Hunter Biden, the son of President Joe Biden, has come under renewed scrutiny over fresh allegations of his Chinese investment firm partnering with a Beijing military company to cement a questionable business deal from seven-plus years ago — when his father was in the White House, serving as vice president to President Barack Obama.
In September, 2015, the BHR Partners investment firm, which counted Hunter Biden as a board member and 10% stakeholder at the time, worked with AVIC Automotive — a subsidiary of the Chinese state-owned Aviation Industry Corporation of China, or AVIC — to purchase Henniges, a Michigan-based company.
According to the Washington Examiner, the Chinese military group AVIC could potentially be the world's largest defense company; and prior to Hunter Biden's arrival on BHR board, multiple AVIC subsidiaries have been sanctioned by the United States government.
One notable AVIC subsidiary, China National Aero-Technology Import and Export Corporation, or CATIC, has been considered a threat to U.S. national security since 1990, according to the Examiner.
In January 1990, then-President George H.W. Bush even warned that CATIC "might take action that threatens to impair the national security of the United States of America."
"The government has long been aware of the national security concerns posed by AVIC and its subsidiaries. We've known since at least the early '90s that this organization is controlled by the Chinese communist regime and is not friendly to America's security interests," Sen. Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, told the Examiner.
Grassley added: "This transaction should have triggered serious alarm bells at the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States. And any upstanding American businessperson who does any due diligence would know that partnering with AVIC is choosing money over country."
Also around that time, per the Examiner, AVIC was known to support the People's Liberation Army and publicly touted its role in building jets for China's air force.
During the late 1990s, the U.S. House select committee on China issued another warning about AVIC and CATIC; and in 1996, coinciding with President Bill Clinton's tenure in the White House, the Government Accountability Office (GAO) chronicled a scheme by CATIC to get U.S.-based McDonnell Douglas to "co-produce 40 MD-80 and MD-90 aircraft in China for the country's domestic 'trunk' routes."
Three years later, the Department of Justice charged CATIC with violating the Export Administration Act and the International Emergency Economic Powers Act "regarding details of a 1994 sale of American machining equipment, some of which was diverted to a Chinese military site."
Around that time, The New York Times reported that Chinese state-run TAL Industries, owned by CATIC, "pleaded guilty to a felony charge in 2001 for violating the U.S. export laws."
All told, "CATIC had been sanctioned under the Arms Export Control Act in 1999 and was sanctioned in 2004, 2005, and 2006 for violations of the Iran Nonproliferation Act," according to the Examiner.
Less than a decade later, BHR publicly said it was "delighted to announce" the purchase of Henniges — a "$600 million acquisition" for AVIC and BHR that, at the time, marked "the biggest Chinese investment into U.S. automotive manufacturing assets to date."
Per the Examiner, business records from China's National Enterprise Credit Information Publicity System continue to identify Hunter Biden's Skaneateles company as a 10% owner in BHR, "and U.S. business records continue to list Hunter Biden as the only beneficial owner of Skaneateles."
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