Banking fraud and gambling: How Oleksandr Sosis and Alyona Dehrik-Shevtsova fight for control of Ukraine’s gambling market

Banking fraud and gambling: How Oleksandr Sosis and Alyona Dehrik-Shevtsova fight for control of Ukraine’s gambling market

When the loud sounds of battles in the suburbs of Kyiv died down and it became clear that the country would continue to exist, the temporarily silent ‘schemers’ began to become active again.

Their persistent struggle for financial resources has resumed with new energy. The echo of this struggle is increasingly heard throughout the information space.

An unusual ‘throw-in’

At the end of June, on the 27th, an article titled UKRAINE SHOULD CLOSE FIRTASH’S BANK, FROM WHICH HUNDREDS OF MILLIONS OF EUROS WERE STOLEN appeared on the English-language website Luxembourg Herald (Luxherald.com). The site soon became unavailable, presumably due to a hacker attack. However, the very next day, its translation into Russian, as well as short excerpts from the text, appeared in a number of Ukrainian online publications.

The publication talks about the fact that the Ukrainian bank ‘Alliance’ is allegedly on the verge of bankruptcy due to large-scale machinations of the management and beneficiary of the financial institution. And the anonymous author categorically names the disgraced oligarch Dmytro Firtash, whose structures ran astronomical sums through ‘Alliance’.

The very next day, ‘Alliance’ Bank categorically denied the information presented in the article (though not all of it – editor’s note).

And the head of the board of the financial institution, Yuliia Frolova, made the following statement:

‘Firstly, it is worth noting that artistic exaggerations, metaphors and the vocabulary of the yellow press are not appropriate for professional journalism, and especially in the financial sector. Secondly, we draw attention to the arguments and references of the authors. In most cases, the author ‘exposes’ illegal actions based on his own speculations and referring to the fake publication Luxembourg Herald, which has repeatedly published fake news. The ‘Alliance’ Bank team considers fake news to be a sign of ordered aggression against the strategic growth of ‘Alliance Bank’’.

Yuliia Frolova

Indeed, the Luxembourg Herald is known in Ukrainian media circles as a fake resource through which interested parties throw in rotten dirt. It gained this notoriety after publishing a delusional article about how the wife of the fifth president of Ukraine, Maryna Poroshenko, was allegedly involved in money laundering through a charitable organization.

However, the head of the board of ‘Alliance’ is being somewhat disingenuous, claiming that what is stated in the article is complete nonsense. After all, the publication specifically emphasizes that the ‘Alliance’ bank is a settlement bank and issuer of electronic money of the international payment system ‘GlobalMoney’, the name of which regularly appears in criminal proceedings. In particular, in the court register it is often mentioned in the context of cases of illegal trade in drugs and psychotropic substances – ‘pushers’ actively use its electronic wallets (here are the first documents from the register that came up – 1, 2).

In addition, a long-standing scandal is mentioned, when information surfaced that GlobalMoney terminals could have been used by pro-Russian terrorists for their financial transactions in ORDLO. Here we can also add involvement in money laundering, of which the ‘ALLO’, a chain of electrical appliance stores, was accused.

As mentioned above, the ‘Alliance’ considers the "throw-in" from the Luxembourg Herald website to be ‘ordered aggression’. In Ukrainian business circles, which are generally far from saintly, it has long been a habit to pretend to be a victim when law enforcement agencies make claims or media exposes them. This is not quite the case. However, before we get to the most interesting part, let’s take a closer look at the actors.

‘Family’ Affairs and the shadow of Yura Yenakiyevskyi

So.

‘Alliance’ Bank. According to previously published data, this bank opened in Donetsk back in 1992. It remained a rather modest bank even by Ukrainian standards (its assets did not exceed 10-15 million dollars), which, nevertheless, successfully survived three crises (1998, 2008 and 2014).

