Can Russian businesses operate and, most importantly, make money in Ukraine during a time of war? It seems that there can be no two answers to this question, nor even a reason for discussion. Russia is the enemy, and Russian companies and their businessmen have no place in Ukraine.
That is why Ukrainian society, through its public pressure, and the Ukrainian government, through its decisions, are doing everything possible to clear our economic space of Russian influence and presence.
The National Security and Defense Council imposes sanctions on Russian companies and individuals, the National Bank nationalizes banks owned by Russian oligarchs, and Russian control over Ukrainian enterprises is detected and stopped by confiscating them in favor of the state.
This was the case with Zaporizhstal, Morshynska, Kyivstar and dozens of other companies, whose Russian stakes were transferred to state ownership.
As the President said in one of his posts.
«When someone in the world still tries to deal with something Russian, it means turning a blind eye to reality. The impudence of evil. The audacity of meanness. Full-blown inhumanity.»
But it would be all too well if there were no strange exceptions to the fight against the Russian presence in Ukrainian business.
The story in question is a real detective story unfolding in the gambling market.
Back in the spring of this year, the National Security and Defense Council imposed sanctions against gambling operators associated with Russia. Dozens of companies. Hundreds of individuals, and loud statements about the inadmissibility of this phenomenon.
But immediately after this decision, public questions began.
The head of the Finance Committee, Mr. Hetmantsev, pointed out the selectivity of the sanctions:
«We certainly welcome the imposition of sanctions against gambling operators, financial companies and individuals who cooperated with the Russians while organizing a large-scale tax evasion scheme in Ukraine.
At the same time, there is one question to those who prepared the list: why did not everyone get on the list?
What are the origins of selectivity?
Yaroslav Zheleznyak, MP from the Voice party, also supported this idea
«It is not very clear yet, where are all the other financial companies that are directly involved in the abuses? Their names are known to everyone, and after the bank audits, this is a legally proven fact. At least, we have a dozen of them in the TSC investigation.
I don’t know about a dozen companies, but today we will analyze one.
This mysterious story concerns one of the leaders of the Ukrainian gambling business, Pin-UP online casino, which was created and controlled by Russians, and the formal owner of this casino in Ukraine is also the owner of a financial company that monopolistically controls the movement of all the money of the legendary Diya app.
Isn’t it interesting already?
But the main mystery of the story is that the gambling regulator CRAIL, having indisputable facts of Pin-UP’s control by Russians, refused to revoke their license at the last minute and has been hiding from public comment for two months.
Who really controls Pin-UP and your money in the Diia app
Perhaps we would never have started our investigation if not for this message in the telegram channel of the Gambling Regulatory Commission on August 1.
«Taking into account the information received about the existence of indirect control relations by residents of the Russian Federation over the activities of certain licensees, the CRBGC will consider revoking licenses in the field of organizing and conducting gambling: LLC «UKR GAME TECHNOLOGIES» and LLC «VICTORIA-SOFT»
This announcement literally became an information bomb, as both legal entities are directly related to the Pin-UP online casino.
UKR GAME TECHNOLOGIES LLC holds the gambling license for the online casino.
And VICTORIA-SOFT is a structural part of Pin-UP, engaged in software development and technical support of both the gambling website and other needs of UKR GAME TECHNOLOGIES LLC.
The announcement of CRAIL was loud, and everyone was waiting for the issue to be considered…. But nothing happened. The meeting was disrupted because the newly appointed member of the CRAIL, Yevhen Yakhnii, suddenly felt sick, an ambulance was called and the meeting was postponed for a week.
It looked as if Yakhniy, who had been appointed to the commission by Prime Minister Shmyhal only a few weeks earlier, had deliberately disrupted the crucial meeting.
Interestingly, before joining KRAIL, Yakhniy was the founder and director of the payment operator X Pay, and market participants associate his appearance in the commission with shadow groups of influence of law enforcement agencies on the gambling market.
Even Danylo Hetmantsev, the head of the parliamentary financial committee, drew attention to Yakhniy’s strange behavior the day before the next meeting of the CRAIL, hinting at the need to consider the announced issues.
«I would like to congratulate one of the most ill members of the CRAIL on his recovery.
Thank God, it is over, and the quorum has been restored. Nothing prevents us from making important state decisions.»
And the next meeting of the CRAIL took place on August 8.
It resulted in decision No. 93 to revoke the license of VICTORIA-SOFT LLC on the grounds that their work was controlled by the Russians.
QUOTE.
Everything is obvious. Krail himself states that Victoria Soft misled the market regulator and concealed the existence of indirect control of the company by the Russians, for which it was deprived of its license.
However, if you think that I will quote the decision to deprive UKR GAME TECHNOLOGIES, on which the entire Pin-UP is based, you are mistaken.
The Gambling Market Commission strangely forgot about this company and what it announced a week ago. As if the problem of Russians controlling Pin UP does not exist and has never existed.
Later, it turned out that on the eve of the meeting, UKR GAME TECHNOLOGIES had also filed a lawsuit against KRAIL, which wanted to prohibit the commission from considering revoking their license for having ties to Russians. Can you imagine the scale of the impudence?
Of course, the court rejected this claim and KRAIL had no reason not to consider revoking their license.
But for some reason, they did not consider it then, and they have stubbornly continued not to consider it for two months now, and the head of KRAIL, Ivan Rudyi, ignores appeals and requests from both the media and MPs.
He does not deny the existence of the SBU certificate, nor the connection of Pin-UP with Russia, he simply hides from this topic.
So who is so powerful and influential behind this casino that everyone is so afraid of it, where did it come from in Ukraine, and are there really Russians there?
One of the founders and real owners of this online casino, Russian Alexander Matyashov, alias «Riddick», will tell us the best about the history of Pinap.
Matyashov appears in the SBU certificate that is in the CRAIL as one of the beneficiaries of the Cyprus company Guruflow Team Limited.
This company is the offshore foundation of Pin AP, as it owns both the international trademark Pin AP and the entire online gambling software of this casino.
Together with Matyashov, the owners of Cyprus Guruflow and beneficiaries of Pin Up at the time of obtaining the license in Ukraine were
Russian Ivan Bannikov,
Russian Dmitry Punin, who is the main investor in Pin-Up
And a Ukrainian woman, Maria Ilyina, who is Punin’s wife.
Here they are together, storming Moscow.
By the way, some of the social media accounts of Punin and Ilyina even resonate with the Guruflo company. Dmitry Guru and Marina Guru, and they mark Riddick as their godfather.
It was a Russian, Dmitry Punin, who registered Guruflow Team Limited in Cyprus at the end of 2019 and issued 1000 shares of this company. Here are the constituent documents and his signatures.
In 2020, these shares were divided into 500 each between two other offshore companies.
Pirpos Holding Ltd and Monaco Limited.
Pirpos is owned by Dmitry Punin and his wife Marina Ilyina.
And the owners of Monaco Limited are Alexander Matyashov (Ridik) and Ivan Bannikov.
Thus, all four of them, three of whom were Russians, received 250 shares of Guruflow Team Limited, which owns the international trademark Pinup and is the main legal entity of Pinup. They also own the Maltese company Pin-up Entertainment LTD.
Which was registered in April by the same Cypriot Guru Flo Tim.
By the way, it was this offshore company that until the spring of 2022 was the owner of Pin-AP.RU, on which the entire Russian pin-up is based. But more on that later.
By the way, this entire company, Punin, his wife Ilyina, and their godfather Matyashov, alias Riddick, are celebrating Pin-Up’s fifth anniversary in Kyiv in August 2021.
It is unclear how all this rather simple construction of Russians was not noticed by KRAIL in the spring of 2021 when the license was issued.
At the same time, the absence of direct or indirect participation of citizens of the aggressor country is one of the key conditions for obtaining a license.
By the way, even the Russian Forbes wrote about Punin as Pinap’s director.
But let’s go back to Riddick’s interview with Oleg Artyshuk, the author of the YouTube channel about the IT business «Point G», which was published exactly 2 weeks before Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
It is significant that after the «noise» around Pinup began in August, this interview was removed from all Internet sites.
And this is not surprising, because in it, Riddick frankly says that Pinup is a Russian casino created by Russian investors for the 2018 FIFA World Cup, which took place in Russia.
These are very important theses, as some Pinap representatives are telling the media today that only the Pinap franchise operated in Russia and they have nothing to do with it and are an independent company in Ukraine.
This is not true. Pinup is a purely Russian vertical product created by Russians who officially brought it to Ukraine in 2021. And Riddick is very proud of the pace of their expansion in our market.
About taxes
Our hero explains why their headquarters is located in Cyprus and how they organize BDSM parties in Moscow.
Isn’t it cool? We make money in Ukraine, then move it offshore to Cyprus, because it’s convenient to minimize taxes there, and then we organize BDSM parties in Moscow and invite Polina Gagarina to sing, who first entertains Pinup beneficiaries, and then supports the war and sings at concerts for Putin.
In general, Russian Pinup beneficiaries lead a very interesting life, because the 200-300 thousand dollars a month that Riddick says they receive must be spent somewhere.
Here are some photos from the social media of Riddick’s Pinup partner, Russian Dmitry Punin.
A party on Russia Day in sports cars, gold cigars as a symbol of wealth and gold bars for his birthday, private jets and flights from Moscow to Kyiv on business, the opening of an alcoholic boutique in Cyprus with a collectible cognac of Tsar Nicholas II, and cars. Yachts and parties.
At the same time, once again, Pinap’s Russian beneficiaries earn their money mostly in Ukraine and see their future projects here.
How cute is that? A network of strip clubs between Moscow and Kyiv? Dude, what planet are you from? In 2014, Russia started a war in Ukraine, annexed Crimea, and at the time of the interview, we are on the verge of invasion, while the Russians are planning a chain of strip clubs Moscow-Kyiv and buying a ski resort near Kyiv, Hvozdev-Grad.
So, I think that after this interview with Riddick, no one has any doubts that Pinup is a project of purely Russian businessmen.
And Matyashov’s public statements are fully confirmed by our analysis of Pinap’s offshore accounts and the information in the SBU’s certificate that is in KRAIL and which they stubbornly refuse to consider.
But if that’s not enough, here’s another PIN-UP offshore, Carletta Limited, and another Russian owner.
On many PIN-UP websites, this offshore is listed as an online casino operator.
However, for some reason, the owners of Pinup are actively removing this information from their resources.
Thus, this information is not available on the main website pin-up.ua today, and only in the archive for 2022 can you find that they associate themselves with Carletta Limited as the operator of the official website.
At the time of obtaining a license in Ukraine, the shareholder of Carletta Limited was Carletta N.V., which is registered on the island of Curacao, has a gambling license of this island and is the owner of a large number of Pinup mirror sites that operate in the occupied territories.
Payments on these sites are accepted by the Cypriot company B.W.I. Black-Wood Limited.
On one of the Ukrainian Pinup mirror sites with the com.ua domain, everything is written in this way.
It is said that Pinup operates under two licenses issued by CRAIL and the island of Curacao, and is operated by Carletta Limited, its parent company Carletta N.V. from Curacao and the Cyprus-based B.W.I. BLACK-WOOD LIMITED.
But why hide this information?
Apparently, because according to the SBU certificate, the ultimate beneficiary of all three companies was another Russian, Ilya Zudilin.
And this may mean that another representative of the aggressor country was involved in Pinap’s work, which they concealed at the time of obtaining the license.
The public registers of Cyprus indicate that in January 2023, Carletta Limited changed owners. Obviously, this happened as a reaction to the appearance of public information in Ukraine about the presence of Russian beneficiaries in Pinar.
Based on all these facts, Pinap should immediately be deprived of its license, because when they received it, they claimed that Pinap was a purely Ukrainian product and that there were no representatives of the aggressor country present. But they were not just present, they actually continue to be present, influencing the company’s work and taking profits from Ukraine to their Cypriot offshore companies.
But let’s further focus on who represents Pinap in Ukraine and how.
The main legal entities in Ukraine are the well-known Ukr Game Technology LLC, which has the main gambling license, Victoria Software LLC, which has already been deprived of its license, and Pin-Ap LLC.
The latter was registered in September 2020, six months before the launch of Pin-up in Ukraine, and its owner was the wife of Russian Dmitry Punin, Marina Ilyina.
She officially heads the global holding company PIN-UP Global, publicly represents the brand, and recently, together with our good friend Riddick, won the SiGMA & AGS Awards Eurasia 2023.
By the way, the spouses Maria Ilyina and Russian Punin have another company Turbo UA registered in Ukraine, but it has nothing to do with the gambling business. It specializes in the delivery of goods.
But the most interesting story is that of the main Pinap company in Ukraine, which holds the license and around which all the fuss began. This is Ukr Game Technology LLC.
Its analysis will lead us to the Russians’ partners in Ukraine.
Ukr Game Technology was registered on March 3, 2021, and its owner, through another company, Ukr Game Consulting Group, was a certain Yaroslav Fomitsky.
Exactly a month after the company’s registration, on 04/09/2021, UkrGameTechnology received a gambling license from KRAIL and started operating in the gambling market under the Pin-Ap brand.
But who is this Yaroslav Fomitsky, where did he get the money, and how is he connected to the Russians? He has no connection.
Before registering Pinup, Fomitsky worked only as a hired director of the Financial Company «Finexperts» owned by a well-known fintech investor and banker Igor Fisun.
Fomitsky is his confidant — (pound) for whom Pinup was originally registered.
