Burisma Holdings

Burisma Group is an energy exploration and production company operating in the Ukrainian oil and gas market since 2002. The head office is in Limassol, Cyprus.

History

Burisma Group was founded in 2002 by Ukrainian businessman Nikolai Zlochevsky (also known as Mykola Zlochevsky) and Nikolay Lysin. Now it is owned by Mykola Zlochevskyi.

In the spring of 2014, the Ukrainian Prosecutor General’s Office opened an investigation at the behest of the UK prosecutors office, which was investigating money laundering allegations against its owner, former Ukrainian Ecology Minister Nikolai Zlochevsky and had just frozen $23.5 million in assets allegedly belonging to him in early April 2014.

Ukrainian prosecutors refused to provide the UK with needed documents and in January 2015 a British court ordered the assets unfrozen. This action was pointedly called out in a speech by U.S. ambassador to Ukraine, Geoffrey Pyatt, who stated “In the case of former Ecology Minister Mykola Zlochevsky, the U.K. authorities had seized $23 million in illicit assets that belonged to the Ukrainian people.” Instead of receiving cooperation from Ukrainian prosecutors, they “sent letters to Zlochevsky’s attorneys attesting that there was no case against him. As a result, the money was freed by the U.K. court, and shortly thereafter the money was moved to Cyprus.”

On Feb. 10, 2015, Vikto Shokin was appointed as the Prosecutor General of the Ukraine and he picked up the investigation into Burisma, which reportedly continued until his removal in February 2016.

Around the same time that Zlochevsky’s assets were frozen in the UK, Burisma appointed Hunter Biden to its board on April 18, 2014. According to The Hill Biden’s firm, Rosemont Seneca Partners, was receiving regular payments—“usually more than $166,000 a month”—from Burisma. The payments ran from the spring of 2014 through the fall of 2015 and reportedly totaled more than $3 million.

The Hill article included a written answer from Shokin, who said his investigation into Burisma had included plans for “interrogations and other crime-investigation procedures into all members of the executive board, including Hunter Biden.”

Board of directors

A number of non-Ukrainian directors were appointed in 2014, including Aleksander Kwaśniewski, former President of the Republic of Poland, appointed in January 2014.

On 18 April 2014, Hunter Biden, the son of then-Vice President Joe Biden, who managed US-Ukraine relations for the Obama administration, was appointed to the board of Burisma Holdings. In February 2016, Joseph Cofer Black, the Director of the CIA’s Counterterrorist Center (CTC) (1999-2002) in the George W. Bush administration and Ambassador at Large for counter-terrorism (2002-2004) joined Burisma’s Board of Directors.