And all because it was called a ‘bandit bank’ through which all sorts of financial schemes were carried out. It was written about ‘Alliance’ that it was under the control of an associate of the fugitive Yanukovych – Yurii Ivanyushchenko (Yura Yenakiyevskyi), and the owners of the bank were always a group of shareholders, each of whom owned about 10%. After the Revolution of Dignity, the bank changed owners: they became Donetsk LLC ‘Kramp’ (EDRPOU 36442702) and Kyiv LLC ‘Ukrbiznesstandart’ (EDRPOU 35886746), both known as Ivanyushchenko’s firms.

In particular, the firm ‘Kramp’ (named after the mafia boss from the old French comedy ‘Umbrella Shot’), according to some media, was part of a scheme by which Ivanyushchenko evaded taxes by selling saltpeter of the state enterprise ‘Ekoantylid’, and was also used for the fictitious bankruptcy of LLC ‘Charnokit’. The latter became a defendant in a criminal case on illegal VAT refunds in especially large amounts, after which it was declared bankrupt.

Yurii Ivanyushchenko

Moreover, in December 2014, the SSU suspected that a large conversion center with a turnover of up to 600 million hryvnia was operating in the ‘Alliance’ bank. The ‘Alpha’ fighters conducted a thorough search of the bank, including ‘rummaging’ through the safe deposit boxes. As the head of the SSU Valentyn Nalyvaichenko later stated, among the confiscated ‘catch’ were the seals of the LDPR institutions and contracts that could be used to finance terrorism. In addition, property and documents of another bank, ‘Gefest’, which was also under the control of Ivanyushchenko and his partner Serhyi Dyadechko, were found in ‘Alliance’.

However, the SSU failed to take advantage of the search results. A scandal was raised immediately after it: the Jewish community of Donbas, through the mouth of Rabbi Pinkhas Vyshedsky (former leader of the Donetsk Chabad community) stated that during the search, the ‘Alpha’ members stole money and valuables from the bank’s safe deposit box that belonged to some ‘Jewish refugees’. A criminal case was opened against the SSU employees, and they were dragged through the courts. And while the scandal was going on, the ‘Alliance’ bank was resold to a new owner. In early 2015, it became the former junior partner of the almost non-oligarch Akhmetov, Oleksandr Sosis.

Oleksandr Sosis

GlobalMoney. Journalists Dmytro Korol and Serhii Shcherbyna wrote about this financial organization in great detail back in 2013 in the online publication INSIDER.

According to the State Register, as of 2013, the authorized capital of GlobalMoney was 12 million hryvnia, of which only 0.5% – 48 thousand – belonged to Oleksandr Tiutiun. Among the founders were also listed the London Quick Payment System Ltd and the Ukrainian venture fund ‘European Technologies’, with shares of 4.7 and 7.2 million hryvnia, respectively.

According to the UK company register, Oleksandr Tiutiun was listed as the director of Quick Payment System Ltd, but for some reason as an Israeli citizen. It was owned by three offshore companies and another English one – Integrate IT Technologies Limited. The beneficiary of the latter was listed as Belarusian IT businessman Sergei Gvardeytsev.

But with PJSC ‘ZNVK IF ‘European Technologies’’ the situation was more complicated.

As of September 2013, its sole founder with a share of 150 million hryvnia was the SouthEast Insurance Company (SEIC). However, according to the decision of the Donetsk Regional Commercial Court, it was declared bankrupt and liquidated back in June 2010.

Before the liquidation, the shareholders of SEIC included the companies AMC ‘DAN’ and CJSC ‘Promkombinat’. Both enterprises belonged to the ‘Soiuz’ bank (which figured in the criminal case on financing terrorism), the deputy chairman of which was the former vice-president of ‘Rodovid’ Bank Serhyi Dyadechko.

Serhyi Dyadechko (pictured on the right)

After the liquidation of the insurance company, European Technologies was managed directly by AMC ‘DAN’.

