Hunter Biden was partnering with a Chinese oil company in Kazakhstan that is now under U.S. sanctions and a former Kazakh prime minister now charged with treason to mediate a lucrative pipeline deal, DailyMail.com disclosed.
Emails received by DailyMail.com show the President's son teamed up with the former Kazakh prime minister Karim Massimov, now facing charges of high treason, to try to pull off a $120 million pipeline deal after similar ventures had faced opposition from Western energy firms. Using his father's name and connections is one thing, but this goes far beyond that.
There is no indication Massimov's charges are related to Hunter's pipeline deal.
One of Hunter's proposed Kazakh energy deals involved the State China National Offshore Oil Corporation (CNOOC), one of China's biggest oil firms.
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The company was sanctioned in 2020 and again last year for its alleged involvement in the Chinese government's "coercive behavior in the South China Sea".
Emails from Hunter's abandoned laptop show he went to Beijing and Kazakhstan to create a blockbuster oil deal between the two countries in 2014 and 2015.
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Hunter brokered the deal on behalf of a Ukrainian gas firm Burisma on whose board he sat.
His position at the firm, owned by an oligarch accused of corruption, is already deeply contentious.
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But the involvement of Hunter's Chinese business partners with Burisma adds a new and troubling dimension to his dealings in Eastern Europe – indicating that he was working on a deal that could indirectly advance the energy interests of the Chinese government while trying to collect millions of dollars for himself.
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CNOOC had been trying for years to break into the Kazakh energy market, a strategically valuable source of oil and gas for China previously dubbed "the second Middle East" by its chief financial officer.
The Chinese oil giant tried to buy a $615 million piece of Kazakhstan's North Caspian Sea Project from a unit of British gas company BG Group in 2003 but was blocked by a group of Western companies including Exxon Mobil, Royal Dutch/Shell and TotalFinaElf.
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Kazakh and Chinese governments have also talked for years about building a pipeline between the two countries. A previous 1997 agreement delayed over-cost worries, but the hunger for massive infrastructure projects was rekindled with China's expansionist "belt and road initiative" in 2013.
So when one of Hunter's Chinese business partners emailed him in April 2014 saying CNOOC wanted to work with them, he saw dollar signs.
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"I had a meeting with Mr. Luo Weizhong, the General Manager of CNOOC Gas & Power Group," wrote Ziben Lu, an associate at Bohai, a Chinese investment firm Hunter partnered with.
"Mr. Luo informed us that as the third largest LNG [liquid natural gas] purchaser in the world, CNOOC Gas & Power are making large cross border [sic] investments."
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