Treasury flagged foreign money flowing to Hunter Biden-tied firms as ‘suspicious’
Senate panels investigating whether law enforcement, US intel turned blind eye to concerns.
A Treasury Department agency that polices financial threats such as money laundering flagged several foreign transactions to Hunter Biden-connected businesses as “suspicious” during the end of the Obama administration and the beginning of the Trump administration. The concerns from the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN) concerns were highlighted in Suspicious Activity Reports turned over to Senate committees over the last year in conjunction with investigations into the Russia and Ukraine scandals, according to several officials familiar with the evidence. As those Senate investigations wind toward the issuance of their first official report later this month, an essential question has emerged: Did U.S. law enforcement or intelligence agencies do anything to determine if the money flowing to Vice President Joe Biden’s son posed any criminal or intelligence threats? Officials at Treasury, FBI and the Office of Director of National Intelligence declined comment. Senate Democrats first called attention to the existence of the SARS in a little-noticed letter late last year and are now bracing for the flagged financial transactions to be a major revelation in a joint report they expect to be published by the GOP-led Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs and the Senate Finance Committees as early as next week. “The Republicans have had this in their back pocket for some time to make headlines as the election drew closer,” one Democratic source told Just the News. A lawyer for Hunter Biden did not return an call requesting for comment. Spokesmen for the two Senate committees declined comment.
The SARS reports were requested as Senate investigators dug into a labyrinth of global businesses that Hunter Biden and his business partners became involved with in Russia, China, Ukraine and elsewhere as his father Joe Biden served as the vice president and Obama administration foreign policy point person. That includes Hunter Biden's controversial addition in spring 2014 to the board of Burisma Holdings, a Ukrainian gas firm with a long record of corruption allegations. SARS are one of the law enforcement community’s most powerful and secretive tools in the war against money laundering, drug cartels and terrorist threats, providing real-time warnings from financial institutions to FinCEN that certain transactions have characteristics that make them suspicious. The origin, size and routing channels are just some of the components that can lead a transaction to be flagged. Treasury typically receives or generates 1 million to 2 million suspicious activity reports a year. So a SARS report in it of itself is not evidence of wrongdoing but usually a starting point for investigation, experts say. The question that remains is whether FBI or ODNI did anything to investigate the suspicious reports after they were alerted by FinCEN. The American suspicious transaction reports turned over to the Senate committees are the second known instance of red flags raised about foreign money flowing into business firms associated with Hunter Biden.
In February 2016, the Latvian government sent a warning to Ukrainian prosecutors that several payments from Burisma to an account in New York controlled by Hunter Biden’s Rosemont Seneca Bohai firm appeared suspicious, according to a copy of the letter obtained by Just the News and Latvian authorities. “The Office for Prevention of Laundering of Proceeds Derived from Criminal Activity … is currently investigating suspicious activity of Burisma Holdings Limited,” the Latvian agency also known as the FIU wrote Ukraine’s financial authorities. The memo was confirmed earlier this year by the Latvian embassy to the United States.
https://justthenews.com/accountability/russia-and-ukraine-scandals/treasury-flagged-foreign-money-flowing-hunter-biden-tied#digital-diary
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