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UPenn is home to the Penn Biden Center that the president set up after leaving the Obama administration
It is where he left a treasure trove of classified documents after his two terms as VP.
The university denies Biden’s think-tank took a single cent of Chinese cash
A prestigious U.S. college, home to a Joe Biden-backed think-tank where the former vice-president left classified documents, raked in more than $100 million from Chinese donors, leaked emails show.
The revelations, first reported by Fox News, will raise fresh suspicions of the presidential family’s cozy ties with foreign governments.
Disgraced first son Hunter Biden, 53, has been under the microscope for years over alleged influence-peddling thanks to his political connections.
They came to light after a series of emails from his laptop were leaked to the media, highlighting how he used his ties to his father to win lucrative contracts abroad.
Financial records obtained by American for Public Trust, a transparency group, show the Penn Biden Center for Diplomacy and Global Engagement accepted millions of dollars in donations from China.
The eye-watering sum of $105 million, nearly double what had been reported in the past, was picked up from businessmen close to the Chinese Communist party in just three short years.
It is the latest scandal to plague UPenn after it emerged Joe Biden had left a treasure trove of classified documents on site after his two-term spell as Barack Obama’s vice-president.
Caitlin Sutherland, the executive director of APT which uncovered the figures, said it would cast further shadows over the Biden family’s business dealings.
She said the filings show ‘the incredible volume of support the university has received from foreign sources.’
There are several donors who have stumped up cash who are linked to past Hunter Biden business deals.
They include a lead investor and a board member of a company that landed an arrangement facilitated by a Hunter-tied investment company.
Cathay Fortune, a private equity firm that has a controlling interest in China Molybdenum – now called CMOC Group Limited – gave $1 million to UPenn in 2019.
CMOC purchased a cobalt mine in the Democratic Republic of the Congo in 2016 with the help of an investment company formed by Hunter Biden in 2013.
The Wall Street Journal reported that the president’s eldest son held a 10% stake in the firm he founded, BHR, as recently as 2020.
In 2018 and 2019, China Merchant Bank donated over $5.5 million to UPenn, the records show.
The bank described UPenn’s prestigious Wharton School of Business as a ‘strategic partner.’
The vice dean of Wharton’s Global Initiative has also called the bank a ‘long-standing partner,’ according to Beijing mouthpiece China Daily.
But a spokesman for the Philadelphia-based university said that not a single cent of the Chinese money was funneled to the president’s think-tank.
‘No foreign funds were contributed anonymously, and no foreign funds were directed to the Penn Biden Center,’ the spokesman told DailyMail.com.
‘Penn reported all foreign contributions as required, and they have been publicly available on the Department of Education website for some time.’
But the Department of Education stopped publishing the identities of foreign university donors in late 2020.
Before that, the gifts included individuals who gave $250,000 or more, meaning the new records also show donors previously not in the database.
The donor list also shows several individuals with ties to the Chinese Communist Party.
Joe Biden enjoys close ties with the University of Pennsylvania. On Monday, he and the first family attended the graduation of his granddaughter, Maisy, in fine arts.
The president was seen with his son Hunter as well as his wife, Dr Jill Biden.
The current commander-in-chief also became an honorary professor there in 2017 after leaving office as vice-president.
He pocketed a total of $776,557 in just two years, double what most professors earn there, before launching the Penn Center the following year.
The think-tank says its mission is to back Biden’s fight ‘to secure American global leadership by defending and advancing a liberal international order.’
Rose Rambles... 