I'm Still Scratching My Head Over Kevin Morris
A top House Republican is looking into the "suspicious" transfer of Hunter Biden’s stake in a Chinese government-linked investment firm to his "sugar brother" Hollywood lawyer who helped pay off millions of dollars of his back taxes.
Kevin Morris, a close Hunter Biden confidante [sic], appears to be the current owner of Skaneateles, an LLC started by the younger Biden through which he held his 10% share in Bohai Harvest RST (Shanghai) Equity Investment Fund Management Company, or BHR, according to the company's business records.
The question I've had all along has been the relatively piddling amounts involved in all of Hunter's transactions, in comparison, say, to Elizabeth Holmes, whose non-existent net worth was as much as $4.5 billion, or Sam Bankman-Fried, who is estimated to have bilked investors of about $8 bilion. In comparison, the value of Hunter's investment in BHR Partners, which is cited as the entity of interest in the story above, is trivial. According to Newsweek,
Among Hunter Biden's foreign business dealings that have come under the microscope is his involvement in the Chinese equity firm BHR and its relationship with powerful Chinese state-owned companies.
Hunter Biden had invested about $420,000 into the firm for a 10 percent equity stake in the company, the Wall Street Journal reported citing a statement from his lawyer, and he had a hand in creating BHR too.
The story gives somewhat more background on the transaction:
After flying to Beijing in 2013 and meeting investment banker Jonathan Li, Hunter Biden was also made chief executive and board member of private equity fund BHR Partners in China.
Rosemont Seneca Partners, a private equity firm he co-founded in 2009, partnered with a Chinese investment company to fund BHR in 2014.
After flying to Beijing in 2013 and meeting investment banker Jonathan Li, Hunter Biden was also made chief executive and board member of private equity fund BHR Partners in China.
Rosemont Seneca Partners, a private equity firm he co-founded in 2009, partnered with a Chinese investment company to fund BHR in 2014.
His earnings from Rosemont Seneca and Seneca Global Advisors are not publicly available.
But tellingly, the story adds,
In 2013, he was also commissioned as a part-time ensign in the Navy Reserve but was later administratively discharged after testing positive for cocaine use.
According to Military-ranks.org,
A Ensign is a junior officer in the United States Navy at DoD paygrade O-1. A Ensign receives a monthly basic pay salary starting at $3,477 per month, with raises up to $4,376 per month once they have served for over 3 years.
$3,477 per month comes to a little over $41,000 per year. So at the same time that Hunter was running these big-ticket deals with China, Joe was scrambling to get him a no-show job as a Navy ensign worth $41,000 per year? And he lost that job within weeks when he failed his first drug test. According to this source,
A “typical” dose of cocaine is approximately 50 mg, but the effects are very short-lived, lasting only 30 minutes. Cocaine addicts will dose again and again, easily consuming a daily total of a gram or more. Of special relevance, people who have acquired a very high tolerance for cocaine may consume significantly more, up to a gram per dose. This is why a moderate cocaine addiction can easily cost $150 a day, or around $55,000 per year. Severe cocaine addiction is far more expensive, however, reaching hundreds – or even thousands – of dollars a day.
According to his ex-wife, Hunter had gone into rehab in 2012, but by 2013 he failed a drug test, so we may assume his cocaine use was at least up to the "moderate" $150 a day level, which even a no-show Navy ensign job wouldn't cover. But by 2015, after his brother Beau's death, Hunter's addictions, his various affairs, and his trips to luxury rehab and celebrity hotels were out of control, and as the link suggests, his overall expenses had almost certainly reached thousands of dollars per day.What's puzzling is that we've never been able to learn just what his putative business ventures were bringing in. But if he was spending, say, $3,000 a day on hotel bills, fast cars, hookers, drugs, and girlfriends like Hallie and Liz Secundy -- a very lowball estimate -- that was over a million dollars a year. But how did this balance against what he was bringing in? From Burisma, which started in 2014,
In 2016, Hunter’s total income from Burisma was $999,996. In 2017 it dropped to $665,000, and then $498,000 in 2018.
Hunter resigned from the Burisma board in April 2019, according to his lawyer George Mesires, after his controversial business dealings dogged his father’s presidential campaign.
Everything I've been able to research says that Hunter's income never matched his expenses, and there's no way he could have contributed to a Biden family boodle, unless he had income sources far greater than any we've heard about so far. In fact, the sketchy information that's come out suggests that either Joe was making up Hunter's shortfalls at least from 2012 onward, or Hunter was simply able to stiff his creditors on the basis that he was Joe's son.But this brings me to the next question: why has Keven Morris bought into this frammis? The various reports that have come out suggest Morris paid Hunter's $2 million IRS bill, paid his rent at various times in Venice and Malibu, and appears to be funding and managing Hunter's legal cases, both the child suppert with Lunden Roberts and the ongoing Delaware tax and firearm investigations.
He's also said to facilitate Hunter's art deals, but even at half a million a pop, these can't cover Hunter's current expenses, even if we assume the guy's now clean and sober, which I doubt.
Morris is now said to control Hunter's former stake in BHR partners, but we don't have any clear idea of what that's worth, and it's hard to me to avoid thinking it's basically just another money pit that will never come close to paying Hunter's debts. What's in this for Kevin Morris?
I think Kevin Morris is a mark.
