By Dana Kennedy | New York Post
Vadym
and Pozharskyi and Hunter Biden Getty Images; Bella Bellini
Trim, prone to sharp suits and with a Jason Statham vibe, Vadym Pozharskyi is the mysterious “advisor” to the head of Ukraine’s notorious Burisma oil and natural gas company — and the man at the center of the latest Biden family scandal.
As operatives for Ukrainian oligarchs go, Pozharskyi, 41,
is one of the toughest, trained in the trenches of one of the world’s most
corrupt countries, say sources familiar with him.
He’s been linked to Hunter Biden, 50, since Biden joined
the company’s board in 2014. The son of then-Vice President Joe Biden was
useful to Pozharskyi as a liaison to the powerful in Washington, DC. At home,
Biden’s appointment to the Burisma board at a salary of $50,000 a month would
give a shiny patina to what had sometimes been seen as a corrupt company.
Since 2014, four journalists have uncovered links between
the myriad offshore companies that are part of Burisma Holdings and Ukraine’s
most powerful, ruthless oligarch, Igor Kolomoisky. Shrouded in secrecy, Burisma has been described as “a big shell company network of a classic
British kind, with ownership and control completely obfuscated.”
According to emails obtained
by the Post, Hunter introduced his veep dad to Pozharskyi less than a year
before Joe Biden leaned on government officials in Ukraine to fire a prosecutor
who was investigating the $400 million company.
“Dear Hunter, thank you for inviting me to DC and giving
an opportunity to meet your father and spent [sic] some time together,”
Pozharskyi wrote to Hunter Biden on April 17, 2015. “It’s realty [sic] an honor
and pleasure.”
An earlier email from May 2014 shows Pozharskyi asking
Hunter for “advice on how you could use your influence” on the company’s
behalf.
The emails — which directly contradict Joe Biden’s claim
that he’s “never
spoken to my son about his overseas business dealings” — were contained in
a massive trove of data recovered from a laptop computer Hunter Biden left with
a Delaware repairman. A copy of the hard drive was later given to former Mayor
Rudy Giuliani, who provided a copy to The Post.
The Biden campaign has denied that Joe Biden ever had an “official”
meeting with Pozharskyi but later admitted it couldn’t rule out that the two
men had ever met.
Pozharskyi met plenty of powerbrokers during his frequent
forays to Washington and New York. He was pictured with US Ambassador to NATO
Kurt Volker, who served as a US special representative to Ukraine, and Daniel
Fried, US Ambassador to Poland, at meetings of the Atlantic Council, a DC-based
think tank partially funded by Burisma.
Hunter Biden left Burisma in 2019 but Pozharskyi, the No.
3 executive at the company, is believed to still be connected to it.
Pozharskyi’s current whereabouts are unknown. He did not return emails from The
Post, nor did anyone at Burisma. Phone calls to Burisma’s offices in Kiev,
Cyprus and London went unanswered.
But being at the center of a U.S. election scandal is not
something that would likely rattle the battle-hardened veteran of Ukraine’s
lawless past, when corporations literally were at war.
Pozharskyi forged his career at a time in post-Soviet
Ukraine when, analysts say, ruthless businessmen like Kolomoisky used their own
private armies to wrest control of other companies. Because
the military was so weak, private military battalions funded in part by
oligarchs often operated with impunity in the country – both fending off
Russian separatists and lining their own coffers by strong-arming energy
companies they wanted to take over.
The same oligarchs were also often charged with money
laundering and embezzlement. They would often flee the country to avoid
prosecution — and just as often returned in triumph to loot the country
all over again
His boss, the oligarch Mykola Zlochevsky, established
Burisma in 2002, 11 years after the fall of the Soviet Union. Zlochevsky was
once Ukraine’s powerful minister of ecology and natural resources. Burisma is
the largest gas producer in Ukraine, and is involved in the exploration,
production, processing, transportation and sale of hydrocarbons.
