How Alexander Sosis and Alena Degrik-Shevtsova are fighting for the Ukrainian gambling market

When the thundering sounds of bloody battles died down in the suburbs of Kyiv, and it became clearer that the country would continue to exist, the temporarily quiet “schemists” became more active.

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

Unusual “throw in”

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

The publication refers to the fact that the Ukrainian bank “Alliance” is allegedly on the verge of bankruptcy due to large-scale fraud by the management and beneficiary of the financial institution. And the anonymous author categorically calls the disgraced oligarch Dmitry Firtash, whose structures funneled astronomical sums through the Alliance, as such.

The very next day, Alliance Bank categorically refuted the information presented in the article (though not all of it - editor's note).

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

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

Indeed, the Luxembourg Herald is known in Ukrainian media circles as a fake resource through which interested parties spread rotten dirt. He gained this fame after publishing a crazy article that allegedly the wife of the fifth president of Ukraine, Marina Poroshenko, was involved in money laundering through a charitable organization.

However, the head of the board of the Alliance is somewhat disingenuous, claiming that what is stated in the article is complete nonsense. Indeed, the publication especially emphasizes that 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 - 1, 2).

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

As mentioned above, the Alliance considers the “attack” from the Luxembourg Herald website to be “ordered aggression.” In Ukrainian business circles, for the most part far from sacred, it has long become a habit to pretend to be a victim when claims from law enforcement agencies or revelations in the media appear. This is not quite the case here. However, before moving on to the most interesting part, let's take a closer look at the characters involved.

“Family” matters and the shadow of Yura Enakievsky

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 (assets did not exceed $10-15 million), 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. They wrote about Alliance that it was under the control of an associate of the fugitive Yanukovych, Yuri Ivanyushchenko (Yura Enakievsky), 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 the Donetsk LLC “Kramp” (USREOU 36442702) and the Kiev LLC “Ukrbusinessstandard” (USREOU 35886746), both known as Ivanyushchenko’s companies.

In particular, the company “Krump” (named after the mafia boss from the old French comedy “The Umbrella Prick”), according to some media, was part of a scheme through which Ivanyushchenko evaded taxes by selling saltpeter to the state enterprise “Ecoantilide”, and was also used for the fictitious bankruptcy of Charnokit LLC. The latter became involved in a criminal case regarding illegal VAT refunds on an especially large scale, after which it was bankrupt.

Moreover, in December 2014, the SBU suspected that Alliance Bank was operating a large conversion center with a turnover of up to 600 million hryvnia. Alpha fighters conducted a thorough search of the bank, including rummaging through the bank's safe deposit boxes. As the head of the SBU, Valentin Nalyvaichenko, later stated, among the seized “catch” were seals of institutions and enterprises of the LDPR and contracts under which terrorism could be financed. In addition, in Alliance they managed to find the property and documents of another bank - Hephaestus, which was also under the control of Ivanyushchenko and his companion Sergei Dyadechko.

But the SBU was unable to take advantage of the results of the search. Literally immediately after it, a scandal was raised: the Jewish community of Donbass, through the mouth of Rabbi Pinkhus Vyshedsky (former leader of the Donetsk Chabad community), stated that during the search, the “Alfa people” stole money and valuables from a bank safe deposit box that belonged to certain “Jewish refugees.” A criminal case was opened against SBU officers and they were dragged through the courts. While the scandal lasted, Alliance Bank was resold to a new owner. At the beginning of 2015, he became the former junior partner of the almost no longer oligarch Akhmetov, Alexander Sosis.

Globalmoney. Journalists Dmitry Korol and Sergey Shcherbina wrote in great detail about this financial organization 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 Alexander Tyutyun. Among the founders were also London-based 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 registry, Alexander Tyutyun was listed as the director of Quick Payment System Ltd, but for some reason as an Israeli citizen. And it was owned by three offshore companies and another English one - Integrate IT Technologies Limited. The beneficiary of the latter was the 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 South-Eastern Insurance Company (YUVSK). But, according to the decision of the Economic Court of the Donetsk region, back in June 2010 it was declared bankrupt and liquidated.