And it seems that Igor Fisun is the same partner of the Russians in online casinos in Ukraine.
In addition to FC FinExpress, Fisun owns several other interesting assets, including a stake in a little-known bank called Oxi-Bank, the processing company UkrCard, and the Interkassa payment system.
Market players say that it was around Interkassa that the interests of Russian global investor Pinup Dmitry Punin and Ukrainian fintech investor Igor Fisun converged.
Fisun’s company Interkassa used to process payments for Parimatch online casinos and made a lot of money on it, but at the end of 2020, Parimatch refused their services and switched to its own 4bill and paymega systems.
It was then, as they say in the market, that Fisun started looking for new partners. And he found them in the person of Dmitry Punin and his wife Ilyina, who were also looking for partners to bring Pinup to Ukraine.
We don’t know what terms of partnership Fisun and Punin agreed on, but it seems that the agreements were reached, because in March 2021, Yaroslav Fomitsky, director of Fisun’s company FC «Finexpress», registered Ukrgametechnology, which quickly obtained a CRAIL license for Pinup and started working.
I think it is already obvious that Pinap instantly becomes a client of the Fisuna Interkassa payment system, which is reflected on the company’s website.
Again, the question arises to CRAIL, which strangely failed to analyze the roots of Pinap’s origin and easily issued a license to a newly created legal entity with a pound owner. No one has identified the real beneficiaries or verified the involvement of Russians in the company.
The entry into Ukraine turned out to be very successful for the Russians, they were actively developing and, as Alexander Riddick told us, they had the largest office in Ukraine, and their market share was growing by 10-15% per month.
It is interesting that in the letter from the SBU to KRAIL, which we started with, it was noted that back in 2021, the SBU warned about Ukrgame technology’s connection with the Russians.
But even then, the gambling commission ignored this information.
The Russians were quietly allowed to enter Ukraine, start earning money, and withdraw money to Cyprus.
The situation began to change with the outbreak of a full-scale war
The first to react was Pinap’s Russian office.
In April 2022, Pin-AP.RU LLC, which is Pinap’s main company in Russia and is owned by the familiar Cypriot offshore company Guruflo Tim, changed both its owners and name.
The company becomes Fonkor LLC and becomes the property of Clear Center Joint Stock Company and Alexander Udodov, who is a relative of Russian Prime Minister Mishustin.
It is because of his family ties to Mishustin and his influence on economic processes in Russia that Udodov is under sanctions from both Ukraine and the United States.
Another owner of the Russian pinup was a certain Alexey Dymov. There is not much information about him, but he is also on Ukraine’s sanctions lists.
There have been no major changes in the Ukrainian branch of Pinap since the beginning of the war.
The company has been quietly working, earning money and becoming a full-fledged leader.
To be fair, Pinap Global’s owner, Marina Ilyina, launched the Pinap Foundation in July 2022 and started to engage in social projects.
Changes are also taking place in Pinap’s offshore vertical. In mid-2022, the Cyprus-based company Guruflo Time Limited is fully re-registered to Marina Ilyina, and Punin, Matyashov and Ivan Bannikov are withdrawn.
Ilyina is becoming the face of Pinap, trying to obscure both her husband Punin and other Russian beneficiaries in the information field.
But it looks like this is only a formal exit of the partners, because judging by social media and photos of Punin, Ilyina, and Riddick, they continue to be and work together.
As I said before, in March 2023, Ilyina and Riddick won the SiGMA & AGS Awards Eurasia 2023.
The appearance of a letter from the SBU in KRAIL in November 2022 did not affect Pinup’s position either.
At first, this document was not noticed, then the work of the CRAIL was blocked due to the lack of a quorum, and scandals around this market regulator were becoming more and more frequent.
At the financial committee, CRAIL even receives an unsatisfactory assessment of its work. In the company itself, changes begin at the beginning of 2023, and structural changes begin in the Ukrainian division of Pin Up.
In January 23, Maryna Ilyina withdraws as a beneficiary from Pin.AP LLC, and Bohdan Shiyan becomes its owner, changing the name to Tranitadevelopment.
At the same time, Shiyan is a clean pound with more than 50 companies registered in his name, and he himself has lawsuits for non-payment of utility bills and household loans. Obviously, Ilyina simply buried Pin-Ap LLC in this way.
But the most interesting transformation is happening with Ukrgametechnology, the company that holds the PinUp gambling license
If you are not already dizzy from this web of connections, now is the time to get completely dizzy.
On April 2, 2023, Yaroslav Fomitsky, the formal owner of PinUp and a fellow fintech investor of Igor Fisun, sells Ukrgametechnology to a new owner.
It was Igor Zotko, who from that moment on became the public face of Pinap in Ukraine, giving a lot of interviews and comments.
I don’t know if you’ll be surprised, but Igor Zotko is also very closely connected with the Russians’ partner and fintech investor Igor Fisun, and most likely the change of Pinup’s owner in Ukraine was only a formality, just like the Russians’ withdrawal from Cypriot offshore.
Judge for yourself. From 2016 to 2020, and this is confirmed by Zotko himself in an interview with NV, he headed the same payment system of Fisun, Interkassa, which served gambling market players.
«Around 2016, I accepted an offer to head Interkassa, a Ukrainian payment platform that operates in international financial markets.»
In 2019, when Fisun bought the processing company Ukrkart and Igor Zotko became its director again. He simultaneously works for Interkassa and Fisun’s Ukrkart.
But in July 2020, Zotko resigned as director of Ukrkart, left Interkassa and became the owner of the United Space Financial Company, which is unique in that it monopolistically serves all payments in the Diia application and no one can explain how this happened.
I don’t know how far FC «United Space» is an independent project of Zotko, but it is possible that he may also represent the interests of Igor Fisun, since according to the financial statements of FC «United Space» half of all company funds are kept in the bank Oxi, which is co-owned by Fisun. There are no such coincidences, you will agree.
Of course, the story of the monopoly of payments in Diia is a separate big topic, and my colleague Vlad Sidorenko has written a lot about it, but in the context of the Pinup detective and his Russian roots, it is an important episode.
It is important because at the beginning of 2023, the flow of all the finances of the state project Diia and the Pin-Up online casino, which the SBU suspects of being a Russian-controlled structure, ends up in the hands of one person.
Moreover, in an interview with NV, Zotko openly states that he has been involved in Pinap since 2020, when the Russians brought it to Ukraine, and he has been cooperating with the real owners of Pinap since 2016.
Here are the quotes
— Your second business is the PIN-UP online casino in Ukraine. Previously, you gave comments as an operational director. And this year, you became the owner. How and why did it happen?
— This path was already clear to me (smiles). But seriously, I was at all stages of creating the PIN-UP brand in Ukraine. I met its owner Maryna Ilyina back in 16-17, when I provided services to her projects in terms of payment acceptance.
When the process of gambling legalization in Ukraine started, I was working on the Single Space. However, there was a non-core investor who consulted with me, in particular, I helped to choose a brand that was not yet present in Ukraine to compete with other players. And in 2022, I received an offer to officially lead the project.
— How did you become the owner?
— At the very start, we agreed with the investor that I would have the opportunity to partially or fully buy out the project. The only thing that stopped me was the availability of sufficient funds and the investor’s desire to sell the business. We were gradually moving along this path, but the war broke out, everything turned upside down, and taxation changes were added. In general, the value system changed dramatically. At the end of the 22nd and beginning of the 23rd, the media began to put pressure on the company, which was being «painted in the tricolor,» «sewn on» to the Russian roots of PIN-UP, and other nonsense.
A number of factors came into play, perhaps something personal, so the owner decided to withdraw his investment. Not everyone is comfortable being in the epicenter of a turbulent, unformed market during a war. We parted ways very well, he didn’t lose a single penny of his investment. All obligations are closed, and we communicate sometimes.
First of all. In response to Mr. Zotko’s thesis about the nonsense of sewing on Russian roots, I want to show him again a photo from the celebration of the fifth anniversary of pinup in Ukraine in 2021.
On the festive stage, along with Marina Ilyina, whom he mentions as the owner of Pinap, are other shareholders of the parent offshore company Guruflow, her Russian husband Dmitry Punin and Russian Alexander Riddick.
For some reason, Zotko does not mention these people in the interview, but as a person who has been with Pinup since the first day, and even since 2016, he must know more about them than we have dug up.
Secondly, it is very interesting to understand who was the investor in Pinap’s emergence in Ukraine and from whom Zotko actually bought it, if he did buy it, and did not come in as a formally new owner under the old beneficiaries — the Russians with whom he had been working from the very beginning.
And it looks very much like the investor is banker Ihor Fisun, but then I wonder on what terms this project was put together with the Russians?
Who has what shares and obligations? How is the profit distributed and where is it withdrawn?
Why doesn’t KRAIL, which issued the license to Ukrgametechnology, know about this, and why doesn’t Yaroslav Fomitsky own a pound?
If Zotko’s purchase of the casino is a formal action, the actual partnership between the Russians and Fisun remains, as does the withdrawal of money from Ukraine by the Russians to offshore.
Is KRAIL not interested in this either?
In general, there are a lot of questions to KRAIL, because issuing licenses to legal entities registered for front companies and not analyzing the origin of the casino is either very unprofessional or very corrupt, and given the blindness to the facts, the second option is more profitable.
And the issue is not that we are interfering in the commercial activities of any company, but that at the time of entering Ukraine, Pinap openly concealed the presence of control by the Russians, which we have now decomposed to molecules.
And this presence was confirmed by the SBU in its letter to CRAIL, which first announced the consideration of this issue, and then got scared and hid.
In fact, someone’s invisible hand divided Russian business in Ukraine into two parts during the war. We mercilessly punish, nationalize, and close one business because it is in someone’s interest, and we protect, guard, and defend the other. This is also very profitable for someone.
Similarly, someone benefits from keeping a monopoly on the state-owned app Diia, which someone somewhere signed over to the Russians’ Pinup partner Ihor Zotko and his FC United Space.
However, the extent to which Zotko acts as an independent player in it is still an open question, as is whether his Pinup partners have access to data from Diya.
So far, there are more questions than answers, but under all these questions we have put solid facts and arguments, which, I think, should definitely be responded to this time.
Can Russian businesses operate and, most importantly, make money in Ukraine during a time of war? It seems that there can be no two answers to this question, nor even a reason for discussion. Russia is the enemy, and Russian companies and their businessmen have no place in Ukraine.
That is why Ukrainian society, through its public pressure, and the Ukrainian government, through its decisions, are doing everything possible to clear our economic space of Russian influence and presence.
The National Security and Defense Council imposes sanctions on Russian companies and individuals, the National Bank nationalizes banks owned by Russian oligarchs, and Russian control over Ukrainian enterprises is detected and stopped by confiscating them in favor of the state.
This was the case with Zaporizhstal, Morshynska, Kyivstar and dozens of other companies, whose Russian stakes were transferred to state ownership.
As the President said in one of his posts.
«When someone in the world still tries to deal with something Russian, it means turning a blind eye to reality. The impudence of evil. The audacity of meanness. Full-blown inhumanity.»
But it would be all too well if there were no strange exceptions to the fight against the Russian presence in Ukrainian business.
The story in question is a real detective story unfolding in the gambling market.
Back in the spring of this year, the National Security and Defense Council imposed sanctions against gambling operators associated with Russia. Dozens of companies. Hundreds of individuals, and loud statements about the inadmissibility of this phenomenon.
But immediately after this decision, public questions began.
The head of the Finance Committee, Mr. Hetmantsev, pointed out the selectivity of the sanctions:
«We certainly welcome the imposition of sanctions against gambling operators, financial companies and individuals who cooperated with the Russians while organizing a large-scale tax evasion scheme in Ukraine.
At the same time, there is one question to those who prepared the list: why did not everyone get on the list?
What are the origins of selectivity?
Yaroslav Zheleznyak, MP from the Voice party, also supported this idea
«It is not very clear yet, where are all the other financial companies that are directly involved in the abuses? Their names are known to everyone, and after the bank audits, this is a legally proven fact. At least, we have a dozen of them in the TSC investigation.
I don’t know about a dozen companies, but today we will analyze one.
This mysterious story concerns one of the leaders of the Ukrainian gambling business, Pin-UP online casino, which was created and controlled by Russians, and the formal owner of this casino in Ukraine is also the owner of a financial company that monopolistically controls the movement of all the money of the legendary Diya app.
Isn’t it interesting already?
But the main mystery of the story is that the gambling regulator CRAIL, having indisputable facts of Pin-UP’s control by Russians, refused to revoke their license at the last minute and has been hiding from public comment for two months.
Who really controls Pin-UP and your money in the Diia app
Perhaps we would never have started our investigation if not for this message in the telegram channel of the Gambling Regulatory Commission on August 1.
«Taking into account the information received about the existence of indirect control relations by residents of the Russian Federation over the activities of certain licensees, the CRBGC will consider revoking licenses in the field of organizing and conducting gambling: LLC «UKR GAME TECHNOLOGIES» and LLC «VICTORIA-SOFT»
This announcement literally became an information bomb, as both legal entities are directly related to the Pin-UP online casino.
UKR GAME TECHNOLOGIES LLC holds the gambling license for the online casino.
And VICTORIA-SOFT is a structural part of Pin-UP, engaged in software development and technical support of both the gambling website and other needs of UKR GAME TECHNOLOGIES LLC.
