Now that the Trump impeachment farce is finally over, vindicating the president and in the process for the first time boosting the president’s approval rating higher than where Obama was at this time in his first term much to the embarrassment of Nancy Pelosi, whose impeachment gambit has backfired spectacularly (just as Nancy knew it would, and is why she delayed triggering it until a critical mass of ultra left-wing demands in Congress made it impossible for her to ignore any longer)…

… the Democrats’ great diversion from Trump’s core question – did the Bidens willfully engage in, and benefit from corruption in the Ukraine, corruption which may have been enabled and facilitated by billions in taxpayer funds originating from the Obama administration no less – is over.

However, while Trump has finally moved on beyond what in retrospect was a remarkable, if failed presidential coup attempt, orchestrated by the Ukraine lobby in the US, backed by the Atlantic Council and various other “deep-state” institutions and apparatchiks, and implemented by Congressional democrats who are now watching the chances of the Democratic party winning the 2020 presidential election melt before their eyes, some long overdue questions surrounding the Bidens’ involvement in Ukraine – one of the world’s most corrupt nations according to the World Economic Forum – especially around the time of the 2014 presidential coup and the months immediately following, are about to be asked, and haunt Joe Biden and his son like a very angry and vengeful ghost, only this time there will be no Trump impeachment to distract from revealing the shocking answers.

Needless to say, we are delighted by this outcome because as regular readers will recall, there are many unanswered questions that emerged back in 2014, some from following the money both in and out of Ukraine, and some from following the country’s gold, much of which was put on board a plane headed to the US in one cold, wintry night in March 2014, never to come back again.

But before we get there, first we need to a rather lengthy detour into the history of Ukraine corruption since the February 2014 Euromadian revolution, for the background on why Trump had to be stopped at all costs from asking either Ukraine, or anyone else, questions that may expose corruption involving Joe Biden in particular, and the Obama administration in general. To do that, we need to follow some $1.8 billion in US taxpayer funds that quietly went missing back in 2014, and most likely ended up in the offshore bank account of some Ukrainian oligarch;conveniently PJ Media’s senior editor Tyler O’Neill did just that almost two years ago, in March 2018. Here’s what he said back then, together with some additions from ZH:

In the last days of the Obama administration, then-Vice President Joe Biden took a “swan song” trip to Ukraine, a notoriously corrupt country where he had been the administration’s “point person.” On the eve of this trip, the country announced it would end a criminal investigation into an infamous company connected to the loss of $1.8 billion in aid funding — a company whose board of directors included Biden’s son Hunter.

The Biden family’s dealings with this Ukrainian company involved getting one of the country’s most notorious mob bankers, Ihor Kolomoiski, off the U.S. government visa ban list. Under Biden’s leadership, $3 billion in aid went to Ukraine, and his son’s company was implicated in the disappearance of $1.8 billion of that money. Peter Schweizer revealed the former vice president’s role in his new book “Secret Empires: How the American Political Class Hides Corruption and Enriches Family and Friends.”

Secretary of State John Kerry announced the U.S. support for Ukraine’s nationalist government in March 2014, a month after a mass uprising pushed pro-Russian President Viktor Yanukovych out of office and inspired a corresponding pro-Russian uprising in the east. It was also at this time that a leaked recording between US assistant secretary of state Victoria “Fuck the EU” Nuland and the US envoy to the Ukraine, Geoffrey Pyatt, emerged, a clip which as the FT said then  “could also bolster [claims] that the protests that erupted against Ukraine’s President Viktor Yanukovich last November are being funded and orchestrated by the US.” In other words, the clip confirmed that the US was masterminding the entire “Euromaidan” process all along and deciding who should be in Ukraine’s next government. In short: what happened in Ukraine in February 2014 was another CIA-staged presidential coup. Finally, it was also the time that Biden became the Obama administration’s “point person” for the country.

On April 16, 2014, shortly after the February 2014 Ukrainian revolution which culminated with the overthrow of democratically-elected president Yanukovich, Biden met with Devon Archer, a former star fundraiser for John Kerry’s 2004 presidential run and business partner in Rosemont Capital with Biden’s son Hunter. (Federal agents would later arrest Archer in May 2016 for defrauding a Native American tribe.)