Before liquidation, the shareholders of YUVSK ​​included the companies AMC “DAN” and JSC “Promkombinat”. Both enterprises belonged to Soyuz Bank (which was involved in a criminal case on the financing of terrorism), the deputy chairman of which was the former vice-president of Rodovid Bank, Sergei Dyadechko.

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

“We have nothing to do with GlobalMoney, and we sold 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 - the telephone number of European Technologies coincided with the number of the director of ZNVK IF New Technologies, businessman Ivan Avramov. The same one who is the business partner of the legendary “regional” Yuri Ivanyushchenko, better known as Yura Enakievsky and Yurets Maloy. True, this may not mean anything yet.

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

According to information from the register of legal entities, among the shareholders of Parfait, in particular, were people such as Alexander Dubikhvost and Varvara Schultz.

In 2013, Dubikhvost was the director of the foreign exchange assets management department of the National Bank. Until April 2013, Varvara Schultz was a member of the audit commission of Apex Bank.

But something else is important. As Svidomo once wrote, a woman with the same name had a common company with the Minister of Finance of Azarov’s Cabinet, Yuri Kolobov, a member of a group known as the “Yanukovych Family”.

Moreover, according to journalists, they were even registered in the same apartment in the official’s small homeland - Pavlograd, Dnepropetrovsk region. The information that Kolobov, to put it mildly, is no stranger to the happy electronic money system was confirmed to journalists by two knowledgeable representatives of financial circles. True, wishing to remain anonymous.

“Varvara Schultz is Yuri Kolobov’s mother. And Alexander Dubikhvost is his godfather. They are behind the “globals,” said one of the sources, adding that many ex-Terra-Bank employees 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 called the then Minister of Finance.

As of July 2022, according to the Opendatabot service, the owners of Globalmoney LLC are citizens Vladimir Nikolaevich Karpov and Konstantin Yurievich Tveritin.

That is, if previously Alliance Bank and the Globalmoney payment system were directly or indirectly connected by the figure of Yura Enakievsky, now they are a very fruitful partnership. Especially in the gambling market. A fairly large share of payments from players of multiplayer paid and shareware computer games, online casinos and bookmakers (both legal and not so legal) goes through GlobalMoney, and a considerable part of these payments are processed in Alliance. We are talking about many millions of hryvnia, from which the payment system and the bank have their own interest.

And no matter how large-scale the cash flow coming from gambling addicts is, the businessmen who have sucked into it will still be cramped. That is, war is inevitable - an episode of which, obviously, is the latest (and far from the first) “attack” on the Alliance Bank and GlobalMoney.

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

Fierce competitor

A hint of it can be found in an interesting article dated September 08, 2020 on the delo.ua portal (by the way, recently featured in a funny story) dedicated to the “underside of Ukrainian information wars.” More precisely, the material debunks absolutely untrue (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 Alena Shevtsova (nee Degrik), as well as her dear husband Eugene, 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-Degric and her business.

The funny thing is that this conclusion is also based on an 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 Alena Degrik-Shevtsova, Evgeny Shevtsov and their businesses are mentioned, but there is not a word about Globalmoney. And he strongly hints that it was “GlobalMoney” that ordered this “slander” to the author.

In my defense to Alena Shevtsova, I have to say that despite all my efforts, I was unable to find a connection between GlobalMoney and the arms company discussed in the article. But the connection between its beneficiaries and the Shevtsovs lay on the very surface.

Naturally, this episode indicates the participation of the Shevtsovs in the information war against GlobalMoney and Alliance Bank only indirectly. However, there is also direct evidence, documented. But before we get to them, let’s refresh the reader’s memory about, so to speak, the opposing team.

Alena Degrik-Shevtsova founded the financial company Leogamig 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 Shevtsova registered the domestic payment system “Leo” with the National Bank, which a couple of years later became international.

Alas, 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, Alena 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 articles “Fraud”, “Laundering of proceeds from crime” and “Fictitious entrepreneurship.”