The announcement of CRAIL was loud, and everyone was waiting for the issue to be considered…. But nothing happened. The meeting was disrupted because the newly appointed member of the CRAIL, Yevhen Yakhnii, suddenly felt sick, an ambulance was called and the meeting was postponed for a week.
It looked as if Yakhniy, who had been appointed to the commission by Prime Minister Shmyhal only a few weeks earlier, had deliberately disrupted the crucial meeting.
Interestingly, before joining KRAIL, Yakhniy was the founder and director of the payment operator X Pay, and market participants associate his appearance in the commission with shadow groups of influence of law enforcement agencies on the gambling market.
Even Danylo Hetmantsev, the head of the parliamentary financial committee, drew attention to Yakhniy’s strange behavior the day before the next meeting of the CRAIL, hinting at the need to consider the announced issues.
«I would like to congratulate one of the most ill members of the CRAIL on his recovery.
Thank God, it is over, and the quorum has been restored. Nothing prevents us from making important state decisions.»
And the next meeting of the CRAIL took place on August 8.
It resulted in decision No. 93 to revoke the license of VICTORIA-SOFT LLC on the grounds that their work was controlled by the Russians.
QUOTE.
Everything is obvious. Krail himself states that Victoria Soft misled the market regulator and concealed the existence of indirect control of the company by the Russians, for which it was deprived of its license.
However, if you think that I will quote the decision to deprive UKR GAME TECHNOLOGIES, on which the entire Pin-UP is based, you are mistaken.
The Gambling Market Commission strangely forgot about this company and what it announced a week ago. As if the problem of Russians controlling Pin UP does not exist and has never existed.
Later, it turned out that on the eve of the meeting, UKR GAME TECHNOLOGIES had also filed a lawsuit against KRAIL, which wanted to prohibit the commission from considering revoking their license for having ties to Russians. Can you imagine the scale of the impudence?
Of course, the court rejected this claim and KRAIL had no reason not to consider revoking their license.
But for some reason, they did not consider it then, and they have stubbornly continued not to consider it for two months now, and the head of KRAIL, Ivan Rudyi, ignores appeals and requests from both the media and MPs.
He does not deny the existence of the SBU certificate, nor the connection of Pin-UP with Russia, he simply hides from this topic.
So who is so powerful and influential behind this casino that everyone is so afraid of it, where did it come from in Ukraine, and are there really Russians there?
One of the founders and real owners of this online casino, Russian Alexander Matyashov, alias «Riddick», will tell us the best about the history of Pinap.
Matyashov appears in the SBU certificate that is in the CRAIL as one of the beneficiaries of the Cyprus company Guruflow Team Limited.
This company is the offshore foundation of Pin AP, as it owns both the international trademark Pin AP and the entire online gambling software of this casino.
Together with Matyashov, the owners of Cyprus Guruflow and beneficiaries of Pin Up at the time of obtaining the license in Ukraine were
Russian Ivan Bannikov,
Russian Dmitry Punin, who is the main investor in Pin-Up
And a Ukrainian woman, Maria Ilyina, who is Punin’s wife.
Here they are together, storming Moscow.
By the way, some of the social media accounts of Punin and Ilyina even resonate with the Guruflo company. Dmitry Guru and Marina Guru, and they mark Riddick as their godfather.
It was a Russian, Dmitry Punin, who registered Guruflow Team Limited in Cyprus at the end of 2019 and issued 1000 shares of this company. Here are the constituent documents and his signatures.
In 2020, these shares were divided into 500 each between two other offshore companies.
Pirpos Holding Ltd and Monaco Limited.
Pirpos is owned by Dmitry Punin and his wife Marina Ilyina.
And the owners of Monaco Limited are Alexander Matyashov (Ridik) and Ivan Bannikov.
Thus, all four of them, three of whom were Russians, received 250 shares of Guruflow Team Limited, which owns the international trademark Pinup and is the main legal entity of Pinup. They also own the Maltese company Pin-up Entertainment LTD.
Which was registered in April by the same Cypriot Guru Flo Tim.
By the way, it was this offshore company that until the spring of 2022 was the owner of Pin-AP.RU, on which the entire Russian pin-up is based. But more on that later.
By the way, this entire company, Punin, his wife Ilyina, and their godfather Matyashov, alias Riddick, are celebrating Pin-Up’s fifth anniversary in Kyiv in August 2021.
It is unclear how all this rather simple construction of Russians was not noticed by KRAIL in the spring of 2021 when the license was issued.
At the same time, the absence of direct or indirect participation of citizens of the aggressor country is one of the key conditions for obtaining a license.
By the way, even the Russian Forbes wrote about Punin as Pinap’s director.
But let’s go back to Riddick’s interview with Oleg Artyshuk, the author of the YouTube channel about the IT business «Point G», which was published exactly 2 weeks before Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
It is significant that after the «noise» around Pinup began in August, this interview was removed from all Internet sites.
And this is not surprising, because in it, Riddick frankly says that Pinup is a Russian casino created by Russian investors for the 2018 FIFA World Cup, which took place in Russia.
These are very important theses, as some Pinap representatives are telling the media today that only the Pinap franchise operated in Russia and they have nothing to do with it and are an independent company in Ukraine.
This is not true. Pinup is a purely Russian vertical product created by Russians who officially brought it to Ukraine in 2021. And Riddick is very proud of the pace of their expansion in our market.
About taxes
Our hero explains why their headquarters is located in Cyprus and how they organize BDSM parties in Moscow.
Isn’t it cool? We make money in Ukraine, then move it offshore to Cyprus, because it’s convenient to minimize taxes there, and then we organize BDSM parties in Moscow and invite Polina Gagarina to sing, who first entertains Pinup beneficiaries, and then supports the war and sings at concerts for Putin.
In general, Russian Pinup beneficiaries lead a very interesting life, because the 200-300 thousand dollars a month that Riddick says they receive must be spent somewhere.
Here are some photos from the social media of Riddick’s Pinup partner, Russian Dmitry Punin.
A party on Russia Day in sports cars, gold cigars as a symbol of wealth and gold bars for his birthday, private jets and flights from Moscow to Kyiv on business, the opening of an alcoholic boutique in Cyprus with a collectible cognac of Tsar Nicholas II, and cars. Yachts and parties.
At the same time, once again, Pinap’s Russian beneficiaries earn their money mostly in Ukraine and see their future projects here.
How cute is that? A network of strip clubs between Moscow and Kyiv? Dude, what planet are you from? In 2014, Russia started a war in Ukraine, annexed Crimea, and at the time of the interview, we are on the verge of invasion, while the Russians are planning a chain of strip clubs Moscow-Kyiv and buying a ski resort near Kyiv, Hvozdev-Grad.
So, I think that after this interview with Riddick, no one has any doubts that Pinup is a project of purely Russian businessmen.
And Matyashov’s public statements are fully confirmed by our analysis of Pinap’s offshore accounts and the information in the SBU’s certificate that is in KRAIL and which they stubbornly refuse to consider.
But if that’s not enough, here’s another PIN-UP offshore, Carletta Limited, and another Russian owner.
On many PIN-UP websites, this offshore is listed as an online casino operator.
However, for some reason, the owners of Pinup are actively removing this information from their resources.
Thus, this information is not available on the main website pin-up.ua today, and only in the archive for 2022 can you find that they associate themselves with Carletta Limited as the operator of the official website.
At the time of obtaining a license in Ukraine, the shareholder of Carletta Limited was Carletta N.V., which is registered on the island of Curacao, has a gambling license of this island and is the owner of a large number of Pinup mirror sites that operate in the occupied territories.
Payments on these sites are accepted by the Cypriot company B.W.I. Black-Wood Limited.
On one of the Ukrainian Pinup mirror sites with the com.ua domain, everything is written in this way.
It is said that Pinup operates under two licenses issued by CRAIL and the island of Curacao, and is operated by Carletta Limited, its parent company Carletta N.V. from Curacao and the Cyprus-based B.W.I. BLACK-WOOD LIMITED.
But why hide this information?
Apparently, because according to the SBU certificate, the ultimate beneficiary of all three companies was another Russian, Ilya Zudilin.
And this may mean that another representative of the aggressor country was involved in Pinap’s work, which they concealed at the time of obtaining the license.
The public registers of Cyprus indicate that in January 2023, Carletta Limited changed owners. Obviously, this happened as a reaction to the appearance of public information in Ukraine about the presence of Russian beneficiaries in Pinar.
Based on all these facts, Pinap should immediately be deprived of its license, because when they received it, they claimed that Pinap was a purely Ukrainian product and that there were no representatives of the aggressor country present. But they were not just present, they actually continue to be present, influencing the company’s work and taking profits from Ukraine to their Cypriot offshore companies.
But let’s further focus on who represents Pinap in Ukraine and how.
The main legal entities in Ukraine are the well-known Ukr Game Technology LLC, which has the main gambling license, Victoria Software LLC, which has already been deprived of its license, and Pin-Ap LLC.
The latter was registered in September 2020, six months before the launch of Pin-up in Ukraine, and its owner was the wife of Russian Dmitry Punin, Marina Ilyina.
She officially heads the global holding company PIN-UP Global, publicly represents the brand, and recently, together with our good friend Riddick, won the SiGMA & AGS Awards Eurasia 2023.
By the way, the spouses Maria Ilyina and Russian Punin have another company Turbo UA registered in Ukraine, but it has nothing to do with the gambling business. It specializes in the delivery of goods.
But the most interesting story is that of the main Pinap company in Ukraine, which holds the license and around which all the fuss began. This is Ukr Game Technology LLC.
Its analysis will lead us to the Russians’ partners in Ukraine.
Ukr Game Technology was registered on March 3, 2021, and its owner, through another company, Ukr Game Consulting Group, was a certain Yaroslav Fomitsky.
Exactly a month after the company’s registration, on 04/09/2021, UkrGameTechnology received a gambling license from KRAIL and started operating in the gambling market under the Pin-Ap brand.
But who is this Yaroslav Fomitsky, where did he get the money, and how is he connected to the Russians? He has no connection.
Before registering Pinup, Fomitsky worked only as a hired director of the Financial Company «Finexperts» owned by a well-known fintech investor and banker Igor Fisun.
Fomitsky is his confidant — (pound) for whom Pinup was originally registered.
And it seems that Igor Fisun is the same partner of the Russians in online casinos in Ukraine.
In addition to FC FinExpress, Fisun owns several other interesting assets, including a stake in a little-known bank called Oxi-Bank, the processing company UkrCard, and the Interkassa payment system.
Market players say that it was around Interkassa that the interests of Russian global investor Pinup Dmitry Punin and Ukrainian fintech investor Igor Fisun converged.
Fisun’s company Interkassa used to process payments for Parimatch online casinos and made a lot of money on it, but at the end of 2020, Parimatch refused their services and switched to its own 4bill and paymega systems.
It was then, as they say in the market, that Fisun started looking for new partners. And he found them in the person of Dmitry Punin and his wife Ilyina, who were also looking for partners to bring Pinup to Ukraine.
We don’t know what terms of partnership Fisun and Punin agreed on, but it seems that the agreements were reached, because in March 2021, Yaroslav Fomitsky, director of Fisun’s company FC «Finexpress», registered Ukrgametechnology, which quickly obtained a CRAIL license for Pinup and started working.
I think it is already obvious that Pinap instantly becomes a client of the Fisuna Interkassa payment system, which is reflected on the company’s website.
Again, the question arises to CRAIL, which strangely failed to analyze the roots of Pinap’s origin and easily issued a license to a newly created legal entity with a pound owner. No one has identified the real beneficiaries or verified the involvement of Russians in the company.
The entry into Ukraine turned out to be very successful for the Russians, they were actively developing and, as Alexander Riddick told us, they had the largest office in Ukraine, and their market share was growing by 10-15% per month.
It is interesting that in the letter from the SBU to KRAIL, which we started with, it was noted that back in 2021, the SBU warned about Ukrgame technology’s connection with the Russians.
But even then, the gambling commission ignored this information.
The Russians were quietly allowed to enter Ukraine, start earning money, and withdraw money to Cyprus.
The situation began to change with the outbreak of a full-scale war
The first to react was Pinap’s Russian office.
In April 2022, Pin-AP.RU LLC, which is Pinap’s main company in Russia and is owned by the familiar Cypriot offshore company Guruflo Tim, changed both its owners and name.
The company becomes Fonkor LLC and becomes the property of Clear Center Joint Stock Company and Alexander Udodov, who is a relative of Russian Prime Minister Mishustin.
It is because of his family ties to Mishustin and his influence on economic processes in Russia that Udodov is under sanctions from both Ukraine and the United States.
Another owner of the Russian pinup was a certain Alexey Dymov. There is not much information about him, but he is also on Ukraine’s sanctions lists.
There have been no major changes in the Ukrainian branch of Pinap since the beginning of the war.
The company has been quietly working, earning money and becoming a full-fledged leader.
To be fair, Pinap Global’s owner, Marina Ilyina, launched the Pinap Foundation in July 2022 and started to engage in social projects.
Changes are also taking place in Pinap’s offshore vertical. In mid-2022, the Cyprus-based company Guruflo Time Limited is fully re-registered to Marina Ilyina, and Punin, Matyashov and Ivan Bannikov are withdrawn.
Ilyina is becoming the face of Pinap, trying to obscure both her husband Punin and other Russian beneficiaries in the information field.
