Hunter Biden once offered to sell intelligence pertaining to Russian businessman Oleg Deripaska, founder of Rusal, the second-largest aluminium company in the world, to a major US company for a sizeable fee, reported a columnist for The New York Post.
The Russian billionaire has been under Washington-imposed sanctions since 2018 over purported close ties to the Kremlin amid allegations of Russia’s role in the US presidential elections in 2016.
Deripaska, who on Wednesday condemned FBI raids of homes of his relatives in the United States, remains on the American sanctions list despite the fact that a number of his companies were subsequently relieved of sanctions in exchange for the billionaire ceding direct control over the assets.
FBI agents carry items as an agent stands watch during the U.S. law enforcement agency's raid at Russian oligarch Oleg Deripaska's home in Washington, U.S., October 19, 2021.
© REUTERS / TOM BRENNER
The son of the current US President had put forward the proposal to US aluminium firm Alcoa from his own company Rosemont Seneca in 2011, according to emails contained on Hunter Biden’s purported laptop and cited by Post reporter Miranda Devine, who has written a book "Laptop from Hell: Hunter Biden, Big Tech, and the Dirty Secrets the President Tried to Hide", which is slated to come out on 30 November.
Alcoa was to be provided with “statistical analysis of political and corporate risks, elite networks associated with Oleg Deripaska (OD), Russian CEO of Basic Element company and United company RUSAL,” state documents on the so-called “laptop from Hell”, believed to have been abandoned by Hunter Biden at a MacBook repair shop in Delaware in April 2019.
An email addressed to Daniel Cruise, Alcoa’s then-Vice President of Government and Public Affairs, dated 3 June 2011, and cited by the outlet, reads:
“Please see the attached proposal per our last conversation . . . we tried to provide a little better sense of the product by attaching some of the raw data that is produced through the elite mapping procedure.”
The proposal is said to have pertained to a “list of elites of similar rank in Russia, map of OD’s [Deripaska’s] networks based on frequency of interaction with selected elites and countries.” Alcoa was to be charged “$25,000 for phase one of the project [and] $55,000 for refined analysis,” says the report. Another email, dated 8 June 2011 and forwarded to Hunter Biden, showed Pei Cheng, at Alcoa, writing to Cruise:
“I don’t believe the data analysis is worth the full $55,000. I think the most valuable piece for us would be the list of Russian elites connected to OD [Deripaska] that would not otherwise be on Government Affairs team’s radar, including various Russian Committee Heads, Union leaders or Ministers.”
Separate mention was made in the email of the fact that “Rosemont Seneca [has] Co-chairmen: Hunter Biden, son of Joe Biden, and Christopher Heinz . . . stepson of Sen. John Kerry”.
At the time of the cited proposals, Alcoa had signed a two-year metal supply agreement with Russia’s RUSAL. In an email on 10 June 2011 to Hunter Biden, his business associate Eric Schwerin wrote that Rosemont Seneca offered Alcoa a price tag of $25,000 for information about Deripaska.
“Not horrible feedback… Daniel’s guy [sic] missed the point that the price was $25k reduced from $55k,” stated the email.
In response to the report in the Post, a spokesman for Alcoa Corporation, a spinoff of Alcoa Inc., said they were “not in a position to respond on behalf of our prior parent company.”
This comes as slightly over a year has passed since The New York Post published an exposé on the alleged unethical and potentially illegal influence peddling involving his father, then-Vice-President Joe Biden.
The damning emails were taken from a laptop supposedly abandoned by Hunter Biden at a Delaware repair shop. The documents suggested that then-Vice President Biden met Vadym Pozharskyi, an executive from the Ukrainian gas firm Burisma, less than a year before Ukraine's then-General Prosecutor Viktor Shokin was fired at the US VP's request.
Then Vice President Joe Biden, left, and his son Hunter Biden appear at the Duke Georgetown NCAA college basketball game in Washington on Jan. 30, 2010.
© AP Photo / Nick Wass
Another batch of emails weighed in on an unspecified business venture with a Chinese firm and allocation of "20 [percent] for H[unter]" and "10 percent" for "the big guy," with Hunter Biden's former business associate Tony Bobulinski telling media that the "big guy" referred to Joe Biden.
Hunter Biden is also currently facing a probe into his taxes by the Justice Department, launched as far back as 2018 and connected to suspicious foreign transactions, including possible exchanges of money with “China and other foreign nations”.
Amid the bombshell revelations that erupted in late 2020, Democratic-aligned US media have largely ignored the allegations targeting Hunter Biden and his father. In an op-ed on 12 October The Post's editorial board underscored that although "the media have (mostly) stopped pretending we got anything wrong, most outlets still don’t even mention these revelations". Nevertheless, the media outlet vowed to keep asking questions about the Bidens' alleged "pay-to-play" schemes to ensure that they would not be “allowed to get away with it again".