Hunter Biden joined Burisma’s board right
after the 2014 Maidan Revolution, in which armed protesters
seized government buildings and overthrew corrupt, pro-Russian president Viktor
Yanukovych. A hated figure in Ukraine, Yanukovych was convicted of treason and sentenced to 13 years in prison by
a Kiev court last year.
In April 2014, British fraud investigators
froze $23 million of Zlochevsky’s assets. Last year, Ukraine’s
prosecutor general said Zlochevsky was suspected of “theft of government funds on an especially large scale.”
Zlochevsky, 54, decamped to Monaco, but Pozharskyi stayed
behind in Kiev to take care of business, according to Ukrainian media.
Pozharskyi also travels to Monaco, where he, Zlochevsky and Prince Albert once
presided over the annual Energy Security Forum.
“Pozharskyi’s the kind of guy who greases the wheels,
shakes the hands and gets the trains to run on time,” a Moscow-based fixer
familiar with eastern European oligarchs told The Post. “He’s not spending that
much time on yachts like the boss. He’s out hustling and networking.”
Pozharskyi has a law degree from the University of East
Anglia in the UK and a master’s degree in European Law from Leiden University
in the Netherlands, according to online biographies. His official title at
Burisma is director of international cooperation and strategic development.
Little is known about his personal life.
“Pozharskyi is a technocrat of the reformer generation
whose work on behalf of oligarchs is unavoidable because the oligarchs dominate
key industries and hire the best fixers money can buy,” said an American think
tank specialist on the Ukraine who, like many interviewed by The Post for this
story, did not want to be named.
Less well known, but potentially more sinister, are
Pozharskyi’s reported ties — by way of his position with Burisma — to
Ukraine’s most thuggish billionaire, the larger-than-life Kolomoisky.
In 2015, veteran Russian writer and investigator John
Helmer, author of “The Man Who Knows Too Much About Russia,” suggested that
Zlochevsky and Pozharskyi were front men for Kolomoisky at Burisma.
He is not the type of “businessman” the Bidens would want
to be associated with, said one Ukraine expert. In August, the U.S. Justice
Department accused Kolomoisky of robbing billions from the PrivatGroup bank he
owned and using the many companies he has all over the world, including the
U.S., to launder it.
The Bond villain-like Kolomoisky, 57, reportedly kept a
live shark in a huge tank in his office to intimidate visitors, and once called
the 5-foot-7 Russian President Vladimir Putin a “schizophrenic dwarf.”
But his bloodthirstiness reportedly matched his bravado.
He crushed Russian separatists with his own private armies,
according to numerous Ukrainian and international media reports, and he allegedly ordered
contract killings, including a hit on a Ukrainian lawyer as well as the murders
of gang members involved in the hit, the Daily Beast reported.
Some of the allegations surfaced in UK court proceedings
in a case ultimately settled out of court, the Telegraph reported.
Kolomoisky has never been charged with murder. He has
refuted such allegations and also denied involvement with Burisma. Mike
Sullivan, a U.S.-based attorney for Kolomoisky, did not return phone calls or
emails from The Post.
He has three nationalities — Ukrainian,
Cypriot and Israeli — and is reportedly worth about $1.2 billion. He
backed the election last year of Ukraine’s current president, Volodymyr
Zelensky, a TV comedian known for, among other things, playing the piano with
his penis.
“Kolomoisky was a known thug in his business practices
and his organizing of armed militias,” Russ Bellant, an expert on Ukraine and
the author of “Old Nazis, the New Right and the Republican Party,” told The
Post.
Bellant, Helmer and writer Richard Smith have said that
Kolomoisky’s shady Privat Group may have owned some or part of Burisma, though
no one has proven it.
Earlier this year Bellant went so far as to refer to
Kolomoisky as the head of Burisma in an essay.
He said he was writing about the Bidens and Ukraine as a
way to “unburden myself and tell this to those who care about the election.”
https://nypost.com/2020/10/31/hunter-bidens-ukraine-contact-allegedly-fixer-for-rulers/
