Joe Biden’s younger brother, James, is purportedly under federal investigation by the United States Attorney in the Western District of Pennsylvania for his role in a now-bankrupt healthcare firm.
On Wednesday, Politico reported that federal prosecutors “have been asking about James Biden’s dealings” with Americore Health, a company that operates rural hospitals .
James Biden, who worked for Americore between 2017 and 2019, supposedly received a personal loan from the $650,000 company before decreasing his day-to-day activities. The personal loan was given to James Biden for helping Americore secure an even bigger bridge loan from a hedge fund run by one of his associates, Michael Lewitt. Court documents, as well as former Americore executives, claim that James Biden convinced the firm’s leadership to sign off on both by promising he would be able to secure larger investments from Middle Eastern contacts thanks to his family’s name.
Americore, which filed for bankruptcy in late-2019, was raided by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) earlier this year as part of an ongoing probe into its finances and business practices. At the time, FBI agents also raided the home of Americore’s CEO, Grant White.
Even before raids, the company’s conduct had come under scrutiny after it was accused of fraud. In July 2019, Michael Frey and his business partner, Dr. Mohannad Azzam, filed a lawsuit in federal court claiming James Biden and Americore’s leadership had promised and failed to line up investors for their rural healthcare enterprise. The suit alleges, James Biden urged the two men to borrow $10 million from a hedge fund run by Lewitt, who was involved in the deal.
“The lawsuit takes direct aim at Biden, painting him as a con artist who uses his ties to his brother … to lure his victims,” the Knoxville News Sentinel reported in August 2019.
According to documents filed with the U.S. District Court, Frey and his wife developed a business model to take over rural hospitals and retrofit them to not only offer traditional hospital care, but also drug addiction and mental health treatment. After incorporating the enterprise as Diverse Medical Management, they brought on Azzam, “who contracted with nursing homes to provide medical care for seniors.”
The business model was lucrative enough that by 2017, Frey and Azzam were actively pitching it to investors and hospitals across the country. One investor particularly taken with the idea was Americore.
At the behest of Americore’s CEO, White, Frey and Azzam were urged to pitch their business plan to rural hospitals in Kentucky. It was at one such meeting the two men met James Biden, who identified himself as a “principal” at Americore.
Not long after their initial encounter, James Biden introduced the men to Lewitt, a hedge fund manager and well-known “credit strategist.” Around this time, Americore made plans to buy Diverse Medical for the sum of $7 million.
Despite the deal, Americore quickly fell behind on its scheduled payments to Frey and Azzam. It was then that James Biden and Lewitt, as detailed in the lawsuit, hatched a plan to oust White and sell Americore along with Diverse Medical to a third company called the Platinum Group. Frey and Azzam appear to have been uncomfortable with the turn the deal took, especially the notion of removing White. The men, though, went along with the plan after being told a payout was “imminent.”
“They repeatedly assured (Frey) that investment capital originating from and flowing through foreign entities was not only certain, but was imminent,” documents filed by Frey and Azzam’s attorney state.
James Biden, himself, is alleged to have tried to pacify the two men’s fears by leaning heavily on his family name and promising that their business model would “play an integral role in health care policy at the highest levels of the United States government.”
It is unclear if the purported investigation that the U.S. Attorney has into James Biden is directly connected to Frey and Azzam’s lawsuit.
Reports of a federal probe, however, come after Hunter Biden, the former vice president’s youngest son, released a statement on Wednesday admitting that his lawyers had been informed the U.S. Attorney in Delaware had opened an investigation into his “tax affairs.”
via Breitbart News
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