Less than a week later (April 22) came an announcement that Archer had joined the board of Burisma, a secretive Ukrainian natural gas company. On May 13, Hunter Biden would also join the company’s board.

On the day before Archer’s hiring, April 21, the vice president landed in Kiev for high-level meetings with Ukrainian officials. He spearheaded the effort to invest $1 billion from the U.S. and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) into Ukraine.

The vice president’s presence helps explain a conundrum. Burisma hired his son and Archer despite the fact that neither of them had any experience in the energy sector. Schweizer notes, “The choice of Hunter Biden to handle transparency and corporate governance of Burisma is curious, because Biden had little if any experience in Ukrainian law, or professional legal counsel, period.”

Furthermore, Hunter Biden “seemed undeterred by the fact that as he was joining the Burisma board the British government’s Serious Fraud Office (SFO) was seizing $23 million from [founder Mykola] Zlochevsky’s bank accounts.” Furthermore, a year after Biden joined the firm, “experienced industry observers warned investors that Burisma was still a company to be avoided.”

On the other hand, Ukraine is one of the most corrupt countries in the world. Out of 148 nations studied by the World Economic Forum, Ukraine ranks 143 for property rights, 130 for “irregular payments and bribes,” 133 for “favoritism in decisions of government officials,” and 146 for “protection of minority shareholders’ interests.”

Two major figures in this corruption feature prominently in Biden’s Ukraine investment.

Zlochevsky founded Burisma in Cyprus in 2006. He served as natural resources minister under Yanukovych, and gave himself the licenses to develop the country’s abundant gas fields. He also had a flare for lavishness, running a super-exclusive fashion boutique named after himself.

Burisma’s major subsidiaries ended up sharing the same business address as the natural gas firm controlled by Ukrainian oligarch Ihor Kolomoisky. He controlled the country’s largest financial institution, PrivatBank, through which the Ukrainian military and government workers got paid. He also owned media companies and airlines. In violation of Ukraine law, he maintained Ukrainian, Israeli, and Cypriot passports.

Kolomoisky gained a reputation for violence and brutality, along with lawlessness. Rival oligarchs have sued him for alleged involvement in “murders and beheadings” related to a business deal. He also allegedly used “hired rowdies armed with baseball bats, iron bars, gas and rubber bullet pistols and chainsaws” to take over a steel plant in 2006. He built his multibillion-dollar empire by “raiding” other companies, forcing them to merge with his own using brute force.

For these and other reasons, the U.S. government placed Kolomoisky on its visa ban list, prohibiting him from entering the country legally. In 2015, however, after Hunter Biden and Devon Archer had joined Burisma’s board, Kolomoisky was given admittance back into the U.S. According to a follow-up report in 2016, “today, the oligarch mainly resides in Switzerland. He spends much time in the United States and is getting less and less involved in the Ukrainian affairs.”

Archer and the younger Biden brought other benefits to Burisma, however. Archer represented the company at the Louisiana Gulf Coast Oil Exposition in 2015. Biden addressed the Energy Security for the Future conference in Monaco. The vice president’s son brought much-needed legitimacy to the shoddy gas company. Less than a month after Archer joined Burisma’s board, the company hired another Kerry lackey, David Leiter, as a lobbyist in Washington, D.C. He successfully lobbied for more aid to the country.

And Both Biden and Kerry championed $1.8 billion in taxpayer-backed loans given to Ukraine in September 2014 courtesy of the IMF. That money would go directly through Kolomoisky’s PrivatBank, and then it would disappear.  According to the Ukrainian anti-corruption watchdog Nashi Groshi, “This transaction of $1.8 billion … with the help of fake contracts was simply an asset siphoning operation.”

What is even more fascinating, is that in the chaos following the February 2014 revolution, Ukraine appears to have embezzled money from none other than the IMF (whose biggest source of funds is the US). As German newspaper Deutsche Wirtshafts Nachrichten reported in August 2015, a huge chunk of the $17 billion in bailout money the IMF granted to Ukraine in April 2014 was discovered in a bank account in Cyprus controlled by, who else, Ukrainian oligarch Kolomoisky. As the German publication went on to add, in April 2014, $3.2 billion was immediately disbursed to Ukraine, and over the following five months, another $4.5 billion was disbursed to the Ukrainian Central Bank in order to stabilize the country’s financial system. “The money should have been used to stabilize the country’s ailing banks, but $1.8 billion disappeared down murky channels,” DWN wrote.

