President Joe Biden’s son, Hunter Biden, saw his salary from a Ukrainian natural gas company cut in half after his father left office in 2017, new charging documents indicate.
The younger Biden was charged in California federal court on Thursday with two felony tax evasion charges, a felony charge for filing a false tax return, and six additional misdemeanor offenses for failure to pay taxes between 2016 and 2019.
A federal indictment in the case describes the president’s son’s sources of income for the period in which he was charged, including his work on the board of the Ukrainian gas company Burisma Holdings.
Mr. Biden began working with the Ukrainian gas company Burisma Holdings in 2014 while his father was serving as vice president. The indictment filed by Special Counsel David Weiss says Mr. Biden received a $1 million annual salary from the Ukrainian firm until March of 2017, when the firm cut his annual compensation to $500,000.
This salary cut from Burisma came after his father left the White House and President Donald Trump assumed office on Jan. 20, 2017.
Despite the salary cut, the indictment indicates Hunter Biden continued to work with Burisma for another two years, leaving the company in April 2019. Joe Biden launched his campaign for president that same month.
The younger Biden’s time working for Burisma has been a point of interest for Republicans for years.
President Trump faced his first impeachment in the fall of 2019 over a call he made with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy in which he alluded to allegations that then-Vice President Biden pressured the Ukrainian government to remove a prosecutor, Viktor Shokin, who is alleged to have been investigating Burisma.
President Biden’s involvement in his family’s business dealings has been a point of focus in an ongoing Republican-led impeachment inquiry.
According to an investigative file released earlier this year, a confidential FBI source alleged Burisma owner Mykola Zlochevsky raised concerns that Mr. Shokin’s investigation would harm the company and discussed paying $5 million to “one Biden” and $5 million to “another Biden” to “deal with Shokin.”
The unverified FBI source also said Mr. Zlochevsky described younger Biden as less intelligent than his dog but that it was necessary to keep him on the board of the company “so everything will be okay.”
Some Republicans have suggested President Biden has abused his power throughout his political career by allowing his family members to leverage his political connections to advance their business dealings in exchange for a cut of their profits.
President Biden has insisted his interactions with his son’s business partners were casual to non-existent. He and his allies have also insisted that his role in the effort to remove Mr. Shokin was in line with his duties at the time and was consistent with the views of the Obama administration and other Western allies who felt Mr. Shokin wasn’t doing enough to combat corruption.
According to the new indictment, the president’s son did not report his income from Burisma on his 2014 IRS form 1040. Instead, prosecutors say all the money he received from the company in 2014 went into a bank account controlled by a company anonymized in the charging document as “ABC.”
The indictment states company ABC was owned and controlled by one of Mr. Biden’s business partners in Burisma, whom the charging document anonymized as Business Associated 5. The indictment states the account controlled through company ABC transferred funds to Mr. Biden and paid for other investments on his behalf, while Business Associate 5 handled all of the taxes linked to their shared business bank account in his name.
According to the indictment, Mr. Biden rerouted his Burisma salary through a separate company he controlled, called Owasco PC, starting in November 2015. From 2016 onward, prosecutors allege much of his money financed his lifestyle while falling behind on taxes he still owed from prior years.
“Between 2016 and October 15, 2020, the Defendant spent this money on drugs, escorts and girlfriends, luxury hotels and rental properties, exotic cars, clothing, and other items of a personal nature, in short, everything but his taxes,” the indictment states.
