The fintech company is facing allegations of money laundering for the gambling mafia.
Tech-Soft Atlas LLC (TM “bill_line”) and its actual CEO Artem Lyashanov (pictured above) are trying, with the help of Themis, to force a number of online publications to remove several compromising publications in which the company and its founder are accused of financial fraud.
As Yaroslav Garmash writes in an article for the CRiME and [high-profile cases] projects , this is evidenced by court documents posted on the DataUA portal.
Artem Lyashanov and false accusations
Tech-Soft Atlas and Artem Lyashanov are suing the offending publications in parallel. The limited liability company appealed to the Economic Court of Kyiv, and its actual founder appealed to the Shevchenkovsky District Court of the capital. Consideration of the company's claim on the merits, according to the court ruling, should begin on January 20 of this year. The trial on Lyashanov's claim starts on February 20.
It is noteworthy that Artem Lyashanov and Tech-Soft Atlas do not make any financial claims against the media. The only requirement is to remove two articles that four online publications published on their pages. The first is called “The criminal case against the bill_line payment system and its head, Belarusian Artem Lyashanov, for money laundering has not yet been closed,” it appeared in July 2024. The second, entitled “Artem Lyashanov and the bill_line payment system serve the Russian gambling mafia,” was published in September 2024.
The absence of financial claims against the media indicates that the purpose of the lawsuits is not to punish “slanderers,” but to whiten reputations. If they win at least one of these two lawsuits, Artem Lyashanov and his brainchild will be able to seek, if not blocking addresses of links to pages with compromising information, then removing them from Internet search results. And not only those that became the subject of the lawsuit, but any other “negative”.
The plaintiffs’ intentions are confirmed by the absence of critical publications about them on the Internet, except for the two mentioned articles. Moreover, there is reason to believe that Artem Lyashanov and Tech-Soft Atlas have been actively whitening reputations on Google using SERM (search engine reputation management) tools since at least 2023.
Note that the fintech company and its CEO have a significant chance of winning their claims. Since the publications specified in the claims contain a number of inaccuracies, as well as statements, the veracity of which the defendants are unlikely to be able to prove in court.
In particular, both publications claim that Artem Lyashanov and his company are defendants in criminal proceedings No. 42021100000000283 dated April 23, 2021 for tax evasion on an especially large scale and forgery of documents. However, in court documents related to that case, Artem Olegovich Lyashanov is not mentioned at all. And Bill Line LLC (as Tech-Soft Atlas was then called) faced the seizure of its bank accounts and property during the investigation. The company's lawyers successfully appealed these arrests in September and October 2021, since the investigation did not have any claims against Lyashanov's brainchild. For now.
Vicious relationship: Artem Lyashanov and Alena Shevtsova
Artem Lyashanov and his fintech company are not in vain spending a lot of money on maintaining a white and fluffy reputation. They have good reasons for this.
Now it is almost impossible to find information on all the fintech projects that Artem Lyashanov worked on. His authorized biography, published as part of an effort to clean up his reputation on search engines, makes no specific mention of them.
However, having compared information from public registers with individual advertising publications, we can confidently say that from approximately 2016 to 2019, Artem Lyashanov worked as the technical director of the Leogaming company - Leogaming Pay LLC, which is now called the LEO Financial Company.
The founder and main beneficiary of the Leo Financial Company is the notorious Alena Shevtsova (before Degrik’s marriage), the owner of a controlling stake in Ibox Bank JSC, through which grandiose financial frauds were allegedly carried out. In particular, according to investigators and prosecutors, money was laundered from the illegal gambling business, in which Alena Degrik-Shevtsova took a significant part.
Fleeing from criminal prosecution, Alena Vladimirovna Shevtsova lay low in the UAE. With the help of lawyers, she never gives up trying to get the criminal cases filed against her closed.
Let me remind you: Elena Degrik-Shevtsova founded the financial company Leogameg Pay back in 2013. Initially, Alena Vladimirovna’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 an accelerated pace, and already in 2017, soon after Artem Lyashanov joined Leo, Alena Shevtsova registered the domestic payment system Leo with the National Bank, which a few years later became international.
During her rise, Degrik-Shevtsova acquired not only assets, but also criminal cases. The online publication MIND.UA, citing data from the Ministry of Justice, wrote that from 2016 to 2020, Elena Shevtsova and her husband Evgeniy Shevtsov, as well as their business partners Viktor Kapustin and Vadim Gordievsky “totally managed at least ten companies, many of which became defendants in criminal cases.” proceedings under the articles “Fraud”, “Laundering of income received criminally” and “Fictitious entrepreneurship”.
Around the same period, Artem Lyashanov was mentioned during public events and in image articles as Chief technology officer (CTO) or technical director of Legaming by Degrik-Shevtsova.
His job responsibilities, as the title of the position suggests, included technological support for processes in Shevtsova’s company, which, according to investigators, was involved in money laundering on a grand scale.
In particular, Artem Lyashanov is behind the creation of a product called LeoBot. As Lyashanova’s boss Alena Shevtsova once explained, LeoBot is a chat bot on Facebook Messenger that carries out p2p transfers - instant money transfers from card to card.