DWN also reported that according to the IMF, in January 2015 the equity ratio of Ukraine’s banking system had dropped to 13.8 percent, from 15.9 percent in late June 2014. By February 2015 even PrivatBank had to be saved from bankruptcy, and was given a 62 million Euro two-year loan from the Central Bank. “So where have the IMF’s billions gone?”

The racket executed by Kolomoiski’s PrivatBank was first uncovered by the Ukrainian anti-corruption initiative ‘Nashi Groshi,’ meaning ‘our money’ in Ukrainian.

According to Nashi Groshi’s investigations, PrivatBank has connections to 42 Ukrainian companies, which are owned by another 54 offshore companies based in the Caribbean, USA and Cyprus. These companies took out loans from PrivatBank totaling $1.8 billion.

These Ukrainian companies ordered investment products from six foreign suppliers based in the UK, the Virgin Islands and the Caribbean, and then transferred money to a branch of PrivatBank in Cyprus, ostensibly to pay for the products.The products were then used as collateral for the loans taken out from PrivatBank – however, the overseas suppliers never delivered the goods, and the 42 companies took legal action in court in Dnipropetrovsk, demanding reimbursement for payments made for the goods, and the termination of the loans from Privatbank. The court’s ruling was the same for all 42 companies; the foreign suppliers should return the money, but the credit agreement with Privatbank remains in place.

“Basically, this was a transaction of $1.8 billion abroad, with the help of fake contracts, the siphoning off of assets and violation of existing laws,” explained journalist Lesya Ivanovna of Nashi Groshi.

Then in March 2015, Kolomoiski, whom some have described as the Tony Soprano of Ukraine, and increasingly a pariah in the country that made him a billionaire was dismissed from his position as governor of Dnipropetrovsk after a power struggle with Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko; the fraud was carried out while he was governor of the region in East-Central Ukraine.

“The whole story with the court case was only necessary to make it look like the bank itself was not involved in the fraud scheme. Officially it now looks like as if the bank has the products, but in reality they were never delivered,” said Ivanovna.

Such business practices, which earned Kolomoskyi a fortune estimated by Forbes in March 2012 to be $3 billion, were known to investigators beyond Ukraine’s borders; Kolomoiski was once banned from entering the US due to suspicions of connections with international organized crime but then Biden’s involvement quietly lifted the visa ban.

Despite these suspicions, Kolomoiski is unlikely to face justice, as he is currently living in exile in Switzerland , Israel and the US, after he fled Ukraine in early 2015. Not long after Kolomoiski fled Ukraine, in December 2016, Ukraine’s government nationalize his Privatbank in order to shore up Ukrainians’ savings. A Ukrainian lawmaker called it the “greatest robbery of Ukraine’s state budget of the millennium.” A few months earlier, in February 2016, the government seized Burisma founder Zlochevsky’s assets and placed him on Ukraine’s wanted list. The Ukrainian Prosecutor General’s Office seized Burisma’s gas wells.

Which brings us to January 2017, and when Joe Biden infamous arrived for his “swan song” visit and demanded, before the entire world, that the criminal investigation into Burisma was dropped.

Devon Archer left the scandal-plagued company at the end of 2016, although a clueless Hunter Biden remained on the board through October 2019 – well after his presence there sparked the biggest political scandal since the Bill Clinton impeachment – providing “legal assistance” in exchange for millions of dollars received from the gas giant. Archer and Biden have not been required to disclose their compensation from Burisma, but Bowling Green State University professor Oliver Boyd-Barrett wrote, “Potentially, the Biden family could become billionaires.”

So did Joe Biden get Burisma off the hook for $1.8 billion in lost aid funding? Did he or his son get Kolomoisky off the visa ban list? To be sure, many questions still remain and were all conveniently swept under the rug over the “faux outrage” over the Trump impeachment farce. But now that the great impeachment diversion is over, these all too pressing questions can and finally should be asked.