But it looks like this is only a formal exit of the partners, because judging by social media and photos of Punin, Ilyina, and Riddick, they continue to be and work together.
As I said before, in March 2023, Ilyina and Riddick won the SiGMA & AGS Awards Eurasia 2023.
The appearance of a letter from the SBU in KRAIL in November 2022 did not affect Pinup’s position either.
At first, this document was not noticed, then the work of the CRAIL was blocked due to the lack of a quorum, and scandals around this market regulator were becoming more and more frequent.
At the financial committee, CRAIL even receives an unsatisfactory assessment of its work. In the company itself, changes begin at the beginning of 2023, and structural changes begin in the Ukrainian division of Pin Up.
In January 23, Maryna Ilyina withdraws as a beneficiary from Pin.AP LLC, and Bohdan Shiyan becomes its owner, changing the name to Tranitadevelopment.
At the same time, Shiyan is a clean pound with more than 50 companies registered in his name, and he himself has lawsuits for non-payment of utility bills and household loans. Obviously, Ilyina simply buried Pin-Ap LLC in this way.
But the most interesting transformation is happening with Ukrgametechnology, the company that holds the PinUp gambling license
If you are not already dizzy from this web of connections, now is the time to get completely dizzy.
On April 2, 2023, Yaroslav Fomitsky, the formal owner of PinUp and a fellow fintech investor of Igor Fisun, sells Ukrgametechnology to a new owner.
It was Igor Zotko, who from that moment on became the public face of Pinap in Ukraine, giving a lot of interviews and comments.
I don’t know if you’ll be surprised, but Igor Zotko is also very closely connected with the Russians’ partner and fintech investor Igor Fisun, and most likely the change of Pinup’s owner in Ukraine was only a formality, just like the Russians’ withdrawal from Cypriot offshore.
Judge for yourself. From 2016 to 2020, and this is confirmed by Zotko himself in an interview with NV, he headed the same payment system of Fisun, Interkassa, which served gambling market players.
«Around 2016, I accepted an offer to head Interkassa, a Ukrainian payment platform that operates in international financial markets.»
In 2019, when Fisun bought the processing company Ukrkart and Igor Zotko became its director again. He simultaneously works for Interkassa and Fisun’s Ukrkart.
But in July 2020, Zotko resigned as director of Ukrkart, left Interkassa and became the owner of the United Space Financial Company, which is unique in that it monopolistically serves all payments in the Diia application and no one can explain how this happened.
I don’t know how far FC «United Space» is an independent project of Zotko, but it is possible that he may also represent the interests of Igor Fisun, since according to the financial statements of FC «United Space» half of all company funds are kept in the bank Oxi, which is co-owned by Fisun. There are no such coincidences, you will agree.
Of course, the story of the monopoly of payments in Diia is a separate big topic, and my colleague Vlad Sidorenko has written a lot about it, but in the context of the Pinup detective and his Russian roots, it is an important episode.
It is important because at the beginning of 2023, the flow of all the finances of the state project Diia and the Pin-Up online casino, which the SBU suspects of being a Russian-controlled structure, ends up in the hands of one person.
Moreover, in an interview with NV, Zotko openly states that he has been involved in Pinap since 2020, when the Russians brought it to Ukraine, and he has been cooperating with the real owners of Pinap since 2016.
Here are the quotes
— Your second business is the PIN-UP online casino in Ukraine. Previously, you gave comments as an operational director. And this year, you became the owner. How and why did it happen?
— This path was already clear to me (smiles). But seriously, I was at all stages of creating the PIN-UP brand in Ukraine. I met its owner Maryna Ilyina back in 16-17, when I provided services to her projects in terms of payment acceptance.
When the process of gambling legalization in Ukraine started, I was working on the Single Space. However, there was a non-core investor who consulted with me, in particular, I helped to choose a brand that was not yet present in Ukraine to compete with other players. And in 2022, I received an offer to officially lead the project.
— How did you become the owner?
— At the very start, we agreed with the investor that I would have the opportunity to partially or fully buy out the project. The only thing that stopped me was the availability of sufficient funds and the investor’s desire to sell the business. We were gradually moving along this path, but the war broke out, everything turned upside down, and taxation changes were added. In general, the value system changed dramatically. At the end of the 22nd and beginning of the 23rd, the media began to put pressure on the company, which was being «painted in the tricolor,» «sewn on» to the Russian roots of PIN-UP, and other nonsense.
A number of factors came into play, perhaps something personal, so the owner decided to withdraw his investment. Not everyone is comfortable being in the epicenter of a turbulent, unformed market during a war. We parted ways very well, he didn’t lose a single penny of his investment. All obligations are closed, and we communicate sometimes.
First of all. In response to Mr. Zotko’s thesis about the nonsense of sewing on Russian roots, I want to show him again a photo from the celebration of the fifth anniversary of pinup in Ukraine in 2021.
On the festive stage, along with Marina Ilyina, whom he mentions as the owner of Pinap, are other shareholders of the parent offshore company Guruflow, her Russian husband Dmitry Punin and Russian Alexander Riddick.
For some reason, Zotko does not mention these people in the interview, but as a person who has been with Pinup since the first day, and even since 2016, he must know more about them than we have dug up.
Secondly, it is very interesting to understand who was the investor in Pinap’s emergence in Ukraine and from whom Zotko actually bought it, if he did buy it, and did not come in as a formally new owner under the old beneficiaries — the Russians with whom he had been working from the very beginning.
And it looks very much like the investor is banker Ihor Fisun, but then I wonder on what terms this project was put together with the Russians?
Who has what shares and obligations? How is the profit distributed and where is it withdrawn?
Why doesn’t KRAIL, which issued the license to Ukrgametechnology, know about this, and why doesn’t Yaroslav Fomitsky own a pound?
If Zotko’s purchase of the casino is a formal action, the actual partnership between the Russians and Fisun remains, as does the withdrawal of money from Ukraine by the Russians to offshore.
Is KRAIL not interested in this either?
In general, there are a lot of questions to KRAIL, because issuing licenses to legal entities registered for front companies and not analyzing the origin of the casino is either very unprofessional or very corrupt, and given the blindness to the facts, the second option is more profitable.
And the issue is not that we are interfering in the commercial activities of any company, but that at the time of entering Ukraine, Pinap openly concealed the presence of control by the Russians, which we have now decomposed to molecules.
And this presence was confirmed by the SBU in its letter to CRAIL, which first announced the consideration of this issue, and then got scared and hid.
In fact, someone’s invisible hand divided Russian business in Ukraine into two parts during the war. We mercilessly punish, nationalize, and close one business because it is in someone’s interest, and we protect, guard, and defend the other. This is also very profitable for someone.
Similarly, someone benefits from keeping a monopoly on the state-owned app Diia, which someone somewhere signed over to the Russians’ Pinup partner Ihor Zotko and his FC United Space.
However, the extent to which Zotko acts as an independent player in it is still an open question, as is whether his Pinup partners have access to data from Diya.
So far, there are more questions than answers, but under all these questions we have put solid facts and arguments, which, I think, should definitely be responded to this time.
Can Russian businesses operate and, most importantly, make money in Ukraine during a time of war? It seems that there can be no two answers to this question, nor even a reason for discussion. Russia is the enemy, and Russian companies and their businessmen have no place in Ukraine.
That is why Ukrainian society, through its public pressure, and the Ukrainian government, through its decisions, are doing everything possible to clear our economic space of Russian influence and presence.
The National Security and Defense Council imposes sanctions on Russian companies and individuals, the National Bank nationalizes banks owned by Russian oligarchs, and Russian control over Ukrainian enterprises is detected and stopped by confiscating them in favor of the state.
This was the case with Zaporizhstal, Morshynska, Kyivstar and dozens of other companies, whose Russian stakes were transferred to state ownership.
As the President said in one of his posts.
«When someone in the world still tries to deal with something Russian, it means turning a blind eye to reality. The impudence of evil. The audacity of meanness. Full-blown inhumanity.»
But it would be all too well if there were no strange exceptions to the fight against the Russian presence in Ukrainian business.
The story in question is a real detective story unfolding in the gambling market.
Back in the spring of this year, the National Security and Defense Council imposed sanctions against gambling operators associated with Russia. Dozens of companies. Hundreds of individuals, and loud statements about the inadmissibility of this phenomenon.
But immediately after this decision, public questions began.
The head of the Finance Committee, Mr. Hetmantsev, pointed out the selectivity of the sanctions:
«We certainly welcome the imposition of sanctions against gambling operators, financial companies and individuals who cooperated with the Russians while organizing a large-scale tax evasion scheme in Ukraine.
At the same time, there is one question to those who prepared the list: why did not everyone get on the list?
What are the origins of selectivity?
Yaroslav Zheleznyak, MP from the Voice party, also supported this idea
«It is not very clear yet, where are all the other financial companies that are directly involved in the abuses? Their names are known to everyone, and after the bank audits, this is a legally proven fact. At least, we have a dozen of them in the TSC investigation.
I don’t know about a dozen companies, but today we will analyze one.
This mysterious story concerns one of the leaders of the Ukrainian gambling business, Pin-UP online casino, which was created and controlled by Russians, and the formal owner of this casino in Ukraine is also the owner of a financial company that monopolistically controls the movement of all the money of the legendary Diya app.
Isn’t it interesting already?
But the main mystery of the story is that the gambling regulator CRAIL, having indisputable facts of Pin-UP’s control by Russians, refused to revoke their license at the last minute and has been hiding from public comment for two months.
Who really controls Pin-UP and your money in the Diia app
Perhaps we would never have started our investigation if not for this message in the telegram channel of the Gambling Regulatory Commission on August 1.
«Taking into account the information received about the existence of indirect control relations by residents of the Russian Federation over the activities of certain licensees, the CRBGC will consider revoking licenses in the field of organizing and conducting gambling: LLC «UKR GAME TECHNOLOGIES» and LLC «VICTORIA-SOFT»
This announcement literally became an information bomb, as both legal entities are directly related to the Pin-UP online casino.
UKR GAME TECHNOLOGIES LLC holds the gambling license for the online casino.
And VICTORIA-SOFT is a structural part of Pin-UP, engaged in software development and technical support of both the gambling website and other needs of UKR GAME TECHNOLOGIES LLC.
The announcement of CRAIL was loud, and everyone was waiting for the issue to be considered…. But nothing happened. The meeting was disrupted because the newly appointed member of the CRAIL, Yevhen Yakhnii, suddenly felt sick, an ambulance was called and the meeting was postponed for a week.
It looked as if Yakhniy, who had been appointed to the commission by Prime Minister Shmyhal only a few weeks earlier, had deliberately disrupted the crucial meeting.
Interestingly, before joining KRAIL, Yakhniy was the founder and director of the payment operator X Pay, and market participants associate his appearance in the commission with shadow groups of influence of law enforcement agencies on the gambling market.
Even Danylo Hetmantsev, the head of the parliamentary financial committee, drew attention to Yakhniy’s strange behavior the day before the next meeting of the CRAIL, hinting at the need to consider the announced issues.
«I would like to congratulate one of the most ill members of the CRAIL on his recovery.
Thank God, it is over, and the quorum has been restored. Nothing prevents us from making important state decisions.»
And the next meeting of the CRAIL took place on August 8.
It resulted in decision No. 93 to revoke the license of VICTORIA-SOFT LLC on the grounds that their work was controlled by the Russians.
QUOTE.
Everything is obvious. Krail himself states that Victoria Soft misled the market regulator and concealed the existence of indirect control of the company by the Russians, for which it was deprived of its license.
However, if you think that I will quote the decision to deprive UKR GAME TECHNOLOGIES, on which the entire Pin-UP is based, you are mistaken.
The Gambling Market Commission strangely forgot about this company and what it announced a week ago. As if the problem of Russians controlling Pin UP does not exist and has never existed.
Later, it turned out that on the eve of the meeting, UKR GAME TECHNOLOGIES had also filed a lawsuit against KRAIL, which wanted to prohibit the commission from considering revoking their license for having ties to Russians. Can you imagine the scale of the impudence?
Of course, the court rejected this claim and KRAIL had no reason not to consider revoking their license.
But for some reason, they did not consider it then, and they have stubbornly continued not to consider it for two months now, and the head of KRAIL, Ivan Rudyi, ignores appeals and requests from both the media and MPs.
He does not deny the existence of the SBU certificate, nor the connection of Pin-UP with Russia, he simply hides from this topic.
So who is so powerful and influential behind this casino that everyone is so afraid of it, where did it come from in Ukraine, and are there really Russians there?
One of the founders and real owners of this online casino, Russian Alexander Matyashov, alias «Riddick», will tell us the best about the history of Pinap.
Matyashov appears in the SBU certificate that is in the CRAIL as one of the beneficiaries of the Cyprus company Guruflow Team Limited.
This company is the offshore foundation of Pin AP, as it owns both the international trademark Pin AP and the entire online gambling software of this casino.
Together with Matyashov, the owners of Cyprus Guruflow and beneficiaries of Pin Up at the time of obtaining the license in Ukraine were
Russian Ivan Bannikov,
Russian Dmitry Punin, who is the main investor in Pin-Up
And a Ukrainian woman, Maria Ilyina, who is Punin’s wife.
Here they are together, storming Moscow.
By the way, some of the social media accounts of Punin and Ilyina even resonate with the Guruflo company. Dmitry Guru and Marina Guru, and they mark Riddick as their godfather.
