Thursday, March 28, 2024

Hunter Biden’s Chinese Fund Helped Outsource U.S. Manufacturing Jobs

Hunter Biden’s Chinese investment fund negotiated the outsourcing of American manufacturing jobs in “one of the largest acquisitions by a Chinese company of a U.S.-based automotive manufacturing company in history.”

Like father, like son: the 2015 buyout was a continuation of then-VP Biden’s oversight on outsourcing millions of manufacturing jobs, chiefly to China. And while working class America reeled, the Bidens profited.

The $600 million deal was barely scrutinized even though it gave a Chinese Communist Party (CCP) entity access to American automotive technology with “potential military applications.”

The deal was authorized by the Committee on Foreign Investment while Joe Biden was Vice President and Christopher Heinz, stepson of Obama-era Secretary of State John Kerry, was also a partner at BHR.

The younger Biden remained on the board as recently as October 2019. In a recent letter, lawyers said: “Mr. Robert Hunter Biden no longer serves as an unpaid director on the board of Bohai Harvest RST (Shanghai) Equity Investment Fund Management Co., Ltd. effective from October 2019.” But they didn’t clarify anything about Hunter Biden’s 10 percent ownership stake.

A statement by the U.S. firm being sold – Henniges Automotive – called the deal “one of the largest acquisitions by a Chinese company of a U.S.-based automotive manufacturing company in history.”

While the company retains five domestic facilities in North Carolina, Missouri, Oklahoma, Iowa, and its global headquarters in Michigan, post acquisition, Henniges has added factories across the world, instead of in America.

In 2016, the company Chinese purchaser – AVIC Automotive Systems Holding Co. Ltd – added a factory in Poland, and a new European Headquarters in the Czech Republic.

The company also expanded in Latin America, investing $30 million to construct its first production plant in Brazil, expected to generate 300 jobs.

And in Mexico, the company added two plants in Durango: “Gomez Palacio II” cost $60 million dollars and generated more than 800 jobs and “Gomez Palacio III” is in the process of being built and is expected to create 600 new jobs.

In China, 2 facilities were added including a 70-person factory in Suzhou and a technical center in Shanghai. And another factory in Beijing, parent-firm AVIC’s operating city, was added to the Henniges’ portfolio roughly a week before the acquisition became public.

While Henniges had begun outsourcing before Hunter Biden got involved, AVIC accelerated the practice, operating on a considerably larger scale. In the decade prior to AVIC guzzling up Henniges, the company only added two new factories. It took less than three years following the 2015 deal for AVIC to surpass this number.

The newly Chinese-owned company expanded its presence to Canada, Germany, Czech Republic, and Mexico. In China, it acquired its pre-existing Chinese facilities through its partner China Academy of Launch Vehicle Technology and the joint company Beijing Wanyuan-Henniges Sealing Systems. In 2014, Henniges gained complete ownership of the company despite sacrificing its autonomy to AVIC roughly one year later.

This AVIC-fueled shift also contributed to transitioning the automotive supply chain increasingly global, which leaves American consumers at the “whims, values, and crises of other nations across the globe who do not have our best interests” at heart.

While the CEO of Henniges said CCP-affiliated companies may be “coming here to learn, but not to take it back to China and forget about North America,” he also acknowledged “they want to create global companies.”

The deal evidently lacked any protections for American factories or workers given AVIC’s outsourcing onslaught. And that’s the Bidens’ modus operandi: sell out American workers and cash out in the process.

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