Incidentally, anyone who is confused by the narrative above, and how $1.8 billion in taxpayer dollars “disappeared” in Ukraine starting in September 2014 when the money was deposited in PrivatBank, is encouraged to watch the following video by Glenn Beck who does a surprisingly good job at connecting the confusing dots behind what may be one of the greatest sovereign corruption and money heist stories in history.

The good news is that there are so many loose threads in this narrative, that any real probe will have little difficulty in getting to the bottom of where and how the $1.8 billion in US taxpayer funding to Ukraine “disappeared” and whether Biden, both father and son, are indeed involved.

And just to help them out, one place where any serious probe can start is with a story we wrote in March 2014, when citing a local media report, we shone light on a mysterious operation in which a substantial portion of Ukraine’s gold reserves were loaded onboard an unmarked plane, and flown to the US, just weeks after the February 2014 revolution.From the source, March 7, 2014:

Tonight, around at 2:00 am, an unregistered transport plane took off took off from Boryspil airport.

According to Boryspil staff, prior to the plane’s appearance, four trucks and two cargo minibuses arrived at the airport all with their license plates missing. Fifteen people in black uniforms, masks and body armor stepped out, some armed with machine guns. These people loaded the plane with more than forty heavy boxes.

After this, several mysterious men arrived and also entered the plane. The loading was carried out in a hurry. After unloading, the plateless cars immediately left the runway, and the plane took off on an emergency basis.

Airport officials who saw this mysterious “special operation” immediately notified the administration of the airport, which however strongly advised them “not to meddle in other people’s business.”

Later, the editors were called by one of the senior officials of the former Ministry of Income and Fees, who reported that, according to him, tonight on the orders of one of the “new leaders” of Ukraine, all the gold reserves of the Ukraine were taken to the United States.

Needless to say there was no official confirmation of any of this taking place, and in fact our report, in which we mused if the “price of Ukraine’s liberation” was the handover of Ukraine’s gold to the Fed at a time when Germany was actively seeking to repatriate its own physical gold located at the bedrock of the NY Fed, led to the usual mainstream media mockery.

But then everything changed in November 2014, when in an interview on Ukraine TV, none other than the then-head of the Ukraine Central Bank, Valeriya Gontareva (who, became head of the Ukraine central bank in June 2014 when she replaced Stepan Kubiv and also presided over the nationalization of Kolomoiski’s PrivateBank in December 2016), made the stunning admission that “in the vaults of the central bank there is almost no gold left. There is a small amount of gold bullion left, but it’s just 1% of reserves.”

As Ukrainareported at the time, this stunning revelation means that not only has Ukraine been quietly depleting its gold throughout the year, but that the latest official number, according to which Ukraine gold was 8 times greater than the reported 1%, was fabricated, and that the real number is about 90% lower.

According to official statistics the NBU, the amount of gold in the vaults should be eight times more than is actually in stock. At the beginning of this month, the volume of gold was about $ 1 billion, or 8% of the total gold reserves. Now this is just one percent.

Assuming Gonaterva’s admission was true, it would imply that the official reserve data at the Central Bank was clearly fabricated, prompting questions about just how long ago the actual gold “displacement” took place. Could it have been during a cold night in March when “more than 40 heavy boxes” full of gold were loaded up on the plane and flown off to an unknown destination in the US?

To help out in this puzzle, we got some additional information from Rusila, which in Nov 2014 reported that “Ukraine’s gold reserves disappeared.”

According to recent data, the value of Ukraine gold should be $988.7 million. That is the value of gold proportion of gold in gold reserves is 8%. If you believe Gontareva, it turns out there is a mere $123.6 million in gold remaining. The figure is fantastic, considering that the amount of gold at the end of February (when the new authorities have already taken key positions) was $1.8 billion or 12% of the reserves.

In other words, since the beginning of the year gold reserves dropped almost 16 times. Gold stock in February were approximately 21 tons of gold, the presence of which was once proudly reported by Sergei Arbuzov, who led the NBU in 2010-2012. So what happened to 20.8 tons of gold?

Explaining the dramatic reduction in the context of the hryvnia devaluation through gold sales is impossible. After all, 92% of the reserves of the National Bank is in the form of a foreign currency that is much easier to use to maintain hryvnia levels and cover current liabilities. Besides since March the international price of gold has plummeted. Selling gold under such circumstances is a crime. In fact it would be more expedient to increase gold reserves through currency conversion in precious metals.