It was a Russian, Dmitry Punin, who registered Guruflow Team Limited in Cyprus at the end of 2019 and issued 1000 shares of this company. Here are the constituent documents and his signatures.
In 2020, these shares were divided into 500 each between two other offshore companies.
Pirpos Holding Ltd and Monaco Limited.
Pirpos is owned by Dmitry Punin and his wife Marina Ilyina.
And the owners of Monaco Limited are Alexander Matyashov (Ridik) and Ivan Bannikov.
Thus, all four of them, three of whom were Russians, received 250 shares of Guruflow Team Limited, which owns the international trademark Pinup and is the main legal entity of Pinup. They also own the Maltese company Pin-up Entertainment LTD.
Which was registered in April by the same Cypriot Guru Flo Tim.
By the way, it was this offshore company that until the spring of 2022 was the owner of Pin-AP.RU, on which the entire Russian pin-up is based. But more on that later.
By the way, this entire company, Punin, his wife Ilyina, and their godfather Matyashov, alias Riddick, are celebrating Pin-Up’s fifth anniversary in Kyiv in August 2021.
It is unclear how all this rather simple construction of Russians was not noticed by KRAIL in the spring of 2021 when the license was issued.
At the same time, the absence of direct or indirect participation of citizens of the aggressor country is one of the key conditions for obtaining a license.
By the way, even the Russian Forbes wrote about Punin as Pinap’s director.
But let’s go back to Riddick’s interview with Oleg Artyshuk, the author of the YouTube channel about the IT business «Point G», which was published exactly 2 weeks before Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
It is significant that after the «noise» around Pinup began in August, this interview was removed from all Internet sites.
And this is not surprising, because in it, Riddick frankly says that Pinup is a Russian casino created by Russian investors for the 2018 FIFA World Cup, which took place in Russia.
These are very important theses, as some Pinap representatives are telling the media today that only the Pinap franchise operated in Russia and they have nothing to do with it and are an independent company in Ukraine.
This is not true. Pinup is a purely Russian vertical product created by Russians who officially brought it to Ukraine in 2021. And Riddick is very proud of the pace of their expansion in our market.
About taxes
Our hero explains why their headquarters is located in Cyprus and how they organize BDSM parties in Moscow.
Isn’t it cool? We make money in Ukraine, then move it offshore to Cyprus, because it’s convenient to minimize taxes there, and then we organize BDSM parties in Moscow and invite Polina Gagarina to sing, who first entertains Pinup beneficiaries, and then supports the war and sings at concerts for Putin.
In general, Russian Pinup beneficiaries lead a very interesting life, because the 200-300 thousand dollars a month that Riddick says they receive must be spent somewhere.
Here are some photos from the social media of Riddick’s Pinup partner, Russian Dmitry Punin.
A party on Russia Day in sports cars, gold cigars as a symbol of wealth and gold bars for his birthday, private jets and flights from Moscow to Kyiv on business, the opening of an alcoholic boutique in Cyprus with a collectible cognac of Tsar Nicholas II, and cars. Yachts and parties.
At the same time, once again, Pinap’s Russian beneficiaries earn their money mostly in Ukraine and see their future projects here.
How cute is that? A network of strip clubs between Moscow and Kyiv? Dude, what planet are you from? In 2014, Russia started a war in Ukraine, annexed Crimea, and at the time of the interview, we are on the verge of invasion, while the Russians are planning a chain of strip clubs Moscow-Kyiv and buying a ski resort near Kyiv, Hvozdev-Grad.
So, I think that after this interview with Riddick, no one has any doubts that Pinup is a project of purely Russian businessmen.
And Matyashov’s public statements are fully confirmed by our analysis of Pinap’s offshore accounts and the information in the SBU’s certificate that is in KRAIL and which they stubbornly refuse to consider.
But if that’s not enough, here’s another PIN-UP offshore, Carletta Limited, and another Russian owner.
On many PIN-UP websites, this offshore is listed as an online casino operator.
However, for some reason, the owners of Pinup are actively removing this information from their resources.
Thus, this information is not available on the main website pin-up.ua today, and only in the archive for 2022 can you find that they associate themselves with Carletta Limited as the operator of the official website.
At the time of obtaining a license in Ukraine, the shareholder of Carletta Limited was Carletta N.V., which is registered on the island of Curacao, has a gambling license of this island and is the owner of a large number of Pinup mirror sites that operate in the occupied territories.
Payments on these sites are accepted by the Cypriot company B.W.I. Black-Wood Limited.
On one of the Ukrainian Pinup mirror sites with the com.ua domain, everything is written in this way.
It is said that Pinup operates under two licenses issued by CRAIL and the island of Curacao, and is operated by Carletta Limited, its parent company Carletta N.V. from Curacao and the Cyprus-based B.W.I. BLACK-WOOD LIMITED.
But why hide this information?
Apparently, because according to the SBU certificate, the ultimate beneficiary of all three companies was another Russian, Ilya Zudilin.
And this may mean that another representative of the aggressor country was involved in Pinap’s work, which they concealed at the time of obtaining the license.
The public registers of Cyprus indicate that in January 2023, Carletta Limited changed owners. Obviously, this happened as a reaction to the appearance of public information in Ukraine about the presence of Russian beneficiaries in Pinar.
Based on all these facts, Pinap should immediately be deprived of its license, because when they received it, they claimed that Pinap was a purely Ukrainian product and that there were no representatives of the aggressor country present. But they were not just present, they actually continue to be present, influencing the company’s work and taking profits from Ukraine to their Cypriot offshore companies.
But let’s further focus on who represents Pinap in Ukraine and how.
The main legal entities in Ukraine are the well-known Ukr Game Technology LLC, which has the main gambling license, Victoria Software LLC, which has already been deprived of its license, and Pin-Ap LLC.
The latter was registered in September 2020, six months before the launch of Pin-up in Ukraine, and its owner was the wife of Russian Dmitry Punin, Marina Ilyina.
She officially heads the global holding company PIN-UP Global, publicly represents the brand, and recently, together with our good friend Riddick, won the SiGMA & AGS Awards Eurasia 2023.
By the way, the spouses Maria Ilyina and Russian Punin have another company Turbo UA registered in Ukraine, but it has nothing to do with the gambling business. It specializes in the delivery of goods.
But the most interesting story is that of the main Pinap company in Ukraine, which holds the license and around which all the fuss began. This is Ukr Game Technology LLC.
Its analysis will lead us to the Russians’ partners in Ukraine.
Ukr Game Technology was registered on March 3, 2021, and its owner, through another company, Ukr Game Consulting Group, was a certain Yaroslav Fomitsky.
Exactly a month after the company’s registration, on 04/09/2021, UkrGameTechnology received a gambling license from KRAIL and started operating in the gambling market under the Pin-Ap brand.
But who is this Yaroslav Fomitsky, where did he get the money, and how is he connected to the Russians? He has no connection.
Before registering Pinup, Fomitsky worked only as a hired director of the Financial Company «Finexperts» owned by a well-known fintech investor and banker Igor Fisun.
Fomitsky is his confidant — (pound) for whom Pinup was originally registered.
And it seems that Igor Fisun is the same partner of the Russians in online casinos in Ukraine.
In addition to FC FinExpress, Fisun owns several other interesting assets, including a stake in a little-known bank called Oxi-Bank, the processing company UkrCard, and the Interkassa payment system.
Market players say that it was around Interkassa that the interests of Russian global investor Pinup Dmitry Punin and Ukrainian fintech investor Igor Fisun converged.
Fisun’s company Interkassa used to process payments for Parimatch online casinos and made a lot of money on it, but at the end of 2020, Parimatch refused their services and switched to its own 4bill and paymega systems.
It was then, as they say in the market, that Fisun started looking for new partners. And he found them in the person of Dmitry Punin and his wife Ilyina, who were also looking for partners to bring Pinup to Ukraine.
We don’t know what terms of partnership Fisun and Punin agreed on, but it seems that the agreements were reached, because in March 2021, Yaroslav Fomitsky, director of Fisun’s company FC «Finexpress», registered Ukrgametechnology, which quickly obtained a CRAIL license for Pinup and started working.
I think it is already obvious that Pinap instantly becomes a client of the Fisuna Interkassa payment system, which is reflected on the company’s website.
Again, the question arises to CRAIL, which strangely failed to analyze the roots of Pinap’s origin and easily issued a license to a newly created legal entity with a pound owner. No one has identified the real beneficiaries or verified the involvement of Russians in the company.
The entry into Ukraine turned out to be very successful for the Russians, they were actively developing and, as Alexander Riddick told us, they had the largest office in Ukraine, and their market share was growing by 10-15% per month.
It is interesting that in the letter from the SBU to KRAIL, which we started with, it was noted that back in 2021, the SBU warned about Ukrgame technology’s connection with the Russians.
But even then, the gambling commission ignored this information.
The Russians were quietly allowed to enter Ukraine, start earning money, and withdraw money to Cyprus.
The situation began to change with the outbreak of a full-scale war
The first to react was Pinap’s Russian office.
In April 2022, Pin-AP.RU LLC, which is Pinap’s main company in Russia and is owned by the familiar Cypriot offshore company Guruflo Tim, changed both its owners and name.
The company becomes Fonkor LLC and becomes the property of Clear Center Joint Stock Company and Alexander Udodov, who is a relative of Russian Prime Minister Mishustin.
It is because of his family ties to Mishustin and his influence on economic processes in Russia that Udodov is under sanctions from both Ukraine and the United States.
Another owner of the Russian pinup was a certain Alexey Dymov. There is not much information about him, but he is also on Ukraine’s sanctions lists.
There have been no major changes in the Ukrainian branch of Pinap since the beginning of the war.
The company has been quietly working, earning money and becoming a full-fledged leader.
To be fair, Pinap Global’s owner, Marina Ilyina, launched the Pinap Foundation in July 2022 and started to engage in social projects.
Changes are also taking place in Pinap’s offshore vertical. In mid-2022, the Cyprus-based company Guruflo Time Limited is fully re-registered to Marina Ilyina, and Punin, Matyashov and Ivan Bannikov are withdrawn.
Ilyina is becoming the face of Pinap, trying to obscure both her husband Punin and other Russian beneficiaries in the information field.
But it looks like this is only a formal exit of the partners, because judging by social media and photos of Punin, Ilyina, and Riddick, they continue to be and work together.
As I said before, in March 2023, Ilyina and Riddick won the SiGMA & AGS Awards Eurasia 2023.
The appearance of a letter from the SBU in KRAIL in November 2022 did not affect Pinup’s position either.
At first, this document was not noticed, then the work of the CRAIL was blocked due to the lack of a quorum, and scandals around this market regulator were becoming more and more frequent.
At the financial committee, CRAIL even receives an unsatisfactory assessment of its work. In the company itself, changes begin at the beginning of 2023, and structural changes begin in the Ukrainian division of Pin Up.
In January 23, Maryna Ilyina withdraws as a beneficiary from Pin.AP LLC, and Bohdan Shiyan becomes its owner, changing the name to Tranitadevelopment.
At the same time, Shiyan is a clean pound with more than 50 companies registered in his name, and he himself has lawsuits for non-payment of utility bills and household loans. Obviously, Ilyina simply buried Pin-Ap LLC in this way.
But the most interesting transformation is happening with Ukrgametechnology, the company that holds the PinUp gambling license
If you are not already dizzy from this web of connections, now is the time to get completely dizzy.
On April 2, 2023, Yaroslav Fomitsky, the formal owner of PinUp and a fellow fintech investor of Igor Fisun, sells Ukrgametechnology to a new owner.
It was Igor Zotko, who from that moment on became the public face of Pinap in Ukraine, giving a lot of interviews and comments.
I don’t know if you’ll be surprised, but Igor Zotko is also very closely connected with the Russians’ partner and fintech investor Igor Fisun, and most likely the change of Pinup’s owner in Ukraine was only a formality, just like the Russians’ withdrawal from Cypriot offshore.
Judge for yourself. From 2016 to 2020, and this is confirmed by Zotko himself in an interview with NV, he headed the same payment system of Fisun, Interkassa, which served gambling market players.
«Around 2016, I accepted an offer to head Interkassa, a Ukrainian payment platform that operates in international financial markets.»
In 2019, when Fisun bought the processing company Ukrkart and Igor Zotko became its director again. He simultaneously works for Interkassa and Fisun’s Ukrkart.
But in July 2020, Zotko resigned as director of Ukrkart, left Interkassa and became the owner of the United Space Financial Company, which is unique in that it monopolistically serves all payments in the Diia application and no one can explain how this happened.
I don’t know how far FC «United Space» is an independent project of Zotko, but it is possible that he may also represent the interests of Igor Fisun, since according to the financial statements of FC «United Space» half of all company funds are kept in the bank Oxi, which is co-owned by Fisun. There are no such coincidences, you will agree.
Of course, the story of the monopoly of payments in Diia is a separate big topic, and my colleague Vlad Sidorenko has written a lot about it, but in the context of the Pinup detective and his Russian roots, it is an important episode.
It is important because at the beginning of 2023, the flow of all the finances of the state project Diia and the Pin-Up online casino, which the SBU suspects of being a Russian-controlled structure, ends up in the hands of one person.
Moreover, in an interview with NV, Zotko openly states that he has been involved in Pinap since 2020, when the Russians brought it to Ukraine, and he has been cooperating with the real owners of Pinap since 2016.
Here are the quotes
— Your second business is the PIN-UP online casino in Ukraine. Previously, you gave comments as an operational director. And this year, you became the owner. How and why did it happen?
