Fund manager indicates Jim Biden was in business with Qatari officials

New details about Jim Biden’s foreign fundraising efforts are spilling out in a Kentucky bankruptcy court, where recent testimony indicates that President Joe Biden’s brother partnered with Qatari government officials in his quest to find money for U.S. health care ventures.

The sworn testimony by fund manager Michael Lewitt, a former business partner of Jim Biden’s, attests that two companies that facilitated the efforts were part-owned by “members of the Qatari government.”

One company named in the testimony partnered directly with Jim Biden in the multi-year fundraising efforts.

The second company provided financial backing for a series of loans that a hospital chain paid Jim Biden to arrange, according to documents and testimony Lewitt submitted in the course of the federal bankruptcy proceedings.

If substantiated, the alleged arrangements would constitute some of the closest known financial links between a relative of President Joe Biden and a foreign government.

The alleged arrangements stem from an effort by Jim Biden to raise money from Qatari sources for ventures in the U.S. beginning in the months after his older brother left the vice presidency. At the time, the tiny, gas-rich nation faced a financial blockade from its neighbors and was spending lavishly to shore up its political standing in the West.

Public records and emails obtained by POLITICO offer a window on fundraising efforts in which Jim Biden invoked his ties to older brother and sought workarounds to restrictions on international money movements. Transactions related to the efforts are also at the heart of a recently-settled fraud case brought by the SEC and are being scrutinized as part of a federal criminal investigation in South Florida.

Much about the efforts remains unknown, and the White House, the Qatari Embassy, and a representative for Jim Biden all did not respond to requests for comment for this story.

Jim Biden suggested to congressional investigators in February that his fundraising efforts stalled for lack of viable projects to back. But the previously unreported testimony by fund manager Michael Lewitt about the ownership of the two companies — the Platinum Group USA and Obermeyer Engineering Consulting — indicates that Jim Biden forged closer ties to Qatar’s government than previously understood.

Lewitt, a former business partner of Jim Biden’s, is likely to face questions about the efforts when he sits for a planned interview with House impeachment inquiry investigators.

No date has been announced for the interview, and Lewitt declined repeated requests to comment further on his courtroom testimony.

Crisis in the Middle East

In June 2017, Qatar’s neighbors, led by Saudi Arabia, ganged up and cut diplomatic ties with the country, citing its alleged support for terrorism. The ensuing financial and physical blockade threw the country — a peninsula that juts out from Saudi Arabia into the Persian Gulf — into a sustained crisis.

In response, the country’s rulers began showering well-connected Westerners with gifts and financial benefits, sometimes in the form of investment funding. The Qatari influence offensive strengthened the country’s ties to the U.S. and Europe but has also led to corruption scandals, including the European Parliament’s sprawling Qatargate fiasco.

Around the time of the blockade, Jim Biden was embarking on a foray into the health care business in which he worked closely with troubled hospital chain Americore.

To raise money for the company, he teamed up with the Platinum Group’s CEO, a Florida businessman named Amer Rustom who has boasted of his ties to officials in the Middle East, and Lewitt.

A hedge fund manager known for authoring a popular finance newsletter, the Credit Strategist, Lewitt has written that he pursued graduate studies under the legendary literary critic Harold Bloom at Yale, where he rubbed shoulders with Italian novelist Umberto Eco and the French philosopher Jacques Derrida before embarking on a finance career at the investment bank Drexel Burnham.

Together, Jim Biden, Rustom and Lewitt sought investment funding from sources in the Middle East for Americore and other ventures, according to federal court filings in Tennessee and emails obtained by POLITICO.

Those efforts came to focus largely on Qatar, according to a former Americore executive who was granted anonymity to discuss a sensitive matter. Jim Biden and his partners said that Qatari officials had expressed an interest in investing more deeply in the U.S. health care sector, the former executive recalled.

POLITICO previously reported that in August 2017, Jim Biden and Rustom workshopped a draft letter to an official at the country’s sovereign wealth fund, the Qatar Investment Authority. The draft letter from Jim Biden read in part, “My family could provide a wealth of introductions and business opportunities at the highest levels that I believe would be worthy of the interest of His Excellency,” and, “On behalf of the Biden family, I welcome your interest here.”

Rustom did not respond to requests for comment.

As the group refined their pitch in early 2018, Lewitt and a group of Platinum-related companies committed to raising $30 million for the hospital chain, according to a complaint later filed against Lewitt by the SEC.

In the meantime, Lewitt’s investment fund, Third Friday, began making a series of bridge loans to Americore to keep the cash-strapped company afloat until the $30 million arrived.

The first bridge loan coincided with a $400,000 payment from Americore to Jim Biden.

In his interview with impeachment inquiry investigators in February, Jim Biden said the roughly $600,000 payments he received from Americore around that time were for his role in arranging the loans. After prompting from his attorney, he added that the payments were also for “many other services,” according to a transcript of the interview.