But apparently the result is not due to someone’s negligence or carelessness. The gold reserve has been actively carted out of the country, as a result of the very vague economic and political prospects of Ukraine. Something similar happened to the gold reserves of the USSR – when the Gorbachev elite realized that perestroika is leading the country to the abyss, gold simply disappeared in an unknown direction.

Oddly enough there was no official gold reduction just prior to the time when Victoria “Fuck the EU” Nuland was planning Yanukovich’s ouster, and as shown above, quite the contrary: Ukraine’s gold pile was increasing with every passing year… until it collapsed in early 2014. It is a little more odd that it was during the period when Ukraine was “supported” by its western allies that several billion dollars worth of physical gold – the people’s gold – just “vaporized.”

Which brings us to the $1.8 billion question: what happened to Ukraine’s gold, because if the now former central banker’s story is accurate, that’s roughly the amount of gold that quietly left the country just days after the US-backed presidential coup. And, it is also roughly how much taxpayer-funded Ukraine aid, procured by Joe Biden while his son was working at Burisma, is now missing.

At this point, there are certainly many pressing questions but one stands out: was the real “quid pro quo” not one of Trump holding up payments to Kiev in exchange for a probe of Biden – which after reading all of the above is more than warranted – but if the quo, namely US support for regime change in Ukraine and almost two billion in now missing taxpayer funds which ended up in an oligarch’s bank and mysteriously “vaporized” but not before said oligarch hired the son of the US vice president, wasn’t the quid to some 40 tons of Ukraine leaving forever to an unknown destination in the US.

We hope that Trump’s second term will provide ample time and opportunity to answer this critical question, and just to set off investigators on the right track, we believe that any investigation should begin with the former central bank head, Gontareva, who he also fled to London where she now lives in self-appointed exile and where she now “fears for her life” after one of her homes near Kiev was badly damaged in an arson attack, and was also injured in August when she was knocked down by a car in London. Failing that, one can always check the flight manifests and the cargo contents of all planes that left the Ukraine and arrived in the US on March 7, 2014 with a cargo consisting of billions of dollars in gold…

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Preview YouTube video Glenn Beck Presents: Ukraine: The Final Piece

Glenn Beck Presents: Ukraine: The Final Piece

While Beijing has been doing everything in its power to keep equity markets artificially supported to avoid a collapse in the precious “wealth effect” and investor sentiment, throwing the kitchen sink at equities and in addition to a record liquidity injection…

… rate and tax cuts, and various fiscal stimulus measures, outright banning the shorting of stocks, there is one indicator that Beijing has been unable to manipulate. Ominously, it is the one indicator that leads overall Chinese output and suggests that the world’s 2nd largest economy has hit a brick wall.

We are talking, of course, about Dr. copper, that age-old barometer for the health of the global economy, which after rebounding modestly from a record 13-day drop, has once again resumed sliding, in the process creating a gaping divergence with the US equity market, which so far has shown an immunity – so to speak – to any concerns about viruses or frankly anything else.

But why is the price of copper plunging, and why has this most popular barometer for the state of the global economy disconnected from both Chinese stocks and the S&P500?

Simple: while China’s “National Team” still has enough firepower to intervene in the stock market, where it can just outright ban selling and print any amount of liquidity it needs to push stocks higher, it lacks the funds to offset the collapse in demand from Chinese copper buyers on the ground, who have seen the writing on the wall for China’s economy – the world’s largest buyer of the orange metal – and have literally torn up contracts, or as the FT reports, “copper traders in China… have asked miners from Chile to Nigeria to cancel or delay shipments” due to a freefall in copper demand.

According to the report, “multiple Chinese copper buyers said they had scrapped or postponed overseas orders by declaring force majeure since the end of January, when Beijing began to report a surge in coronavirus infections.”

As for the reason why copper demand is collapsing, China’s efforts to contain the virus, ranging from restricting highway traffic to extending the lunar new year holiday, have affected industrial activity and raised concerns about growth in the world’s second-biggest economy. In fact, as we reported on Friday, according to JPMorgan China’s Q1 GDP is already set to plunge from 6% to 1%…

… and while a rebound in Q2 is expected as Beijing gets the pandemic under control, this may end up an overly optimistic assumption for a nation where some speculate as many as 1.5 million are now infected. Indeed, even JPM admits that unless the pandemic is contained in the next few weeks, China’s GDP may crash as much as -4% in Q1, ending all hopes for a quick rebound, and in the process potentially triggering a global recession, if not depression.