— This path was already clear to me (smiles). But seriously, I was at all stages of creating the PIN-UP brand in Ukraine. I met its owner Maryna Ilyina back in 16-17, when I provided services to her projects in terms of payment acceptance.
When the process of gambling legalization in Ukraine started, I was working on the Single Space. However, there was a non-core investor who consulted with me, in particular, I helped to choose a brand that was not yet present in Ukraine to compete with other players. And in 2022, I received an offer to officially lead the project.
— How did you become the owner?
— At the very start, we agreed with the investor that I would have the opportunity to partially or fully buy out the project. The only thing that stopped me was the availability of sufficient funds and the investor’s desire to sell the business. We were gradually moving along this path, but the war broke out, everything turned upside down, and taxation changes were added. In general, the value system changed dramatically. At the end of the 22nd and beginning of the 23rd, the media began to put pressure on the company, which was being «painted in the tricolor,» «sewn on» to the Russian roots of PIN-UP, and other nonsense.
A number of factors came into play, perhaps something personal, so the owner decided to withdraw his investment. Not everyone is comfortable being in the epicenter of a turbulent, unformed market during a war. We parted ways very well, he didn’t lose a single penny of his investment. All obligations are closed, and we communicate sometimes.
First of all. In response to Mr. Zotko’s thesis about the nonsense of sewing on Russian roots, I want to show him again a photo from the celebration of the fifth anniversary of pinup in Ukraine in 2021.
On the festive stage, along with Marina Ilyina, whom he mentions as the owner of Pinap, are other shareholders of the parent offshore company Guruflow, her Russian husband Dmitry Punin and Russian Alexander Riddick.
For some reason, Zotko does not mention these people in the interview, but as a person who has been with Pinup since the first day, and even since 2016, he must know more about them than we have dug up.
Secondly, it is very interesting to understand who was the investor in Pinap’s emergence in Ukraine and from whom Zotko actually bought it, if he did buy it, and did not come in as a formally new owner under the old beneficiaries — the Russians with whom he had been working from the very beginning.
And it looks very much like the investor is banker Ihor Fisun, but then I wonder on what terms this project was put together with the Russians?
Who has what shares and obligations? How is the profit distributed and where is it withdrawn?
Why doesn’t KRAIL, which issued the license to Ukrgametechnology, know about this, and why doesn’t Yaroslav Fomitsky own a pound?
If Zotko’s purchase of the casino is a formal action, the actual partnership between the Russians and Fisun remains, as does the withdrawal of money from Ukraine by the Russians to offshore.
Is KRAIL not interested in this either?
In general, there are a lot of questions to KRAIL, because issuing licenses to legal entities registered for front companies and not analyzing the origin of the casino is either very unprofessional or very corrupt, and given the blindness to the facts, the second option is more profitable.
And the issue is not that we are interfering in the commercial activities of any company, but that at the time of entering Ukraine, Pinap openly concealed the presence of control by the Russians, which we have now decomposed to molecules.
And this presence was confirmed by the SBU in its letter to CRAIL, which first announced the consideration of this issue, and then got scared and hid.
In fact, someone’s invisible hand divided Russian business in Ukraine into two parts during the war. We mercilessly punish, nationalize, and close one business because it is in someone’s interest, and we protect, guard, and defend the other. This is also very profitable for someone.
Similarly, someone benefits from keeping a monopoly on the state-owned app Diia, which someone somewhere signed over to the Russians’ Pinup partner Ihor Zotko and his FC United Space.
However, the extent to which Zotko acts as an independent player in it is still an open question, as is whether his Pinup partners have access to data from Diya.
So far, there are more questions than answers, but under all these questions we have put solid facts and arguments, which, I think, should definitely be responded to this time.
Can Russian businesses operate and, most importantly, make money in Ukraine during a time of war? It seems that there can be no two answers to this question, nor even a reason for discussion. Russia is the enemy, and Russian companies and their businessmen have no place in Ukraine.
That is why Ukrainian society, through its public pressure, and the Ukrainian government, through its decisions, are doing everything possible to clear our economic space of Russian influence and presence.
The National Security and Defense Council imposes sanctions on Russian companies and individuals, the National Bank nationalizes banks owned by Russian oligarchs, and Russian control over Ukrainian enterprises is detected and stopped by confiscating them in favor of the state.
This was the case with Zaporizhstal, Morshynska, Kyivstar and dozens of other companies, whose Russian stakes were transferred to state ownership.
As the President said in one of his posts.
«When someone in the world still tries to deal with something Russian, it means turning a blind eye to reality. The impudence of evil. The audacity of meanness. Full-blown inhumanity.»
But it would be all too well if there were no strange exceptions to the fight against the Russian presence in Ukrainian business.
The story in question is a real detective story unfolding in the gambling market.
Back in the spring of this year, the National Security and Defense Council imposed sanctions against gambling operators associated with Russia. Dozens of companies. Hundreds of individuals, and loud statements about the inadmissibility of this phenomenon.
But immediately after this decision, public questions began.
The head of the Finance Committee, Mr. Hetmantsev, pointed out the selectivity of the sanctions:
«We certainly welcome the imposition of sanctions against gambling operators, financial companies and individuals who cooperated with the Russians while organizing a large-scale tax evasion scheme in Ukraine.
At the same time, there is one question to those who prepared the list: why did not everyone get on the list?
What are the origins of selectivity?
Yaroslav Zheleznyak, MP from the Voice party, also supported this idea
«It is not very clear yet, where are all the other financial companies that are directly involved in the abuses? Their names are known to everyone, and after the bank audits, this is a legally proven fact. At least, we have a dozen of them in the TSC investigation.
I don’t know about a dozen companies, but today we will analyze one.
This mysterious story concerns one of the leaders of the Ukrainian gambling business, Pin-UP online casino, which was created and controlled by Russians, and the formal owner of this casino in Ukraine is also the owner of a financial company that monopolistically controls the movement of all the money of the legendary Diya app.
Isn’t it interesting already?
But the main mystery of the story is that the gambling regulator CRAIL, having indisputable facts of Pin-UP’s control by Russians, refused to revoke their license at the last minute and has been hiding from public comment for two months.
Who really controls Pin-UP and your money in the Diia app
Perhaps we would never have started our investigation if not for this message in the telegram channel of the Gambling Regulatory Commission on August 1.
«Taking into account the information received about the existence of indirect control relations by residents of the Russian Federation over the activities of certain licensees, the CRBGC will consider revoking licenses in the field of organizing and conducting gambling: LLC «UKR GAME TECHNOLOGIES» and LLC «VICTORIA-SOFT»
This announcement literally became an information bomb, as both legal entities are directly related to the Pin-UP online casino.
UKR GAME TECHNOLOGIES LLC holds the gambling license for the online casino.
And VICTORIA-SOFT is a structural part of Pin-UP, engaged in software development and technical support of both the gambling website and other needs of UKR GAME TECHNOLOGIES LLC.
The announcement of CRAIL was loud, and everyone was waiting for the issue to be considered…. But nothing happened. The meeting was disrupted because the newly appointed member of the CRAIL, Yevhen Yakhnii, suddenly felt sick, an ambulance was called and the meeting was postponed for a week.
It looked as if Yakhniy, who had been appointed to the commission by Prime Minister Shmyhal only a few weeks earlier, had deliberately disrupted the crucial meeting.
Interestingly, before joining KRAIL, Yakhniy was the founder and director of the payment operator X Pay, and market participants associate his appearance in the commission with shadow groups of influence of law enforcement agencies on the gambling market.
Even Danylo Hetmantsev, the head of the parliamentary financial committee, drew attention to Yakhniy’s strange behavior the day before the next meeting of the CRAIL, hinting at the need to consider the announced issues.
«I would like to congratulate one of the most ill members of the CRAIL on his recovery.
Thank God, it is over, and the quorum has been restored. Nothing prevents us from making important state decisions.»
And the next meeting of the CRAIL took place on August 8.
It resulted in decision No. 93 to revoke the license of VICTORIA-SOFT LLC on the grounds that their work was controlled by the Russians.
QUOTE.
Everything is obvious. Krail himself states that Victoria Soft misled the market regulator and concealed the existence of indirect control of the company by the Russians, for which it was deprived of its license.
However, if you think that I will quote the decision to deprive UKR GAME TECHNOLOGIES, on which the entire Pin-UP is based, you are mistaken.
The Gambling Market Commission strangely forgot about this company and what it announced a week ago. As if the problem of Russians controlling Pin UP does not exist and has never existed.
Later, it turned out that on the eve of the meeting, UKR GAME TECHNOLOGIES had also filed a lawsuit against KRAIL, which wanted to prohibit the commission from considering revoking their license for having ties to Russians. Can you imagine the scale of the impudence?
Of course, the court rejected this claim and KRAIL had no reason not to consider revoking their license.
But for some reason, they did not consider it then, and they have stubbornly continued not to consider it for two months now, and the head of KRAIL, Ivan Rudyi, ignores appeals and requests from both the media and MPs.
He does not deny the existence of the SBU certificate, nor the connection of Pin-UP with Russia, he simply hides from this topic.
So who is so powerful and influential behind this casino that everyone is so afraid of it, where did it come from in Ukraine, and are there really Russians there?
One of the founders and real owners of this online casino, Russian Alexander Matyashov, alias «Riddick», will tell us the best about the history of Pinap.
Matyashov appears in the SBU certificate that is in the CRAIL as one of the beneficiaries of the Cyprus company Guruflow Team Limited.
This company is the offshore foundation of Pin AP, as it owns both the international trademark Pin AP and the entire online gambling software of this casino.
Together with Matyashov, the owners of Cyprus Guruflow and beneficiaries of Pin Up at the time of obtaining the license in Ukraine were
Russian Ivan Bannikov,
Russian Dmitry Punin, who is the main investor in Pin-Up
And a Ukrainian woman, Maria Ilyina, who is Punin’s wife.
Here they are together, storming Moscow.
By the way, some of the social media accounts of Punin and Ilyina even resonate with the Guruflo company. Dmitry Guru and Marina Guru, and they mark Riddick as their godfather.
It was a Russian, Dmitry Punin, who registered Guruflow Team Limited in Cyprus at the end of 2019 and issued 1000 shares of this company. Here are the constituent documents and his signatures.
In 2020, these shares were divided into 500 each between two other offshore companies.
Pirpos Holding Ltd and Monaco Limited.
Pirpos is owned by Dmitry Punin and his wife Marina Ilyina.
And the owners of Monaco Limited are Alexander Matyashov (Ridik) and Ivan Bannikov.
Thus, all four of them, three of whom were Russians, received 250 shares of Guruflow Team Limited, which owns the international trademark Pinup and is the main legal entity of Pinup. They also own the Maltese company Pin-up Entertainment LTD.
Which was registered in April by the same Cypriot Guru Flo Tim.
By the way, it was this offshore company that until the spring of 2022 was the owner of Pin-AP.RU, on which the entire Russian pin-up is based. But more on that later.
By the way, this entire company, Punin, his wife Ilyina, and their godfather Matyashov, alias Riddick, are celebrating Pin-Up’s fifth anniversary in Kyiv in August 2021.
It is unclear how all this rather simple construction of Russians was not noticed by KRAIL in the spring of 2021 when the license was issued.
At the same time, the absence of direct or indirect participation of citizens of the aggressor country is one of the key conditions for obtaining a license.
By the way, even the Russian Forbes wrote about Punin as Pinap’s director.
But let’s go back to Riddick’s interview with Oleg Artyshuk, the author of the YouTube channel about the IT business «Point G», which was published exactly 2 weeks before Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
It is significant that after the «noise» around Pinup began in August, this interview was removed from all Internet sites.
And this is not surprising, because in it, Riddick frankly says that Pinup is a Russian casino created by Russian investors for the 2018 FIFA World Cup, which took place in Russia.
These are very important theses, as some Pinap representatives are telling the media today that only the Pinap franchise operated in Russia and they have nothing to do with it and are an independent company in Ukraine.
This is not true. Pinup is a purely Russian vertical product created by Russians who officially brought it to Ukraine in 2021. And Riddick is very proud of the pace of their expansion in our market.
About taxes
Our hero explains why their headquarters is located in Cyprus and how they organize BDSM parties in Moscow.
Isn’t it cool? We make money in Ukraine, then move it offshore to Cyprus, because it’s convenient to minimize taxes there, and then we organize BDSM parties in Moscow and invite Polina Gagarina to sing, who first entertains Pinup beneficiaries, and then supports the war and sings at concerts for Putin.
In general, Russian Pinup beneficiaries lead a very interesting life, because the 200-300 thousand dollars a month that Riddick says they receive must be spent somewhere.
Here are some photos from the social media of Riddick’s Pinup partner, Russian Dmitry Punin.
A party on Russia Day in sports cars, gold cigars as a symbol of wealth and gold bars for his birthday, private jets and flights from Moscow to Kyiv on business, the opening of an alcoholic boutique in Cyprus with a collectible cognac of Tsar Nicholas II, and cars. Yachts and parties.
At the same time, once again, Pinap’s Russian beneficiaries earn their money mostly in Ukraine and see their future projects here.
How cute is that? A network of strip clubs between Moscow and Kyiv? Dude, what planet are you from? In 2014, Russia started a war in Ukraine, annexed Crimea, and at the time of the interview, we are on the verge of invasion, while the Russians are planning a chain of strip clubs Moscow-Kyiv and buying a ski resort near Kyiv, Hvozdev-Grad.