‘We have nothing to do with GlobalMoney, and we sold the AMC ‘DAN’ and the fund it manages (‘European Technologies’) back in 2008-2009’, Dyadechko commented on this situation. However, he did not say to whom exactly the company was sold.

But there are a number of interesting details. The first of them is that the phone number of ‘European Technologies’ coincided with the number of the director of ‘ZNVK IF ‘New Technologies’’, businessman Ivan Avramov. The same one who is a business partner of the legendary ‘regional’ Yuri Ivanyushchenko, better known as Yura Yenakiyevskyi and Yurets Maloi. However, this may not mean anything.

Ivan Avramov (pictured left)

The most interesting thing is that in 2009, the majority shareholder of European Technologies was LLC ‘Parfe’. The history of this company is extremely interesting. For example, ‘Parfe’ owned 100% of ‘Apeks’ Bank. This financial institution was created in the same year, 2009.

According to information from the register of legal entities, among the shareholders of ‘Parfe’, in particular, were people such as Oleksandr Dubykhvist and Varvara Shultz.

In 2013, Dubykhvist was the director of the department for managing foreign exchange assets at the National Bank. Varvara Shultz was a member of the audit commission at ‘Apeks’ Bank until April 2013.

But something else is important. As ‘Svidomo’ wrote at the time, a woman with the same name had a common company with the Minister of Finance of the Azarov Cabinet, Yurii Kolobov, a member of the group known as the ‘Yanukovych Family’.

Moreover, according to journalists, they were even registered in the same apartment in the official’s small homeland – in Pavlograd, Dnipropetrovskyi region. The information that Kolobov, to put it mildly, is not alien to the happy system of electronic money was confirmed to journalists by two informed representatives of financial circles. However, they wished to remain anonymous.

Yurii Kolobov

‘Varvara Shultz is Yurii Kolobov’s mother. And Oleksandr Dubykhvist is his godfather. They are behind the ‘globals’, one of the sources said, adding that many former employees of ‘Terra-Bank’ work in the structure of this system. It is worth noting that the owner of this financial institution, before its sale in the spring of 2010, was said to be the then Minister of Finance.

As of July 2022, according to the Opendatabot service, the owners of Globalmoney LLC are citizens Volodymyr Mykolaiovych Karpov and Kostiantyn Yuriievych Tveritin.

That is, if earlier the ‘Alliance’ bank and the ‘Globalmoney’ payment system were directly or indirectly linked by the figure of Yura Yenakiyevskyi, now it is a very fruitful partnership. Especially in the gambling market. A fairly large share of payments from players of multi-user paid and conditionally free computer games, online casinos and bookmakers (both legal and not quite) goes through ‘Globalmoney’, and a considerable part of these payments are processed in ‘Alliance’. We are talking about many millions of hryvnias, from which the payment system and the bank receive their percentage.

And no matter how large the cash flow coming from gamblers is, the dealers who have latched onto it will still be cramped. That is, a war is inevitable – an episode of which is obviously the latest (and far from the first) ‘attack’ on the ‘Alliance’ Bank and ‘GlobalMoney’.

Who is this fierce enemy, furiously attacking the heroes of our story in the information space?

Fierce competitor

A hint of it can be found in an interesting article from September 8, 2020 on the delo.ua portal (by the way, recently featured in one of our funny stories), dedicated to the ‘underside of Ukrainian information wars’. To be more precise, the material debunks absolutely false (according to the anonymous author of the publication) accusations of money laundering and other bad deeds against the founder of the financial company ‘Leogaming Pay’ and the international payment system ‘LEO’, Alyona Shevtsova (née Dehrik), as well as her dear husband Yevhenii, a former high-ranking police chief. In it, the reader is pushed to the idea that competitors in the form of the ‘Globalmoney ‘payment system are behind the spread of alleged nonsense about Shevtsova-Dehrik and her business.

