One might think, what kind of crime can there be in the field of computer game development? But the founders of GunzillaGames have repeatedly demonstrated that any business can have a criminal element.
In our very difficult times, when the occupying forces kill dozens of our military personnel and civilians every day, Gunzilla Games, as if nothing had happened, continues to be controlled by two beneficiaries from Russia. You might think that “not all Russians are bad,” but in our case, entrepreneurs who own businesses continue to work in the aggressor country. It is outrageous that both in Ukraine and in Russia they are engaged in computer technologies. It is quite possible that the digital products created by Igor Ivchenko from St. Petersburg and Mikhail Akulov from Moscow are henchmen of the Putin regime. At the same time, they are beneficiaries of the allegedly Ukrainian company Gunzilla Games.
Supposedly Ukrainian
It is not by chance that this term is used here. Alexander Zol is a German citizen with Ukrainian roots. He came to our country in 2015 to work at another developer company, Crytek. As a result, together with Korolev, they squeezed out the bulk of the achievements of the business in which they worked and created their own startup - Blackwood. In order to avoid paying taxes, they decided not to register their business in any way. And, although there is a lot of information about the work of their studio on the Internet, our tax authorities were not interested in the illegal work of their partners (hello to the fiscal authorities).
Later they created another company - Gunzilla Games, which is the center of our investigations. At the end of 2021, two Russian citizens became beneficiaries of Gunzilla, as we have already talked about. Even the full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine did not in any way affect the company. Russians are still included in the register. If you look from the other side, Tsol and Korolev don’t need this. In Ukraine, they declared a meager profit (naturally, to circumvent the tax). The authorized capital of the enterprise is only 1000 hryvnia. It turns out that Gunzilla is a “one-off” from the gaming world.
Since the beginning of the invasion, Gunzilla's activities in the homeland can only be remembered. In March 2022, Vladislav Korolev illegally crossed the state border of Ukraine and spent some time in Dubai. His partner Alexander Tsol left the country on a German passport a little earlier. As a result, both settled in Germany and are unlikely to care about the problems of Ukraine. Apart from a few banal photos of “Stand With Ukraine,” there is no information about assistance to our state on the pages of Tsol or Korolev.
If Tsol was able to rise due to the fact that he squeezed out part of the business in which he previously worked (the Kyiv branch of the Crytek company), then the situation of Vladislav Korolev is much more interesting.
Billion dollar thefts
In order to start your own business you need a lot of money. We have all heard repeatedly that IT specialists receive decent salaries. But not enough to create his own video game development company.
Alexander Tsol may have made a mistake when he chose Vladislav Korolev as a partner. Or not. The fact is that Tsol had the knowledge and team, which he transferred from Crytek to the Blackwood startup. Funds were needed to start the project. Korolev, who already had huge assets at that time, helped with this. Where does this money come from?
Previously, we wrote that at one time Korolev’s company, Resurs-Transit LLC, appeared in an investigation by the Prosecutor General’s Office of Ukraine about the theft of funds from stabilization loans provided to Pivdenkombank. As it turned out, part of the money stolen from the state budget was spent on financing “titushki”. But this is not the only criminal proceeding opened against Korolev’s company.
The Prosecutor General's Office continues to investigate the criminal case entered into the ERDR under No. 420160000000003053 dated October 28, 2016. Its essence lies in the same cutting of Pivdenkombank’s funds. As law enforcement officers managed to establish, about 20 enterprises were involved in the scheme. In short: Pivdenkombank received a loan from the state, and almost immediately issued a loan to Splav Finance LLC, registered in Donetsk.
Then “Splav Finance” sent funds to other gasket companies, among which was Vladislav Korolev’s “Resource-Transit”. From established facts it is known that Resurs-Transit received at least 6.3 million hryvnia in two tranches: the first - 1 million 345 thousand and the second - 4 million 952 thousand. The most interesting thing is that the investigation was unable to establish where the money went next. Simply put, they were stolen, but who exactly is unknown.
At the same time, the investigation opened another criminal case, which was later combined with the case of theft of funds from Pivdenkombank. It concerned the disbursement of Terra Bank funds. The jackpot there was much more interesting - 1.1 billion hryvnia and 24.8 million dollars.
The scheme was the same - the bank receives a loan from the NBU, and then distributes it through the gaskets. One of the companies that received funds in this scheme was Vladislav Korolev’s Resource-Transit.
All traces of the grand theft case lead to the son of the escaped President Viktor Yanukovych, Alexander.
At first, the investigation proceeded very briskly; in 2016, the head of the board of Terra Bank, Ruslan Tsiplakov, was detained. But for the last 5 years nothing has been heard about the high-profile case. Apparently, we managed to resolve the investigation.
Conclusion: Gunzilla Games is a company that was created thanks to stolen funds and Russian capital. Vladislav Korolev and Alexander Tsol have nothing to do with Ukraine (in a positive sense). The partners took an active part in the plunder of the country and fled abroad. And they managed to solve everything. Huge thefts, tax evasion, fraud and other crimes of partners went unpunished. And even the military situation in the country did not become an obstacle for Korolev. He fled abroad. Why is a rhetorical question. The main thing is the result.