So, I think that after this interview with Riddick, no one has any doubts that Pinup is a project of purely Russian businessmen.
And Matyashov’s public statements are fully confirmed by our analysis of Pinap’s offshore accounts and the information in the SBU’s certificate that is in KRAIL and which they stubbornly refuse to consider.
But if that’s not enough, here’s another PIN-UP offshore, Carletta Limited, and another Russian owner.
On many PIN-UP websites, this offshore is listed as an online casino operator.
However, for some reason, the owners of Pinup are actively removing this information from their resources.
Thus, this information is not available on the main website pin-up.ua today, and only in the archive for 2022 can you find that they associate themselves with Carletta Limited as the operator of the official website.
At the time of obtaining a license in Ukraine, the shareholder of Carletta Limited was Carletta N.V., which is registered on the island of Curacao, has a gambling license of this island and is the owner of a large number of Pinup mirror sites that operate in the occupied territories.
Payments on these sites are accepted by the Cypriot company B.W.I. Black-Wood Limited.
On one of the Ukrainian Pinup mirror sites with the com.ua domain, everything is written in this way.
It is said that Pinup operates under two licenses issued by CRAIL and the island of Curacao, and is operated by Carletta Limited, its parent company Carletta N.V. from Curacao and the Cyprus-based B.W.I. BLACK-WOOD LIMITED.
But why hide this information?
Apparently, because according to the SBU certificate, the ultimate beneficiary of all three companies was another Russian, Ilya Zudilin.
And this may mean that another representative of the aggressor country was involved in Pinap’s work, which they concealed at the time of obtaining the license.
The public registers of Cyprus indicate that in January 2023, Carletta Limited changed owners. Obviously, this happened as a reaction to the appearance of public information in Ukraine about the presence of Russian beneficiaries in Pinar.
Based on all these facts, Pinap should immediately be deprived of its license, because when they received it, they claimed that Pinap was a purely Ukrainian product and that there were no representatives of the aggressor country present. But they were not just present, they actually continue to be present, influencing the company’s work and taking profits from Ukraine to their Cypriot offshore companies.
But let’s further focus on who represents Pinap in Ukraine and how.
The main legal entities in Ukraine are the well-known Ukr Game Technology LLC, which has the main gambling license, Victoria Software LLC, which has already been deprived of its license, and Pin-Ap LLC.
The latter was registered in September 2020, six months before the launch of Pin-up in Ukraine, and its owner was the wife of Russian Dmitry Punin, Marina Ilyina.
She officially heads the global holding company PIN-UP Global, publicly represents the brand, and recently, together with our good friend Riddick, won the SiGMA & AGS Awards Eurasia 2023.
By the way, the spouses Maria Ilyina and Russian Punin have another company Turbo UA registered in Ukraine, but it has nothing to do with the gambling business. It specializes in the delivery of goods.
But the most interesting story is that of the main Pinap company in Ukraine, which holds the license and around which all the fuss began. This is Ukr Game Technology LLC.
Its analysis will lead us to the Russians’ partners in Ukraine.
Ukr Game Technology was registered on March 3, 2021, and its owner, through another company, Ukr Game Consulting Group, was a certain Yaroslav Fomitsky.
Exactly a month after the company’s registration, on 04/09/2021, UkrGameTechnology received a gambling license from KRAIL and started operating in the gambling market under the Pin-Ap brand.
But who is this Yaroslav Fomitsky, where did he get the money, and how is he connected to the Russians? He has no connection.
Before registering Pinup, Fomitsky worked only as a hired director of the Financial Company «Finexperts» owned by a well-known fintech investor and banker Igor Fisun.
Fomitsky is his confidant — (pound) for whom Pinup was originally registered.
And it seems that Igor Fisun is the same partner of the Russians in online casinos in Ukraine.
In addition to FC FinExpress, Fisun owns several other interesting assets, including a stake in a little-known bank called Oxi-Bank, the processing company UkrCard, and the Interkassa payment system.
Market players say that it was around Interkassa that the interests of Russian global investor Pinup Dmitry Punin and Ukrainian fintech investor Igor Fisun converged.
Fisun’s company Interkassa used to process payments for Parimatch online casinos and made a lot of money on it, but at the end of 2020, Parimatch refused their services and switched to its own 4bill and paymega systems.
It was then, as they say in the market, that Fisun started looking for new partners. And he found them in the person of Dmitry Punin and his wife Ilyina, who were also looking for partners to bring Pinup to Ukraine.
We don’t know what terms of partnership Fisun and Punin agreed on, but it seems that the agreements were reached, because in March 2021, Yaroslav Fomitsky, director of Fisun’s company FC «Finexpress», registered Ukrgametechnology, which quickly obtained a CRAIL license for Pinup and started working.
I think it is already obvious that Pinap instantly becomes a client of the Fisuna Interkassa payment system, which is reflected on the company’s website.
Again, the question arises to CRAIL, which strangely failed to analyze the roots of Pinap’s origin and easily issued a license to a newly created legal entity with a pound owner. No one has identified the real beneficiaries or verified the involvement of Russians in the company.
The entry into Ukraine turned out to be very successful for the Russians, they were actively developing and, as Alexander Riddick told us, they had the largest office in Ukraine, and their market share was growing by 10-15% per month.
It is interesting that in the letter from the SBU to KRAIL, which we started with, it was noted that back in 2021, the SBU warned about Ukrgame technology’s connection with the Russians.
But even then, the gambling commission ignored this information.
The Russians were quietly allowed to enter Ukraine, start earning money, and withdraw money to Cyprus.
The situation began to change with the outbreak of a full-scale war
The first to react was Pinap’s Russian office.
In April 2022, Pin-AP.RU LLC, which is Pinap’s main company in Russia and is owned by the familiar Cypriot offshore company Guruflo Tim, changed both its owners and name.
The company becomes Fonkor LLC and becomes the property of Clear Center Joint Stock Company and Alexander Udodov, who is a relative of Russian Prime Minister Mishustin.
It is because of his family ties to Mishustin and his influence on economic processes in Russia that Udodov is under sanctions from both Ukraine and the United States.
Another owner of the Russian pinup was a certain Alexey Dymov. There is not much information about him, but he is also on Ukraine’s sanctions lists.
There have been no major changes in the Ukrainian branch of Pinap since the beginning of the war.
The company has been quietly working, earning money and becoming a full-fledged leader.
To be fair, Pinap Global’s owner, Marina Ilyina, launched the Pinap Foundation in July 2022 and started to engage in social projects.
Changes are also taking place in Pinap’s offshore vertical. In mid-2022, the Cyprus-based company Guruflo Time Limited is fully re-registered to Marina Ilyina, and Punin, Matyashov and Ivan Bannikov are withdrawn.
Ilyina is becoming the face of Pinap, trying to obscure both her husband Punin and other Russian beneficiaries in the information field.
But it looks like this is only a formal exit of the partners, because judging by social media and photos of Punin, Ilyina, and Riddick, they continue to be and work together.
As I said before, in March 2023, Ilyina and Riddick won the SiGMA & AGS Awards Eurasia 2023.
The appearance of a letter from the SBU in KRAIL in November 2022 did not affect Pinup’s position either.
At first, this document was not noticed, then the work of the CRAIL was blocked due to the lack of a quorum, and scandals around this market regulator were becoming more and more frequent.
At the financial committee, CRAIL even receives an unsatisfactory assessment of its work. In the company itself, changes begin at the beginning of 2023, and structural changes begin in the Ukrainian division of Pin Up.
In January 23, Maryna Ilyina withdraws as a beneficiary from Pin.AP LLC, and Bohdan Shiyan becomes its owner, changing the name to Tranitadevelopment.
At the same time, Shiyan is a clean pound with more than 50 companies registered in his name, and he himself has lawsuits for non-payment of utility bills and household loans. Obviously, Ilyina simply buried Pin-Ap LLC in this way.
But the most interesting transformation is happening with Ukrgametechnology, the company that holds the PinUp gambling license
If you are not already dizzy from this web of connections, now is the time to get completely dizzy.
On April 2, 2023, Yaroslav Fomitsky, the formal owner of PinUp and a fellow fintech investor of Igor Fisun, sells Ukrgametechnology to a new owner.
It was Igor Zotko, who from that moment on became the public face of Pinap in Ukraine, giving a lot of interviews and comments.
I don’t know if you’ll be surprised, but Igor Zotko is also very closely connected with the Russians’ partner and fintech investor Igor Fisun, and most likely the change of Pinup’s owner in Ukraine was only a formality, just like the Russians’ withdrawal from Cypriot offshore.
Judge for yourself. From 2016 to 2020, and this is confirmed by Zotko himself in an interview with NV, he headed the same payment system of Fisun, Interkassa, which served gambling market players.
«Around 2016, I accepted an offer to head Interkassa, a Ukrainian payment platform that operates in international financial markets.»
In 2019, when Fisun bought the processing company Ukrkart and Igor Zotko became its director again. He simultaneously works for Interkassa and Fisun’s Ukrkart.
But in July 2020, Zotko resigned as director of Ukrkart, left Interkassa and became the owner of the United Space Financial Company, which is unique in that it monopolistically serves all payments in the Diia application and no one can explain how this happened.
I don’t know how far FC «United Space» is an independent project of Zotko, but it is possible that he may also represent the interests of Igor Fisun, since according to the financial statements of FC «United Space» half of all company funds are kept in the bank Oxi, which is co-owned by Fisun. There are no such coincidences, you will agree.
Of course, the story of the monopoly of payments in Diia is a separate big topic, and my colleague Vlad Sidorenko has written a lot about it, but in the context of the Pinup detective and his Russian roots, it is an important episode.
It is important because at the beginning of 2023, the flow of all the finances of the state project Diia and the Pin-Up online casino, which the SBU suspects of being a Russian-controlled structure, ends up in the hands of one person.
Moreover, in an interview with NV, Zotko openly states that he has been involved in Pinap since 2020, when the Russians brought it to Ukraine, and he has been cooperating with the real owners of Pinap since 2016.
Here are the quotes
— Your second business is the PIN-UP online casino in Ukraine. Previously, you gave comments as an operational director. And this year, you became the owner. How and why did it happen?
— This path was already clear to me (smiles). But seriously, I was at all stages of creating the PIN-UP brand in Ukraine. I met its owner Maryna Ilyina back in 16-17, when I provided services to her projects in terms of payment acceptance.
When the process of gambling legalization in Ukraine started, I was working on the Single Space. However, there was a non-core investor who consulted with me, in particular, I helped to choose a brand that was not yet present in Ukraine to compete with other players. And in 2022, I received an offer to officially lead the project.
— How did you become the owner?
— At the very start, we agreed with the investor that I would have the opportunity to partially or fully buy out the project. The only thing that stopped me was the availability of sufficient funds and the investor’s desire to sell the business. We were gradually moving along this path, but the war broke out, everything turned upside down, and taxation changes were added. In general, the value system changed dramatically. At the end of the 22nd and beginning of the 23rd, the media began to put pressure on the company, which was being «painted in the tricolor,» «sewn on» to the Russian roots of PIN-UP, and other nonsense.
A number of factors came into play, perhaps something personal, so the owner decided to withdraw his investment. Not everyone is comfortable being in the epicenter of a turbulent, unformed market during a war. We parted ways very well, he didn’t lose a single penny of his investment. All obligations are closed, and we communicate sometimes.
First of all. In response to Mr. Zotko’s thesis about the nonsense of sewing on Russian roots, I want to show him again a photo from the celebration of the fifth anniversary of pinup in Ukraine in 2021.
On the festive stage, along with Marina Ilyina, whom he mentions as the owner of Pinap, are other shareholders of the parent offshore company Guruflow, her Russian husband Dmitry Punin and Russian Alexander Riddick.
For some reason, Zotko does not mention these people in the interview, but as a person who has been with Pinup since the first day, and even since 2016, he must know more about them than we have dug up.
Secondly, it is very interesting to understand who was the investor in Pinap’s emergence in Ukraine and from whom Zotko actually bought it, if he did buy it, and did not come in as a formally new owner under the old beneficiaries — the Russians with whom he had been working from the very beginning.
And it looks very much like the investor is banker Ihor Fisun, but then I wonder on what terms this project was put together with the Russians?
Who has what shares and obligations? How is the profit distributed and where is it withdrawn?
Why doesn’t KRAIL, which issued the license to Ukrgametechnology, know about this, and why doesn’t Yaroslav Fomitsky own a pound?
If Zotko’s purchase of the casino is a formal action, the actual partnership between the Russians and Fisun remains, as does the withdrawal of money from Ukraine by the Russians to offshore.
Is KRAIL not interested in this either?
In general, there are a lot of questions to KRAIL, because issuing licenses to legal entities registered for front companies and not analyzing the origin of the casino is either very unprofessional or very corrupt, and given the blindness to the facts, the second option is more profitable.
And the issue is not that we are interfering in the commercial activities of any company, but that at the time of entering Ukraine, Pinap openly concealed the presence of control by the Russians, which we have now decomposed to molecules.
And this presence was confirmed by the SBU in its letter to CRAIL, which first announced the consideration of this issue, and then got scared and hid.
In fact, someone’s invisible hand divided Russian business in Ukraine into two parts during the war. We mercilessly punish, nationalize, and close one business because it is in someone’s interest, and we protect, guard, and defend the other. This is also very profitable for someone.
