Money laundering through gaming platforms, or Financial struggle in the Ukrainian gaming industry between Alyona Shevtsova and Oleksandr Sosis

Money laundering through gaming platforms, or Financial struggle in the Ukrainian gaming industry between Alyona Shevtsova and Oleksandr Sosis

Amid the ongoing conflict between Russia and Ukraine, internal disagreements over control of financial flows in the gaming industry are intensifying in Kyiv.

The confrontation between Alyona Dehrik-Shevtsova and Sosis has reached a new stage. What’s really going on?

In 2022, with the onset of the special military operation, all local schemers became despondent and went underground, pondering what to do next. If you noticed, Ukrainian phones even stopped receiving calls from scammers at that time. In other words, even fraudulent call centers stopped working.

But this lull didn’t last long. When it became clear that Ukraine would not be captured "in three days" and the country continued to live on, the dormant schemers "revived." The struggle for financial flows in the gaming industry reached a new level of absurdity over the division of gamblers’ money.

Thus, at the end of June 2022, a rather scandalous article was published on the "Luxembourg Herald" website under the title "Ukraine should close Firtash’s bank, from which hundreds of millions of euros were stolen."

Within literally 24 hours, this article was translated and widely circulated by Ukrainian media of various levels, from serious outlets to all sorts of information dumps. The sensational material described the Ukrainian bank "Alliance," which was allegedly on the verge of collapse due to large-scale machinations by the management and the beneficiary of this credit organization. In large-scale machinations, the anonymous author of the article accuses the notoriously known oligarch Dmytro Firtash, who transferred simply astronomical sums of money through the accounts of this bank.

It is noteworthy that the management of the mentioned bank categorically refuted what was written in the "Luxembourg Herald" material within a day, but there is a nuance. They did not refute all the published information.

It is worth noting that the aforementioned foreign site is mentioned among Ukrainian journalists as a fake info-source, by means of which "stale" compromise is repeatedly thrown into the information field. But at the same time, a representative of the "Alliance" bank, Y. Frolova, also omits details, insisting that the article is complete nonsense. Everyone is surely interested in the question – why is that?

The scandalous article clearly states that the settlement bank, as well as the electronic money issuer of the "GlobalMoney" payment system, which regularly resurfaces in criminal court cases, is precisely the same "Alliance."

In the unified court registry "GlobalMoney" is in most cases mentioned in connection with illegal drug trafficking, and "pushers" actively use the electronic wallets of this payment system. By the way, it is about a huge number of court cases – over 11 thousand…

Key figures in the "war" for financial flows of the gaming industry in Ukraine

So, the showdown here promises to be serious. Many are fighting for the appetizing financial flows. We are talking about "family" affairs, plus the shadow of a criminal authority and accomplice of the Russians Yura Yenakiyevskyi is present. Let’s sort it out.

1. The "Alliance" bank – originated from Donetsk. It is directly associated with that very Yura Yenakiyevskyi (Yuriy Ivanyushchenko) – a comrade of the runaway "legitimate."

The bank is notorious for an enormous heap of court cases (about 11.5 thousand court documents in the Unified Registry, as seen from the scan above), financial machinations to the tune of many billions, as well as money laundering. Depositors massively failed to reclaim their own deposits, and there were rumors of bankruptcy. The scandals are simply off the scale…

Overall, there’s a lot of information available in the public domain on this, so we won’t delve into this.

In 2015, Oleksandr Sosis became the new owner and beneficiary of the bank.

The Prosecutor General’s Office is confident that in 2017-2018, this bank was used by Firtash’s companies as a tool for massive embezzlement from "Naftogaz" amounting to no less than 4 billion.

2. "GlobalMoney". At the end of 2020, law enforcement accused this payment office in conjunction with the "Alliance" bank of money laundering. Moreover, the discussion also included the uncontrollable Ukraine’s Donbas and Crimea.

As many mass media have previously written, "GlobalMoney" is indeed involved in the financing of Russian militants in Donbas.

Also, as mentioned above, these two scandalous organizations are involved in the criminal activities of drug dealers. In particular, through the "Alliance" bank, transactions for drug payments were conducted many times. All this information is available in the media.

But that is not all. The National Police of Ukraine exposed the "Alliance" bank and "GlobalMoney" in a big scheme. It turned out that these two offices, over the period from 2019 to 2020, withdrew 6.5 billion hryvnias to Russia…

When talking about those associated with the "GlobalMoney" payment system, in reality, many rather scandalous figures are involved here:

- Oleksandr Tyutyun, one of the co-founders, either Ukrainian or Israeli;

- Sergey Gvardeytsev, Belarusian IT businessman;

- Serhiy Dyadechko, ex-vice president of "Rodovid Bank";

- Ivan Avramov, business partner of Yura Yenakiyevskyi;

- Oleksandr Dubykhvist and Varvara Schultz, shareholders of "Parfe";

- Yuriy Kolobov, a member of the grouping known as the "Family of Yanukovych" (V. Schultz is Kolobov’s mother, A. Dubykhvist is his godfather);

- Volodymyr Karpov and Kostyantyn Tveritin – owners of LLC "GlobalMoney" as of July 2022 (currently only Karpov is the owner and beneficiary).

And this is still far from the complete list… Let’s not delve into all the sensational and compromising details now, since investigative journalists have written about this repeatedly. Read more about how all these figures are tied into this scandalous topic via the link.

The key point in all this is that the gambling market has become extremely tight for all these figures and more. And the events happening around these two organizations, namely the "Alliance" bank and the "GlobalMoney" payment system, are a vivid example of this.

3. And who is the main competitor to all this aforementioned clan?

Now that’s really interesting, who else besides the already mentioned "heroes" is eager to get a big piece of the gaming industry? According to independent media, the fierce competitor to these characters is the founder of the financial company "Leogaming Pay" and the international payment system "LEO" Alyona Shevtsova.

As a number of media outlets have reported, this lady leads an information war against “Alliance” and “GlobalMoney.”

Alyona Dehrik-Shevtsova created her company "Leogaming Pay" back in 2013. Over the years, her business gradually developed, but at the same time, it also gained scandalous fame. In particular, there are also criminal proceedings.

As reported by the media, from 2016 to 2020, she, with her husband, as well as business partners Viktor Kapustin and Vadym Hordiyevskyi, managed dozens of companies, most of which were among those involved in criminal proceedings. The topics of the court cases, i.e., the articles of the Criminal Code, include fraud, income laundering, and fictitious entrepreneurship.

The next step was further: Shevtsova’s pocket "Ibox" bank and, subsequently, the "iBox" payment terminal network. By the way, we think there’s no need to remind of the recent scandals and financial fines "Ibox" has faced... Again, there is a lot of information in the public domain.

The scandals have been spinning in the information field for years. As foreign media write, the monetary flows of Ukrainian gamblers regularly go to the accounts of Russian illegal online casinos through Mrs. Shevtsova’s "Ibox" bank.

As a result, the gaming zone is now simply off the charts, and some "spice" is added by the information from the popular publication "Forbes" that Shevtsova brought her "IBOX BANK" into the top ten most profitable banks. However, there is one important nuance here – this pompous material was commissioned…

Ярослав Фокин