Ukrainian prime minister submits resignation after leaked recording

KYIV, Ukraine — Ukraine’s prime minister submitted his resignation Friday, days after he was caught on tape saying the country’s president knows nothing about the economy. In a Facebook post, Oleksiy Honcharuk said that he had given his resignation to President Volodymyr Zelenskiy. “I took this post to implement the president’s program. He is an example of transparency and decency to me,” he said. “However, in order to dispel any doubts about our respect and trust for the president, I have written a resignation letter and submitted it to the president for introduction to parliament,” Honcharuk’s statement read.

Earlier this week an audio recording surfaced in which Honcharuk appeared to make disparaging comments about Zelenskiy’s understanding of economics. He called Zelenskiy “a layman” in economics and said the president should be better educated about the national currency. Honcharuk said that the recording was a compilation of “fragments of recorded government meetings” and blamed unidentified “influential groups” for making it look like he doesn’t respect the president. “It is not true,” the prime minister insisted.

On Thursday, lawmakers from the opposition party Opposition Platform-For Life demanded Honcharuk’s resignation, saying he and his cabinet discredit Ukraine’s president and exacerbate the economic crisis in the country. The Rada, Ukraine’s parliament, must vote on whether to accept the resignation. Zelenskiy’s office confirmed that it had received the letter and said the president would take it under consideration.Members of the ruling Servant of the People party said there were no grounds for Honcharuk to resign. Iryna Herashchenko, a lawmaker in the Rada, said that Honcharuk should have submitted his resignation to the parliament and not to the president — otherwise it doesn’t bear any legal consequences and is merely “private political correspondence.” “In Ukraine, the parliament appoints the Cabinet,” she argued, adding that so far the parliament hasn’t received any documents related to the prime minister’s resignation.

The scandal involving Honcharuk shows that different political forces have started a fight for the position of prime minister, Volodymyr Fesenko, head of the Penta think tank, told The Associated Press. However, he added that the resignation is unlikely to be accepted: “Zelenskiy doesn’t want to dismiss Honcharuk.” In the meantime, Zelenskiy demanded that the provenance of the tapes be investigated. “I demand that in two weeks, as soon as possible, we obtain information on who was recording the tapes,” the Ukrainian president said.

https://nypost.com/2020/01/17/ukrainian-prime-minister-submits-resignation-after-leaked-recording/

How Frank Biden leveraged his famous name for business gain

"They brought him in for his name," one critic said of Frank Biden.

In 2009, the year Joe Biden took office as vice president, a local business executive met the politician’s younger brother, Frank, at a Starbucks in Palm Beach Gardens, Florida, and later asked him to become the president and front man for a fledgling charter school venture. Frank Biden, a longtime real estate developer in the state, accepted the offer, and over the years, he touted his famous last name and prominent connections in Washington to help land the company a series of charter contracts from local officials in Florida to open charter schools, earning hundreds of thousands of dollars over a five-year period from the company in the process. In media interviews at the time, Frank Biden was unabashed – calling his last name “a tremendous asset” because of the family’s record of “taking care of people who need help,” and telling people it brought him “automatic acceptance” as he sought government approvals for the for-profit Mavericks in Education.

Claims of mismanagement would ultimately bog down many of those schools, which focused on educating at-risk teens with troubled backgrounds. In at least two separate lawsuits, Mavericks schools faced allegations of inflating enrollment as part of a scheme to garner more government funding. The charters were eventually sold and the schools reorganized under new management. Critics suggest that when Frank Biden touted his family name to promote the Mavericks’ charter schools, it was just one example of the Biden family actively benefiting from sharing a name with the vice president. Now it could pose challenges for the former VP as he seeks the Democratic Party nomination for president, even when Joe Biden has not been accused of any wrongdoing. “Joe Biden needs to recognize it’s a problem,” Richard Painter, a former chief White House ethics lawyer for George W. Bush, told Politico in August. “You can’t control your brothers. You can’t control your grown son. But you can put some firewalls in place in your own office.” If elected, Biden’s campaign has committed to issuing an executive order on his first day in office to "address conflicts of interest of any kind," and has repeatedly said he and his family have never discussed private business interests.

Kinship-as-currency is hardly a new phenomenon in Washington. But as Joe Biden makes his third run at the nation’s highest office, he has already confronted a sustained political attack on the decision by his son, Hunter, to accept a position on the board of directors for a Ukrainian energy firm – a decision that has figured prominently into the debate over President Trump’s impeachment. The president has repeatedly called the Bidens “crooked,” particularly with regard to Hunter Biden’s business activities. The presidential candidate has also faced questions about endeavors by another brother, James Biden, who is fighting a lawsuit in which he stands accused of feigning interest in investing in a medical device company as a ploy to steal the company's business model.

https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/frank-biden-leveraged-famous-business-gain/story?id=68202529