Poroshenko ‘most corrupt president ever,’ Hunter Biden’s board job may have been bribe for his father – UkraineGate documentary

30 Jan, 2020 13:36

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FILE PHOTO: (L) Hunter Biden and Joe Biden. © REUTERS/Andy Wong/Pool (R) Petro Poroshenko and Joe Biden © REUTERS/Valentyn Ogirenko 

Former Ukrainian officials told a French journalist that President Petro Poroshenko was directly involved in corruption, and that Hunter Biden’s job at the gas company Burisma was a bribe to his father, the US vice president. 

US President Donald Trump is currently on trial in the Senate, having been impeached by the House over Democrat allegations that withholding military aid to Ukraine over corruption concerns amounted to an abuse of power. Former Ukrainian officials and anti-corruption activists, however, have testified that not only was there corruption involving Burisma, the natural gas firm tied to former vice president and Democratic presidential frontrunner Joe Biden’s son, but that it went all the way to the top.

These revelations can be found in the third installment of the documentary series ‘UkraineGate: Inconvenient facts’, produced by the French investigative journalist Olivier Berruyer, founder of popular anti-corruption and economics blog Les Crises.

Hunter Biden was hired “solely to pressure Ukrainian authorities into stopping the criminal investigations into Burisma,” former Deputy Prosecutor-General Renat Kuzmin told Berruyer. These investigations had raised the possibility that Biden’s compensation was in effect a bribe being channeled to his father, who handled the Ukraine policy for the Obama administration. 

When VP Biden demanded the firing of head prosecutor Viktor Shokin – as he later boasted on camera – Poroshenko was happy to oblige, even if he had to bribe some members of the Rada to make it happen, interviewees have revealed. 

A leading anti-corruption activist openly accused the former president of keeping the office of prosecutor-general under personal political control. One former deputy prosecutor said that Poroshenko treated the office as “an escort service,” in his pursuit of money and power.  

A former employee of the prosecutor-general’s office described Poroshenko as “the most corrupt president in our history, as of now.” 

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Former MP Oleksandr Onyschenko testified that Burisma’s owner Mykola Zlochevsky used him in late 2015 to relay a $50 million bribe offer to Poroshenko to make the investigations go away – and that the president agreed. The former parliamentarian and close associate of Poroshenko has since turned whistleblower, admitting to taking bribes himself in exchange for votes, such as the one to remove Shokin. 

Poroshenko lost his re-election bid in 2019 to comedian Volodymyr Zelensky, and is currently reported to be facing multiple criminal investigations for corruption.  

“Unfortunately, Ukraine is corrupt to the core,” said former Deputy Prosecutor Kuzmin, pointing the finger of blame at the US government’s involvement with Poroshenko’s administration.