It’s not just copper that is seeing an implosion in demand: Chinese buyers of liquefied natural gas have also considered declaring force majeure, a clause that identifies natural disasters or other unavoidable catastrophes as cause for not fulfilling a contract.

Quoted by the FT, a manager at Guangzhou Zhongshan Trade, a non-ferrous metal trading firm in southern China that focuses on copper and antimony, said that “Coronavirus has had a huge impact on copper demand as downstream users [involved in processing raw copper] have stopped acquiring raw material.” Guangzhou Zhongshan this week asked suppliers in Chile and Somalia to delay shipments of 500 tonnes of copper worth about Rmb25m ($3.57m) for at least a week. It has also cancelled a preliminary contract with a seller in Somalia and has stopped placing new orders.

“The epidemic is not just a China issue, it is a global problem,” the manager said, adding that its customers had not objected to its decision, although there is a reason for that – they expect these orders to return shortly. If that doesn’t happen, and if the world’s largest buyer of copper fails to return to the market, the avalanche of upstream bankruptcies as one copper producer after another files, could result in the world’s biggest commodity shock since Lehman.

As for the port of Guangzhou (aka Canton), located in China’s Pearl river delta, one of the biggest in China for commodities trading, business activity has already plunged with fewer than a third of workers on duty, the manager added, even though Guangzhou is not yet officially under quarantine. As a result, at least a dozen other Chinese copper buyers could use force majeure in the coming weeks to try to renegotiate copper import contracts, said traders in the city, located about 1,000km south of Wuhan, the outbreak’s centre. One can only imagine what would happen if a burst of new cases were to be reported in this province which is key to China’s economy.

One thing is certain: the coronavirus fallout – which has led to nearly half a billion people living under lock down – is only just starting, as copper users, ranging from car companies to home appliance makers, face a sharp drop in sales if the outbreak continues to worsen. Consultancy Wood Mackenzie said demand for copper-related products could suffer “further disruptions” after more than a dozen provinces imposed restrictions on people’s movements in an attempt to contain the disease.

That, the FT reports,  has prompted copper traders to embrace the use of force majeure, even if it comes at the expense of their business partners. What it means is that the copper supply chain is now on the verge of collapse, and it’s every man for themselves. Ironically, Chinese end buyers will be ok, buffeted by the massive liquidity injections unleashed by the PBOC. But what about all those fragile upstream producers all of which are so dependent on Chinese purchases?

Well, they are none of China’s business: “Sellers have to accept our terms because the disease has made business contracts invalid,” said an executive at Shenzhen Yongfulu, a copper trader in southern China with annual revenues of about Rmb40m. Yongfulu imported 4,000 tonnes of copper last year. The company asked its suppliers in Chile and Somalia to postpone shipments of 400 tonnes of copper for at least two weeks.

Needless to say, a plunge in Chinese purchases – which has already led to a record drop in the price of copper – would send shockwaves through the global copper market. The nation accounts for half of global consumption of the metal, according to the International Copper Study Group. Copper futures traded in Shanghai have fallen 8 per cent since the beginning of this year. And even though many local Chinese smelters have continued to operate despite the breakout of the pandemic , the decision to shut down roads in key hubs and cities across China has caused delays in them receiving raw materials.

The practice of force majeure is controversial. Dan Harris, a lawyer who has worked on force majeure cases against Chinese firms, said an overuse of the clause will hurt Chinese copper importers in the long run. “Legally, these Chinese companies may be in the right,” said Mr Harris. “But [copper sellers] are going to remember that. A year from now they are not going to sell to those Chinese companies.”

Somehow we doubt that: after all who in the world, literally, can possibly replace the ravenous demand from Chinese buyers. The answer is rhetorical, which however leads to another question: what happens to China’s economy as the world realizes that countless just-in-time supply chains, all of which pass through China, are no longer working?

For the answer, read our article from 2012: “Trade-Off”: A Study In Global Systemic Collapse.