In March 2018, Jim Biden transferred $200,000 of the payments in question to Joe Biden, who was then out of office, in what he and the White House have both described as a repayment of an unrelated loan between brothers. POLITICO previously reviewed bank records that show a $200,000 payment to Jim Biden from an account that appeared to belong to Joe Biden made several weeks earlier.

'Global banking emissary'

In the spring of 2018, the fundraising efforts gained steam.

On March 10, Jim Biden’s wife, Sara Biden, emailed a draft investor presentation to a Platinum Group executive, Julie Lander, saying that it reflected “a few minor revisions by Jim.”

The email was part of a cache of internal Americore documents obtained exclusively by POLITICO, which published a February report on Jim Biden’s work with the hospital chain.

The attached presentation said that Americore was seeking $30 million in financing to acquire hospitals and described Jim Biden as “Brother and Campaign Finance Chair of former Vice President Joe Biden.”

A month later, on April 10, Lander emailed Jim Biden about the fundraising efforts and referred to an apparent meeting with a high-ranking Qatari official.

“I am following up from the meeting we had with the Minister,” wrote Lander. “Your approach with him was flawless. He requested more information on Americore.”

In the previously unreported email, Lander suggested a potential request of $200 million and asked Jim Biden to provide more information on the potential benefits to Qatar of an investment deal.

Lander’s email came five days after a large delegation of Qatari officials and business leaders visited Miami. It is not clear which minister Lander, who did not respond to requests for comments, was referring to.

Despite her upbeat email, the fundraising efforts hit a series of snags. The former Americore executive said that some of the issues pertained to legal restrictions on moving investment funds across borders, but the person said they were not versed in the details of those restrictions. The former executive recalled discussion at one point of trying to move money across a Middle Eastern border in the form of gold bars, but said they were not aware of any action taken on the idea.

One avenue that Jim Biden explored for getting investments to Americore was dependent on helping a payment processing company, Billerfy, gain access to the U.S. banking system, internal Americore emails show.

At the time, Billerfy processed payments for Canada’s then-largest crypto exchange, Quadriga, which has since collapsed. A lawyer who has represented Billerfy, Philip Holdsworth of Robbins Appleby in Toronto, did not respond to requests for comment and POLITICO was unable to reach the company directly.

A draft presentation that circulated inside Americore described Billerfy as an “open network for global payments” and described Jim Biden as Billerfy’s “chief global banking emissary.”

It is not clear what came of the talks. In an April 10 email to Jim Biden, Americore’s outside counsel, Christopher Anderson, expressed reservations about working with Billerfy. Anderson did not respond to requests for comment and a representative for Jim Biden did not respond to a question about Billerfy.

'Dubai $$$'

As business in Qatar slowed down in mid-May for the Islamic holy month of Ramadan, the fundraising efforts stalled and tensions grew among the people involved.

In a May 17 email to Americore CEO Grant White, Jim Biden vented about a flap between the two men and implored White to provide more detailed financial information to potential investors.

By way of explaining the continued fundraising delays, Jim Biden wrote that Rustom and Lewitt “are waiting on World Bank approval” of their acquisition of a bank and touted his own efforts to secure funding. “I agreed to go to Qatar, Saudi Arabia and China (at my own expense),” he wrote.

A week later, Jim Biden aired his frustrations in an email to Rustom. “The $30 million was committed to over two months ago and we made moves predicated on that available line of credit,” he wrote. ”Things have happened in the interim that are completely understandable, but the fact remains that the $5 million at this point in time is critical in order to get by for the big picture. ”

In late June, Lewitt emailed Jim Biden and White about efforts to move money into Qatar from Dubai in the neighboring United Arab Emirates, referring to an unspecified “blockage” that was holding up the process.

“Amer would like me to join Jim for the presentation to the Finance Minister in Doha so as soon as we have the date I will plan my travel,” the email concluded.

The former Americore executive said that Jim Biden and Lewitt traveled to Qatar in mid-2018 as part of the fundraising efforts, but it is not clear whether any meeting between Jim Biden and Qatar’s then-finance minister, Ali Sharif Al Emadi, took place.

Al Emadi left his post in 2021 after Qatar’s attorney general ordered him arrested on suspicion of corruption. In January, Reuters reported that he was convicted on charges that included laundering more than $5 billion and sentenced to 20 years in prison.

Neither a representative for Jim Biden nor Qatar’s embassy in Washington responded to questions about Jim Biden’s alleged trip to Qatar or plans to meet with Al Emadi.

In July of 2018, Jim Biden cut ties with White, a move he attributed in his congressional testimony to Americore’s dependence on high-interest loans.

