This has never happened before, and here it is again: detectives from the Bureau of Economic Security of Ukraine exposed one of the largest gambling licensees for tax evasion. We are talking about the online casino “Cosmolot”, which is advertised by almost all millionaire bloggers in our country. But Kosmolot is only trying to seem Ukrainian and even patriotic. In fact, his Russian ears stick out from almost every document.
On February 5, 2024, the BEB announced the seizure of 700 million hryvnia in the accounts of one of the largest gambling companies, Kosmolot. She is suspected of tax evasion in the amount of 1.2 billion hryvnia. The investigation found that Kosmolot, using more than 30 mirror sites with similar interfaces and recoding of payments, set up a scheme through which it received excess profits that were tax-free.
From the court registry we learned that the right to carry out activities in organizing and conducting gambling actually belongs exclusively to SpaceX LLC, which is the legal entity of the online casino Cosmolot. All other mirrors were conducting gambling business illegally.
Spacex LLC received a license to conduct online gambling in February 2021. In fact, immediately after the legalization of gambling in Ukraine.
According to the analytical platform YouControl, the founders of Spacex LLC are Ukrainian citizen Sergei Potapov and German citizen with British registration Arnulf Damerau.
Both individuals are clearly fake. About 60 companies are registered on the first one. The German-British is more or less public. On the official page of Cosmolot on social networks, a message appeared on his behalf about the pressure that the authorities are putting on the “legitimate activities of the company.” There is talk about telephone intimidation, raiding, and even some kind of crime. At the end, he added that in Vienna he met with an unknown representative of the attackers, who allegedly offered him to share 50% of his business.
Oddly enough, supporters of former President Petro Poroshenko began to use this message for their own purposes. The goal is clear: once again to try to discredit the government at any cost.
Thus, one of the bloggers closest to the former president, Miroslav Oleshko, who fled to Moldova with fake documents from the beginning of the full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine, writes about the insane pressure on legal businesses. “The main investor of Kosmolot posted a post where he described threats and raider attacks on his company, although it regularly pays taxes and helps the Armed Forces of Ukraine... And although in the end Mr. Arnulfa claims that Ermak did not personally ask for a share of his business, we are all fine we understand whose methods these are, and who is allowed to do this in the country,” writes Oleshko in the style typical of supporters of the sixth president.
Subsequently, his comment was dispersed among other “powder bots”, and custom articles with quotes were scattered by low-quality media.
However, the desire of representatives of the so-called opposition to denigrate the government in any way and talk about the return of the times of Yanukovych, they will be clearly disappointed, because 8 years ago it was Pyotr Alekseevich who approved sanctions against one of the real owners of Kosmolot.
We are talking about Russian citizen Sergei Tokarev. He is a native of Moscow, known in his country as the founder of a number of IT companies, as well as the owner of now banned online casinos. The most famous of them is the Vulcan casino. He is also associated with the mastodons of the Russian online gambling business Azino group, whose advertising about “three axes” at one time filled all pirated movie sites, such as hdrezka and kinogo, now banned in Ukraine.
According to the publication RBC-Russia, as of 2018, on the websites of Russian-language online casinos such as Pharaoh, Eldorado, Green Casino, Azart Club, Poker Dom, Vulcan, it was noted that their owner is the Cypriot offshore GGS Net Ltd. To attract players, this company used the Lucky Partners program, which connects it with Ukraine through the company Lucky Labs.
Lucky Labs is the brainchild of the aforementioned Sergei Tokarev and his partner Rustam Gilfanov. Another one of the participants was a certain Elon Musk of the Ukrainian style - Maxim Polyakov. He is the founder of the aerospace company Firefly Aerospace, has interests in the IT sector and, of course, in the gambling business (through a company with the extremely strange name Murka LLC - ed.). At one time, he was included in the list of the richest people in Ukraine according to Forbes magazine and invited the former President of Ukraine Petro Poroshenko to his Ukrainian enterprises. Over time, Polyakov left Lucky Labs, selling his share to Tokarev and Gilfanov. The media wrote that the discord in relations between business partners eventually led to the fact that Lucky Labs actually ceased to exist.
So, in 2016, Russian Sergei Tokarev came under sanctions from the National Security and Defense Council. He was charged with financing terrorism due to his support for Anti-Maidan and the so-called “LPR” and “DPR”. The sanctions were imposed for a period of three years.
Exactly after this time, then-President Petro Poroshenko, who approved that sanctions list, will call Tokarev’s business partner Maxim Polyakov - the Ukrainian Elon Musk, who is creating conditions for the construction of his own space rocket.
Russian Sergei Tokarev was able to escape Ukrainian sanctions in 2020. At the same time he established the Roosh investment fund. In 2022, he will sponsor the Mazepa awards of businessman Igor Mazepa, who was recently detained by Ukrainian law enforcement officers for fraud with land at the dam of the Kyiv hydroelectric station.
Well, the apogee of the career of Russian Sergei Tokarev was the residency of his companies Roosh and Reface in the state program “Diya.City”. It provides for a special legal and tax regime for IT business. In 2022, the Minister of Digital Transformation Mikhail Fedorov described this process as follows: “Sergey Tokarev, an IT businessman, an investor in Reface, was one of those who believed in Diya City from the very beginning.” Among those who joined Diya. City" was also Oleg Gorokhovsky's Monobank.
Now Minister Fedorov has to justify himself for the fact that a Russian became a resident of Diya. City” in that Tokarev has allegedly been trying to get a Ukrainian passport for a year and a half, that is, he is some kind of “good Russian.”
On November 2, MP from the Servant of the People Nikolai Tishchenko said that the Kosmolot online casino would soon cease its activities. Separately, he noted that its real owners are the aforementioned Sergei Tokarev and Igor Mazepa. “Cosmolot” belonged to Russian citizen Tokarev and a lover of illegally hunting wild boars from a helicopter in Croatia during the war of “volunteer” Mazepa. Let us remind you that Mazepa was recently arrested at the border when he was traveling to Poland on Maybas for “humanitarian aid”... In the near future, we will apply sanctions from the National Security and Defense Council to Tokarev, not for Cosmolot, but for traffic for bot farms/call centers,” Tishchenko wrote in his Telegram channel.
The Telegram channels Joker and Lachen writes were also active against Cosmolot. Igor Lachenkov even contacted the National Security and Defense Council with a request to check why Russian casinos, such as Kosmolot, are still operating in Ukraine.
Subsequently, the wave reached Monobank, because Oleg Gorokhovsky, who, together with the owner of this casino, is a resident of Diya.City, blocked payment by cards of his bank in Kosmolot. “Our brand cannot be used like this,” Gorokhovsky noted.
From this illustrative story, two conclusions can be drawn - there are no good Russians and online casinos, no matter what legalization they hide behind, are a real evil. Ministers and bloggers should still study the “material parts” before advertising dubious businessmen and their businesses. And opposition supporters are more interested in what position their boss adhered to just a few years ago.