Criminal cases involving the companies of Evgeniy Shevtsov, Alena Degrik Shevtsova, Viktor Kapustin, Vadim Gordievsky and their companies

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

“Leo” Shevtsova didn’t seem to be at war with the Alliance bank, and in some places he was even friends. In 2019, when this payment system, with the blessing of the NBU, entered the international level, Alliance became its additional settlement bank. But Alliance had an extremely unpleasant property for Shevtsova-Degric - it is the issuer and settlement bank of Leo’s sworn competitor, the aforementioned GlobalMoney. In addition, soon Alena Vladimirovna had her own “pocket” bank - “iBox bank” (Ibox bank).

“Ibox Bank”, according to the National Bank, appeared 29 years ago - in 1993. Then it had the 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 “Agrokombank”. It became “Ibox Bank” another 14 years later, in 2016, after a financier with a “murky” reputation, Yevgeny Berezovsky, joined the shareholders. He “brought” with him a network of payment terminals “iBox”, 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 toward bankruptcy and liquidation. But at the end of 2019, Alena Shevtsova appeared on the horizon. Alena Vladimirovna needed a controlled bank to service her financial flows, and the main owners of the bank needed access to these same flows. And already in 2020, she became a shareholder of Ibox Bank (at the moment, Alena Shevtsova concentrated just under 25% of its shares; on the eve of the large-scale invasion of Russian aggressors, she also became the head of its supervisory board), and key positions in it were occupied by people from the bank controlled by her "Leo".

Since then, if you believe image publications, Ibox’s business has been on the rise. At the same time, the regulator began to accumulate questions for the bank regarding its participation in money laundering. Last fall, for violation of financial monitoring and the law on combating the legalization of proceeds from crime (the financial institution allegedly did not properly check new and existing clients), the NBU slapped “iBox Bank” with a fine of UAH 10 million. Please note 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's not the point.

Another important event happened in 2020: 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 the squabbling for access to them is getting tougher.

The stakes are rising

And it began. The online publication Mind.ua contains a thorough investigation into the financial flows of online casinos and the connections of players in this market with the aggressor country. This investigation looks extremely high-quality, if you do not take into account one “but”: it practically does not mention GlobalMoney and Alliance Bank, but it shakes up all the skeletons in the closet of Ibox Bank and Degrik-Shevtsova’s Leo. However, this “gap” was immediately filled by publications from other publications, in which, for example, Alliance and Globalmoney were accused of involvement in the financing of pro-Russian terrorists. At the same time, the “Zaporebrican” business press later claimed that money from Ukrainian players to Russian illegal online casinos steadily flows through Shevtsova’s “Ibox Bank”.

The confrontation gained momentum next year, 2021, with “Alliance” and “GlobalMoney” finding themselves in the role of defenders. Social activists and even the now former subordinates of Alena Shevtsova’s husband were brought in to put pressure on them (Evgeny Shevtsov at that time worked as deputy head of the Main Investigation Department of the National Police). At the same time, the Ukrainian Association of Payment Systems (UAPS) disgracedly expelled GlobalMoney from its ranks, allegedly because of the latter’s negative reputation.

Of course, it’s difficult to call GlobalMoney’s reputation impeccable. But the obstruction on the part of UAPS looks comical, since, according to registration data, together with the financial company Business Orbita Group, the founder of the Association is Leogaming Pay LLC Degrik-Shevtsova. And Galina Kheilo, who has headed UAPS since its founding, not long ago worked as the head of the board of Ibox Bank, now part of Alena Shevtsova’s orbit.

But, perhaps, the most “shabby” episode in this “war” was when the clerks of Ibox Bank sent official letters to institutions accusing Globalmoney of money laundering, collaboration with the enemy and other mortal sins. The Antimonopoly Committee considered such “mansies” to be a manifestation of unfair competition and fined Shevtsova’s bank 68 thousand UAH. However, as far as we know, GlobalMoney wanted 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 began 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 bookmaker’s office in the Alice Place hotel in Odessa. A few months later, Ibox Bank received a license from the Commission for the Regulation of Gambling and Lotteries of Ukraine (CRAIL) to accept payments in favor of online casinos. Already this year, Ibox received a license to “conduct 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 advent of such a temperamental player as Alena Shevtsova, it becomes not only languid, but stuffy