The next month, Lewitt wrote to Jim Biden to express confidence that his fund would be repaid imminently for its loans to Americore with money from Dubai, according to an email that emerged in bankruptcy litigation. “Nothing else changes in terms of what I will be doing re Americore,” Lewitt wrote, “since I will be just as responsible for the Dubai$$$ with the added worry of being driven around the desert....LOL.”

In the meantime, Jim Biden continued to work with Lewitt and Rustom to secure financing for other health care ventures from the Qatar Investment Authority, according to filings in a since-settled federal court casein Tennessee in which Jim Biden, Lewitt, Rustom and Platinum Group USA were named as co-defendants.

As they continued to pursue business together, Jim Biden’s financial ties to Lewitt deepened.

Over the course of 2019, Jim Biden’s company, Lion Hall Group, received $225,000 from Third Friday.

Jim Biden testified to Congress that the payments were loans that were later forgiven. Lewitt disputed that his fund forgave the loans, telling POLITICO that Jim Biden’s debt was instead assumed by a third party, which he declined to name.

Also in 2019, a new business, Platinum Global Partners, LLC, was registered in Florida with Jim Biden, Sara Biden, Lewitt, Rustom and his brother Azzam Rustom all listed as managers, according to the state’s corporate records.

Asked in his impeachment inquiry interview about the purpose of the company — which was dissolved in 2020 — Jim Biden said he was trying to land investment from Qatar for infrastructure projects and hotels.

In the end, he said, the venture petered out.

“We weren’t able to show the financial bona fides of any one particular project,” he said. “We got pretty far down the road on several hotel complexes, but they never came to fruition.”

'A black haze' over Kentucky

In the years since Qatar’s rulers reached into their deep pockets to fend off a diplomatic crisis, the country’s international spending spree has created political fallout in the West.

Qatari investment in an office tower owned by Jared Kushner’s family has come under scrutiny, the ongoing Qatargate graft scandal has rocked the government of the European Union, and, in January, federal prosecutors in New Jersey alleged that Democratic Sen. Bob Menendez corruptly advanced Qatar’s interests to help an associate land investment funding from the country.

The Qatar-focused fundraising efforts of Jim Biden and his partners have also become the subject of legal controversies.

In 2022, investors in Third Friday sued Lewitt, saying he embezzled their money through Americore to Jim Biden and others. Lewitt has denied wrongdoing in the Palm Beach case, which remains ongoing. Jim Biden has not been named as a defendant in the case.

In March, POLITICO reported that Third Friday’s loans to Americore — as well as other dealings involving Jim Biden, Lewitt, Rustom and the Platinum Group — were being scrutinized in an ongoing federal criminal investigation in South Florida.

And in April, Lewitt settled a fraud case brought by the SEC over the loans, receiving a five-year ban from the securities industry, according to court filings.

Meanwhile, a bizarre commercial dispute between Lewitt and the Rustom brothers has provided a striking glimpse into Jim Biden’s foreign business ties.

In the course of Americore’s bankruptcy litigation, Lewitt produced documents that included an agreement between his fund and a Delaware company, Obermeyer Engineering Consulting. The agreement calls for Obermeyer to purchase Third Friday’s loans to Americore, as well as a 35 percent stake in the hospital chain, for $30 million.

The agreement, submitted by Lewitt in the course of litigation, appears to include a signature from Azzam Rustom as Obermeyer’s “authorized signatory.”

But Amer Rustom, who is listed in corporate records as Obermeyer’s manager, contested the validity of the contract, saying neither he nor his brother had ever seen it before, according to court filings.

The Rustoms also contested the authenticity of signatures and documents Lewitt produced that showed loans from Third Friday to the Platinum Group, saying the loans in question did not exist, according to court filings. In a signed declaration Azzam Rustom said that Lewitt had “forged” his signature on the loan documents.

On September 21 of last year, Lewitt was called to testify about the matter at the federal bankruptcy court in Lexington.

Lawyers for Americore’s bankruptcy trustee had accused him of perjury regarding the alleged Platinum Group loans, and Judge Gregory Schaaf was entertaining a potential criminal referral to the Justice Department.

Called to the stand, a subdued Lewitt told the court that Amer Rustom verbally authorized Lewitt to affix his brother’s signature to the disputed documents.

Towards the end of the hearing Lewitt was asked why, if the agreements he produced were valid, the Rustoms were contesting them.

Lewitt testified that the Rustoms owned both Obermeyer and the Platinum Group with “members of the Qatari government.” He speculated that the brothers had not cleared the agreements with the Qatari officials, whom he did not name. “I don't think they expected these to become public,” he testified, “and I think they were trying to cover themselves.”

Schaaf punted any final decisions on sanctioning Lewitt, but he made clear at the hearing’s close that he found the whole matter suspicious.

“Where there’s smoke, there’s fire,” the judge said, “and this is a black haze right now.”