Federal prosecutors have filed tax charges against Hunter Biden, a second criminal case against the US president’s son.
The nine-count indictment says he schemed to evade at least $1.4m (£1.1m) in federal taxes from 2016-19.
The three felonies and six misdemeanours include failure to file and pay taxes, false tax return and evasion of assessment.
Hunter Biden was indicted in September on federal firearm charges in Delaware.
President Joe Biden’s 53-year-old son has already pleaded not guilty in the gun case.
The White House did not comment on the new charges on Thursday night. It comes as congressional Republicans place Hunter Biden’s business dealings at the centre of an impeachment inquiry into President Biden, who is seeking election next year.
If convicted in the tax case, Hunter Biden could face up to 17 years in prison.
US Department of Justice Special Counsel David Weiss has been investigating Hunter Biden’s alleged criminal conduct since 2019.
Prosecutors allege Hunter Biden spent his money on “drugs, escorts and girlfriends, luxury hotels and rental properties, exotic cars, clothing, and other items of a personal nature, in short, everything but his taxes”.
The indictment says that the president’s son “individually received more than $7 million in total gross income” between 2016 and mid-October 2020, but “willfully failed to pay his 2016, 2017, 2018, and 2019 taxes on time, despite having access to funds to pay some or all of these taxes”.
Hunter Biden’s attorney, Abbe Lowell, responded to the new charges saying “if Hunter’s last name was anything other than Biden, the charges in Delaware, and now California, would not have been brought”.
Hunter Biden eventually paid all his taxes and fines back in 2020 – with the help of a loan from his personal attorney.
A chart inside the indictment outlines what Hunter Biden spent his money on.
Between 2016-19, he paid over $188,000 on “adult entertainment” and over $683,000 on “payments – various women”, according to the charge sheet.
Hunter Biden “continued to earn handsomely and to spend wildly in 2018”, prosecutors allege.
The indictment notes he made “substantial” income, including from a company he formed with a Chinese business conglomerate, the Ukrainian energy company Burisma and an unnamed Romanian businessperson.
As his income increased, so did his expenditures on an “extravagant lifestyle”, says the indictment.
In 2018, the defendant spent more than $1.8m, including hundreds of thousands of dollars in cash withdrawals, about $383,000 in payments to women and $151,000 on clothing.
He stayed at various high-end hotels and allegedly spent $10,000 “to purchase a membership in a sex club”.
Prosecutors note throughout the indictment that he “had sufficient funds available… to pay some or all of his outstanding taxes when they were due”, but he chose not to do so.
Hunter Biden allegedly often wrote off personal expenses as business expenses, like a rental of a Lamborghini that he drove when he first moved to California in April 2018 until his Porsche arrived from the east coast.
On one occasion, the defendant did not note a $1,500 Venmo payment in August 2018 as a personal expense.
Though the payment was described as “artwork”, prosecutors say it was to an exotic dancer at a strip club, who “had not sold him any artwork”, says the court papers.
The defendant also allegedly used his business line of credit to pay for his daughter’s rent in New York City, about $19,535, and to make payments to an online pornography website – about $27,316.
Hunter Biden also claimed extensive business travel in 2018 when he had none, says the indictment.
It also refers to someone who brought a paternity suit against the defendant after being involved in a romantic relationship with him.
It alleges Hunter Biden placed this individual – named as Person 1 – on the payroll shortly after she moved to Arkansas while pregnant with his child, even though she did not perform any work.
Person 1 received $22,500 in wages, which Hunter Biden falsely claimed as a business deduction, according to prosecutors.
While Person 1 is not named in the indictment, she is believed to be Lunden Roberts, a stripper who is the mother of Hunter’s long-unacknowledged daughter.
The charge sheet also notes that Hunter Biden had joined the board of directors of Burisma Holdings Limited, a Ukrainian industrial conglomerate, which agreed to pay him an annual salary of about $1m.
Earlier this year, Hunter Biden had been expected to plead guilty to misdemeanour tax charges in a deal with prosecutors.
But that agreement fell apart after a judge questioned it as “unusual”. Congressional Republicans later slammed it as a “sweetheart deal”.
The House of Representatives Oversight Committee is currently pursuing an impeachment inquiry of President Biden, claiming he was involved in an influence peddling scheme with his son.
While congressional Republicans on the panel have produced bank statements that they argue prove Joe Biden lied when he denied benefitting from his son’s business dealings, the White House has said the entire inquiry is based on lies.
By BBC News