The funniest thing is that this conclusion is also based on the analysis of the article by the author of these lines, ‘Dangerous Connections of ‘Zbroyar’: Who Sells Weapons to the Ukrainian Military’, written for the online publication ‘ORD’. An anonymous colleague emphasizes that in that text by your humble servant, Alyona Dehrik-Shevtsova, Yevhenii Shevtsov and their business are mentioned, but there is not a word about ‘Globalmoney’. And he strongly hints that it was ‘Globalmoney’ that ordered this ‘slander’ from the author.

In my defense before Alyona Shevtsova, I have to say that despite all my efforts to find a connection between ‘Globalmoney’ and the arms company mentioned in the article, I was unable to do so. But the connection between its beneficiaries and the Shevtsovs was obvious.

Naturally, this episode points to the Shevtsovs’ participation in the information war against ‘Globalmoney’ and the ‘Alliance’ bank only indirectly. However, there is also direct evidence, documented. But before we get to that, let’s refresh the reader’s memory about the, so to speak, opposing team.

Yevhenii Shevtsov and Alyona Dehrik-Shevtsova

Alyona Dehrik-Shevtsova founded the financial company ‘LeoGameig Pay’ back in 2013. Initially, Alyona Volodymyrivna’s business was not a full-fledged payment system. It was more of a gateway between players and gaming platforms. But the enterprise grew at a rapid pace, and already in 2017, Shevtsova registered the domestic payment system ‘Leo’ with the National Bank, which a couple of years later became international.

Unfortunately, during her rise, Dehrik-Shevtsova not only acquired assets, but also criminal cases. The online publication MIND.UA, citing data from the Ministry of Justice, wrote that from 2016 to 2020, Alyona Shevtsova and her husband Yevhenii Shevtsov, as well as their business partners Viktor Kapustin and Vadym Hordiievskyi, ‘in total managed at least ten companies, many of which became defendants in criminal proceedings under the articles ‘Fraud’, ‘Laundering of proceeds from crime’, and ‘Fictitious entrepreneurship’’.

Criminal cases involving the companies of Yevhenii Shevtsov, Alyona Dehrik-Shevtsova, Viktor Kapustin, Vadym Hordiievskyi and their companies

*according to data from law enforcement agencies and extracts from the Unified State Register of Court Cases.

Shevtsova’s ‘Leo’ did not seem to be at war with the ‘Alliance’ bank, and in some places even made friends. In 2019, when this payment system, with the blessing of the NBU, entered the international arena, ‘Alliance’ became its additional settlement bank. But ‘Alliance’ had an extremely unpleasant property for Shevtsova-Dehrik – it is the issuer and settlement bank of ‘Leo’s sworn competitor - the above-mentioned ‘Globalmoney’. In addition, Alyona Volodymyrivna soon had her own ‘pocket’ bank – ‘iBox Bank’.

According to the National Bank, ‘iBox Bank’ appeared 29 years ago – in 1993. At that time, it had a somewhat ominous name ‘Authority’ (in the 1990s, this word was more often associated with the word ‘criminal’ than, for example, ‘moral’). Only in 2002 did the owners rename it ‘Ahrokombank". It became ‘iBox Bank’ 14 years later, in 2016, after a financier with a ‘murky’ reputation, Yevhenii Berezovskyi, joined the shareholders. He ‘brought’ with him the ‘iBox’ network of payment terminals, which gave the ‘office’ a new name.

However, having changed its name and acquired payment terminals, the bank was unable to improve its affairs and was rapidly moving towards bankruptcy and liquidation. But at the end of 2019, Alyona Shevtsova appeared on the horizon. Alyona Volodymyrivn needed a bank under her control to service her financial flows, and the main owners of the bank needed access to these very flows. And already in 2020, she became a shareholder of ‘Ibox Bank’ (at the moment, Alyona Shevtsova has concentrated slightly less than 25% of its shares; from the very beginning of the Russian invasion of Ukraine also became the head of its supervisory board), and key positions in it were occupied by people from ‘Leo’, which she controlled.

