Viktor Yanukovych, who fled in February 2014. That spring Zlochevsky recruited Western names to his board: the former Polish president Aleksander Kwasniewski, Devon Archer, and Hunter Biden. [1][2][3]

Burisma paid $83,333.33 a month to Rosemont Seneca Bohai, an entity tied to Archer, from which Hunter was paid; Senate Republican investigators counted 39 such payments, and Hunter put his own average at about $65,000 a month over five years. NBC’s review of financial records on the laptop found that Hunter and his company took in about $11 million in 2013–2018 from Burisma and a Chinese firm combined. [1][2][4]

Hunter testified that he advised on corporate governance and international expansion, and that he attended board meetings. He had no experience in the gas industry or in Ukraine. [1]

Devon Archer, Hunter’s former partner, told the House Oversight Committee in July 2023 that Burisma would have survived without the Biden name, but that “the brand” helped it. He said Hunter was part of a wider effort to give the company protection in Washington, and that Hunter put his father on the phone with associates about 20 times over a decade, with talk that was social, “niceties,” not business. [1][2]

Archer also described a December 2015 board meeting in Dubai. Zlochevsky and his deputy Vadym Pozharskyi asked Hunter for help with pressure the company was under, and Hunter stepped away with them to “call D.C.” Archer did not hear the call and said no one told him it was to the vice president. [1]

George Kent, then a senior State Department official, testified that in early 2015 he told the vice president’s office that Hunter’s role created the perception of a conflict of interest and complicated U.S. anti-corruption work in Ukraine. Senate Republican investigators found that neither the vice president’s office nor the State Department acted on such concerns. Joe Biden said in September 2019: “I have never spoken to my son about his overseas business dealings.” A month later he said Hunter “did not do a single thing wrong.” [3][4][5]