What did $5 million really buy China?
“I am sitting here with my father and we would like to understand why the commitment made has not been fulfilled,” Hunter Biden threatened in a WhatsApp message to a CEFC associate.
If his demands were not met, the future president’s son warned, “I will make certain that between the man sitting next to me and every person he knows and my ability to forever hold a grudge that you will regret not following my direction.”
Hunter would later claim that Joe Biden wasn’t actually there and he had been drunk or high.
Whatever the truth, next month a CEFC affiliate sent $5 million, half of the $10 million Hunter had demanded, to a joint company set up by Hunter and a CEFC figure, $400,000 was then transferred to a shell company, $150,000 was diverted to a company controlled by Joe Biden’s brother James, $50,000 of which was diverted to a personal checking account and $40,000 of which was sent as a personal check to Joe Biden for a “loan repayment.”
But one unanswered question is why CEFC China Energy would have been intimidated by Biden’s threats at all. In July 2017, Joe Biden was out of the White House and while he was a potential presidential candidate, that was still years away.
Why did CEFC feel nervous enough to cut the Bidens a very sizable check in 2017?
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The answer may lie with a March 2017 deal in which CEFC had tried to acquire a stake in the Cowen Group: a somewhat obscure investment bank based out of New York City. The deal would have had to win the approval of the Committee on Foreign Investment in the U.S. (CFIUS) and under the Trump administration, China’s investments were not winning approval.
CEFC’s 19.9% stake in the Cowen Group came at the same time as CFIUS was scrutinizing attempted Chinese purchases of MoneyGram, Genworth Financial and Lattice Semiconductor. These various deals fell apart or, as in CEFC’s case, were shut down by CFIUS. By August, CEFC had cut their check to the Bidens, but by September were forced to refile their proposal, and by November had announced that CFIUS process was just too onerous to continue.
The timeline raises the distinct possibility that CEFC was protecting its Cowen Group investment while trying to avoid any problems during the CFIUS process. While CFIUS is led by the heads of departments such as the Treasury Department and the Department of Defense, CEFC might have reasonably believed that the former VP could cause problems.
Or it may have been working on a Plan B to wait and refile under a future Biden administration.
But an underlying question is what did CEFC, a Chinese energy company, want with a New York investment bank? The answer may be that some Chinese companies looking to expand into the United States had found it easier to buy into existing American investment companies. --->READ MORE HERE
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