Since then, if we are to believe the image publications, ‘iBox’s business has been on the rise. At the same time, the regulator began to accumulate questions about the bank regarding its participation in money laundering. Last fall, for violating financial monitoring and the law on combating the legalization of proceeds from crime (the financial institution allegedly did not carry out proper verification of new and existing clients), the NBU slapped ‘iBox Bank’ with a fine of 10 million UAH. It should be noted that this is the largest fine provided for such a violation. Already in June of this year, the National Bank had similar claims against ‘iBox’ again. But that is not the point.

In 2020, another important event occurred: the Law of Ukraine ‘On state regulation of activities related to the organization and conduct of gambling’ appeared. That is, the financial flows of the gambling business that has emerged from the shadows are becoming legal with the prospect of increasing them. Which means that the fight for access to them is getting tougher.

The stakes are rising

And it began. The online publication Mind.ua published a meticulous investigation into the financial flows of online casinos and the connections of players in this market with Russia. This investigation looks extremely high-quality, if you don’t take into account one ‘but’: it practically doesn’t mention ‘Globalmoney’ and the ‘Alliance’ bank, but shakes up all the skeletons in the closet of Dehrik-Shevtsova’s ‘Ibox Bank’ and ‘Leo’. However, this ‘gap’ was immediately filled by publications in other publications, which, for example, accused ‘Alliance’ and ‘Globalmoney’ of involvement in financing pro-Russian terrorists. At the same time, the russian business press later claimed that money from Ukrainian players to Russian illegal online casinos was consistently going through Shevtsova’s ‘Ibox Bank’.

The confrontation gained momentum in the following year, 2021, with ‘Alliance’ and ‘Globalmoney’ finding themselves in the role of defenders. Activists and even former subordinates of Alyona Shevtsova’s husband (at that time, Yevhenii Shevtsov worked as deputy head of the Main Investigation Department of the National Police) were brought in to put pressure on them. At the same time, the Ukrainian Association of Payment Systems (UAPS) shamefully expelled ‘Globalmoney’ from its ranks, allegedly because of the latter’s negative reputation.

Of course, it is difficult to call ‘Globalmoney’s reputation impeccable. But the obstruction on the part of UAPS looks comical, since, according to registration data, the founder of the Association, together with the financial company ‘Business Orbita Group’, is Dehrik-Shevtsova’s LLC ‘Leogaming Pay’. And Halyna Kheilo, who has headed UAPS since its foundation, recently worked as the head of the board of ‘Ibox Bank’, which is now part of Alyona Shevtsova’s orbit.

But perhaps the most ‘shameful’ episode in this ‘war’ was when the clerks of ‘iBox Bank’ sent official letters to institutions accusing ‘GlobalMoney’ of money laundering, collaborating with the enemy and other mortal sins. The Antimonopoly Committee considered such ‘manses’ to be a manifestation of unfair competition and fined Shevtsova’s bank 68 thousand UAH. However, as far as is known, ‘GlobalMoney’ was thirsty for a more severe punishment for ‘iBox’ and even tried to achieve it through the courts.

It is important to note that since 2021, structures associated with Shevtsova have begun to officially declare their participation in the gambling business. In particular, in May last year, ‘LeoGaming’ bought a license to set up a casino and/or a bookmaker’s office in the ‘Alice Place’ hotel in Odesa. A few months later, ‘Ibox Bank’ received a license from the Ukrainian Commission for Regulation of Gambling and Lotteries (CRGL) to accept payments in favor of online casinos. This year, ‘Ibox’ received a license to ‘carry out activities in the gambling business’.

That is, now a bank from Shevtsova’s orbit can launch its own casinos and set up bookmakers. Considering that this market is already so crowded that its ‘old’ participants tirelessly pour slop on each other, with the appearance of such a temperamental player as Alyona Shevtsova, it becomes not just languid, but stuffy.

  Ольга Балакина