As is known, p2p transfers are the basis of money laundering using drops.
Having founded Bill Line LLC in March 2019, Artem Lyashanov allegedly severed ties with Shevtsova, going on an independent voyage. But in fact, certain connections remain.
In particular, a certain Yulia Anatolyevna Kulchitskaya is currently listed as the accountant of Lyashanov’s company.
According to information from public registries, this lady once worked at Leo Partners LLC, a company that was part of Alena Shevtsova’s business empire.
However, something else is more important in this story.
Artem Lyashanov and the “laundry” of the Gorban brothers
Despite the fact that, as mentioned above, as part of the investigation in criminal proceedings No. 42021100000000283 there were allegedly no claims against Lyashanov and Bill Line LLC, already in October 2021, a few months after the opening of the criminal case, the company changed its name to "Tech-Soft Atlas". The following year, in July 2022, Artem Lyashanov de jure resigned from the management and founders of the company.
Obviously, the last move was made so that the business would not fall under sanctions due to Lyashanov’s Belarusian citizenship.
However, in 2022, 2023, and 2024, in image articles Artem Lyashanov (in this spelling) appears as “CEO of the fintech company bill_line”
But no bill_line company de jure exists. There is a payment system with the same name, to which all rights (including trademarks) belong to Tech-Soft Atlas LLC, a legal entity whose founders Artem Lyashanov left in 2022. According to the registers, he has nothing to do with him. But according to his public statements, which no one denies, he is in charge.
Even when Artem Lyashanov headed Tech-Soft Atlas not only de facto, but also de jure, on June 10, 2021, the National Bank of Ukraine included his company in the Register of Payment Infrastructure as a technological operator of payment services. This information is contained on the laconic official website of the LLC. It also specifically states which legal entities Tech-Soft Atlas provides services as a technological operator of payment services.
These are LLC “Financial Company “Phoenix” and LLC “Swift Garant”. Both of these companies surfaced in our investigation entitled “Dangerous Liaisons of Zbroyar.”
FC Phoenix and Swift Garant LLC are controlled by Valery and Sergey Gorban - millionaires with extensive business interests - from finance to weapons production.
Both Gorban companies, which are now served by Lyashanov’s Tech-Soft Atlas, are periodically mentioned in criminal proceedings on financial fraud in general, and servicing the flow of illegal online casinos in particular. Sometimes together with companies from Alena Shevtsova’s orbit.
In particular, in proceedings No. 42017000000002925, registered on September 14, 2017, in which an episode of fictitious entrepreneurship and money laundering was investigated.
As the online publication “Nashi Groshi” wrote with reference to the investigation materials, the mechanism for laundering and withdrawing funds abroad was created by Elena Shevtsova (Degrik) in conspiracy with her husband - at that time the head of one of the departments of the National Police, Evgeny Shevtsov, and also together with the ultimate beneficiary of Pari-Match LLC, Eduard Shvindlerman and other persons. Through fictitious companies controlled by Shevtsova, according to investigators, funds received from organizing gambling in an electronic (virtual) casino under the Pari-Match brand were cashed in and withdrawn.
The scale of earnings of “combinators” from Ukrainian gambling addicts and further “laundering” was colossal: the turnover of the scheme reached 20 million UAH per day, the total volume of legalized illegal income per year was about $350 million.
It is interesting that in proceedings No. 42021100000000283, in which the accounts of Tech-Soft Atlas (which at that time was called Bill Line) were seized, one of the episodes is also related to the illegal activities of Pari-Match. At least this is what one of the court decisions indicates.
One more important detail.
When Shevtsova’s business empire, built on laundering money from the illegal gambling business, collapsed in March 2023, a huge network of iBox self-service terminals, through which gamblers transferred money to underground casinos, was “orphaned.” It turned out that nine thousand terminals scattered throughout the country do not belong to Shevtsova’s Ibox Bank, but to Metapay LLC, founded in June 2022, the founder of which was the “nominee” Tatyana Zhigurskaya.
Already on March 13, 2023, Swift Garant LLC Gorbanov, whose Tech-Soft Atlas Lyashanova acts as a technological operator of payment services, reports the actual takeover of the iBox terminal network. As Liga.net wrote, this was done under the guise of a long-term lease.
As the history of changes in the company shows, in June last year Evgeniy Rastovsky was appointed general director of Metapay. Evgeniy Vladimirovich Rastovsky, according to the Clarity Project database, is listed as a signatory (head) of 218 organizations, in 318 he is the founder and in 287 he is the final beneficiary.
A number of legal entities in which Evgeniy Rastovsky appears have a criminal trail. In particular, in February 2024, he became a signatory and beneficiary of Renitorg LLC (before that it was called the Well-Known Company) instead of a certain Igor Vasilievich Zotko. Igor Zotko is the nominal owner of the sanctioned online casino PIN-UP Ukraine. He was recently detained on charges of financing armed aggression against Ukraine.
When Evgeniy Rastovsky headed Metapay, the founder of the LLC also changed. It became the company 5CORP LTD, registered in London on September 18, 2023 to a resident of French Polynesia named Yeuby Sohanna Aquilar Cuevas. As of the beginning of this year, 5CORP LTD is in the process of liquidation.