Similarly, someone benefits from keeping a monopoly on the state-owned app Diia, which someone somewhere signed over to the Russians’ Pinup partner Ihor Zotko and his FC United Space.
However, the extent to which Zotko acts as an independent player in it is still an open question, as is whether his Pinup partners have access to data from Diya.
So far, there are more questions than answers, but under all these questions we have put solid facts and arguments, which, I think, should definitely be responded to this time.
Can Russian businesses operate and, most importantly, make money in Ukraine during a time of war? It seems that there can be no two answers to this question, nor even a reason for discussion. Russia is the enemy, and Russian companies and their businessmen have no place in Ukraine.
That is why Ukrainian society, through its public pressure, and the Ukrainian government, through its decisions, are doing everything possible to clear our economic space of Russian influence and presence.
The National Security and Defense Council imposes sanctions on Russian companies and individuals, the National Bank nationalizes banks owned by Russian oligarchs, and Russian control over Ukrainian enterprises is detected and stopped by confiscating them in favor of the state.
This was the case with Zaporizhstal, Morshynska, Kyivstar and dozens of other companies, whose Russian stakes were transferred to state ownership.
As the President said in one of his posts.
«When someone in the world still tries to deal with something Russian, it means turning a blind eye to reality. The impudence of evil. The audacity of meanness. Full-blown inhumanity.»
But it would be all too well if there were no strange exceptions to the fight against the Russian presence in Ukrainian business.
The story in question is a real detective story unfolding in the gambling market.
Back in the spring of this year, the National Security and Defense Council imposed sanctions against gambling operators associated with Russia. Dozens of companies. Hundreds of individuals, and loud statements about the inadmissibility of this phenomenon.
But immediately after this decision, public questions began.
The head of the Finance Committee, Mr. Hetmantsev, pointed out the selectivity of the sanctions:
«We certainly welcome the imposition of sanctions against gambling operators, financial companies and individuals who cooperated with the Russians while organizing a large-scale tax evasion scheme in Ukraine.
At the same time, there is one question to those who prepared the list: why did not everyone get on the list?
What are the origins of selectivity?
Yaroslav Zheleznyak, MP from the Voice party, also supported this idea
«It is not very clear yet, where are all the other financial companies that are directly involved in the abuses? Their names are known to everyone, and after the bank audits, this is a legally proven fact. At least, we have a dozen of them in the TSC investigation.
I don’t know about a dozen companies, but today we will analyze one.
This mysterious story concerns one of the leaders of the Ukrainian gambling business, Pin-UP online casino, which was created and controlled by Russians, and the formal owner of this casino in Ukraine is also the owner of a financial company that monopolistically controls the movement of all the money of the legendary Diya app.
Isn’t it interesting already?
But the main mystery of the story is that the gambling regulator CRAIL, having indisputable facts of Pin-UP’s control by Russians, refused to revoke their license at the last minute and has been hiding from public comment for two months.
Who really controls Pin-UP and your money in the Diia app
Perhaps we would never have started our investigation if not for this message in the telegram channel of the Gambling Regulatory Commission on August 1.
«Taking into account the information received about the existence of indirect control relations by residents of the Russian Federation over the activities of certain licensees, the CRBGC will consider revoking licenses in the field of organizing and conducting gambling: LLC «UKR GAME TECHNOLOGIES» and LLC «VICTORIA-SOFT»
This announcement literally became an information bomb, as both legal entities are directly related to the Pin-UP online casino.
UKR GAME TECHNOLOGIES LLC holds the gambling license for the online casino.
And VICTORIA-SOFT is a structural part of Pin-UP, engaged in software development and technical support of both the gambling website and other needs of UKR GAME TECHNOLOGIES LLC.
The announcement of CRAIL was loud, and everyone was waiting for the issue to be considered…. But nothing happened. The meeting was disrupted because the newly appointed member of the CRAIL, Yevhen Yakhnii, suddenly felt sick, an ambulance was called and the meeting was postponed for a week.
It looked as if Yakhniy, who had been appointed to the commission by Prime Minister Shmyhal only a few weeks earlier, had deliberately disrupted the crucial meeting.
Interestingly, before joining KRAIL, Yakhniy was the founder and director of the payment operator X Pay, and market participants associate his appearance in the commission with shadow groups of influence of law enforcement agencies on the gambling market.
Even Danylo Hetmantsev, the head of the parliamentary financial committee, drew attention to Yakhniy’s strange behavior the day before the next meeting of the CRAIL, hinting at the need to consider the announced issues.
«I would like to congratulate one of the most ill members of the CRAIL on his recovery.
Thank God, it is over, and the quorum has been restored. Nothing prevents us from making important state decisions.»
And the next meeting of the CRAIL took place on August 8.
It resulted in decision No. 93 to revoke the license of VICTORIA-SOFT LLC on the grounds that their work was controlled by the Russians.
QUOTE.
Everything is obvious. Krail himself states that Victoria Soft misled the market regulator and concealed the existence of indirect control of the company by the Russians, for which it was deprived of its license.
However, if you think that I will quote the decision to deprive UKR GAME TECHNOLOGIES, on which the entire Pin-UP is based, you are mistaken.
The Gambling Market Commission strangely forgot about this company and what it announced a week ago. As if the problem of Russians controlling Pin UP does not exist and has never existed.
Later, it turned out that on the eve of the meeting, UKR GAME TECHNOLOGIES had also filed a lawsuit against KRAIL, which wanted to prohibit the commission from considering revoking their license for having ties to Russians. Can you imagine the scale of the impudence?
Of course, the court rejected this claim and KRAIL had no reason not to consider revoking their license.
But for some reason, they did not consider it then, and they have stubbornly continued not to consider it for two months now, and the head of KRAIL, Ivan Rudyi, ignores appeals and requests from both the media and MPs.
He does not deny the existence of the SBU certificate, nor the connection of Pin-UP with Russia, he simply hides from this topic.
So who is so powerful and influential behind this casino that everyone is so afraid of it, where did it come from in Ukraine, and are there really Russians there?
One of the founders and real owners of this online casino, Russian Alexander Matyashov, alias «Riddick», will tell us the best about the history of Pinap.
Matyashov appears in the SBU certificate that is in the CRAIL as one of the beneficiaries of the Cyprus company Guruflow Team Limited.
This company is the offshore foundation of Pin AP, as it owns both the international trademark Pin AP and the entire online gambling software of this casino.
Together with Matyashov, the owners of Cyprus Guruflow and beneficiaries of Pin Up at the time of obtaining the license in Ukraine were
Russian Ivan Bannikov,
Russian Dmitry Punin, who is the main investor in Pin-Up
And a Ukrainian woman, Maria Ilyina, who is Punin’s wife.
Here they are together, storming Moscow.
By the way, some of the social media accounts of Punin and Ilyina even resonate with the Guruflo company. Dmitry Guru and Marina Guru, and they mark Riddick as their godfather.
It was a Russian, Dmitry Punin, who registered Guruflow Team Limited in Cyprus at the end of 2019 and issued 1000 shares of this company. Here are the constituent documents and his signatures.
In 2020, these shares were divided into 500 each between two other offshore companies.
Pirpos Holding Ltd and Monaco Limited.
Pirpos is owned by Dmitry Punin and his wife Marina Ilyina.
And the owners of Monaco Limited are Alexander Matyashov (Ridik) and Ivan Bannikov.
Thus, all four of them, three of whom were Russians, received 250 shares of Guruflow Team Limited, which owns the international trademark Pinup and is the main legal entity of Pinup. They also own the Maltese company Pin-up Entertainment LTD.
Which was registered in April by the same Cypriot Guru Flo Tim.
By the way, it was this offshore company that until the spring of 2022 was the owner of Pin-AP.RU, on which the entire Russian pin-up is based. But more on that later.
By the way, this entire company, Punin, his wife Ilyina, and their godfather Matyashov, alias Riddick, are celebrating Pin-Up’s fifth anniversary in Kyiv in August 2021.
It is unclear how all this rather simple construction of Russians was not noticed by KRAIL in the spring of 2021 when the license was issued.
At the same time, the absence of direct or indirect participation of citizens of the aggressor country is one of the key conditions for obtaining a license.
By the way, even the Russian Forbes wrote about Punin as Pinap’s director.
But let’s go back to Riddick’s interview with Oleg Artyshuk, the author of the YouTube channel about the IT business «Point G», which was published exactly 2 weeks before Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
It is significant that after the «noise» around Pinup began in August, this interview was removed from all Internet sites.
And this is not surprising, because in it, Riddick frankly says that Pinup is a Russian casino created by Russian investors for the 2018 FIFA World Cup, which took place in Russia.
These are very important theses, as some Pinap representatives are telling the media today that only the Pinap franchise operated in Russia and they have nothing to do with it and are an independent company in Ukraine.
This is not true. Pinup is a purely Russian vertical product created by Russians who officially brought it to Ukraine in 2021. And Riddick is very proud of the pace of their expansion in our market.
About taxes
Our hero explains why their headquarters is located in Cyprus and how they organize BDSM parties in Moscow.
Isn’t it cool? We make money in Ukraine, then move it offshore to Cyprus, because it’s convenient to minimize taxes there, and then we organize BDSM parties in Moscow and invite Polina Gagarina to sing, who first entertains Pinup beneficiaries, and then supports the war and sings at concerts for Putin.
In general, Russian Pinup beneficiaries lead a very interesting life, because the 200-300 thousand dollars a month that Riddick says they receive must be spent somewhere.
Here are some photos from the social media of Riddick’s Pinup partner, Russian Dmitry Punin.
A party on Russia Day in sports cars, gold cigars as a symbol of wealth and gold bars for his birthday, private jets and flights from Moscow to Kyiv on business, the opening of an alcoholic boutique in Cyprus with a collectible cognac of Tsar Nicholas II, and cars. Yachts and parties.
At the same time, once again, Pinap’s Russian beneficiaries earn their money mostly in Ukraine and see their future projects here.
How cute is that? A network of strip clubs between Moscow and Kyiv? Dude, what planet are you from? In 2014, Russia started a war in Ukraine, annexed Crimea, and at the time of the interview, we are on the verge of invasion, while the Russians are planning a chain of strip clubs Moscow-Kyiv and buying a ski resort near Kyiv, Hvozdev-Grad.
So, I think that after this interview with Riddick, no one has any doubts that Pinup is a project of purely Russian businessmen.
And Matyashov’s public statements are fully confirmed by our analysis of Pinap’s offshore accounts and the information in the SBU’s certificate that is in KRAIL and which they stubbornly refuse to consider.
But if that’s not enough, here’s another PIN-UP offshore, Carletta Limited, and another Russian owner.
On many PIN-UP websites, this offshore is listed as an online casino operator.
However, for some reason, the owners of Pinup are actively removing this information from their resources.
Thus, this information is not available on the main website pin-up.ua today, and only in the archive for 2022 can you find that they associate themselves with Carletta Limited as the operator of the official website.
At the time of obtaining a license in Ukraine, the shareholder of Carletta Limited was Carletta N.V., which is registered on the island of Curacao, has a gambling license of this island and is the owner of a large number of Pinup mirror sites that operate in the occupied territories.
Payments on these sites are accepted by the Cypriot company B.W.I. Black-Wood Limited.
On one of the Ukrainian Pinup mirror sites with the com.ua domain, everything is written in this way.
It is said that Pinup operates under two licenses issued by CRAIL and the island of Curacao, and is operated by Carletta Limited, its parent company Carletta N.V. from Curacao and the Cyprus-based B.W.I. BLACK-WOOD LIMITED.
But why hide this information?
Apparently, because according to the SBU certificate, the ultimate beneficiary of all three companies was another Russian, Ilya Zudilin.
And this may mean that another representative of the aggressor country was involved in Pinap’s work, which they concealed at the time of obtaining the license.
The public registers of Cyprus indicate that in January 2023, Carletta Limited changed owners. Obviously, this happened as a reaction to the appearance of public information in Ukraine about the presence of Russian beneficiaries in Pinar.
Based on all these facts, Pinap should immediately be deprived of its license, because when they received it, they claimed that Pinap was a purely Ukrainian product and that there were no representatives of the aggressor country present. But they were not just present, they actually continue to be present, influencing the company’s work and taking profits from Ukraine to their Cypriot offshore companies.
But let’s further focus on who represents Pinap in Ukraine and how.
The main legal entities in Ukraine are the well-known Ukr Game Technology LLC, which has the main gambling license, Victoria Software LLC, which has already been deprived of its license, and Pin-Ap LLC.
The latter was registered in September 2020, six months before the launch of Pin-up in Ukraine, and its owner was the wife of Russian Dmitry Punin, Marina Ilyina.
She officially heads the global holding company PIN-UP Global, publicly represents the brand, and recently, together with our good friend Riddick, won the SiGMA & AGS Awards Eurasia 2023.
By the way, the spouses Maria Ilyina and Russian Punin have another company Turbo UA registered in Ukraine, but it has nothing to do with the gambling business. It specializes in the delivery of goods.
But the most interesting story is that of the main Pinap company in Ukraine, which holds the license and around which all the fuss began. This is Ukr Game Technology LLC.
Its analysis will lead us to the Russians’ partners in Ukraine.
Ukr Game Technology was registered on March 3, 2021, and its owner, through another company, Ukr Game Consulting Group, was a certain Yaroslav Fomitsky.
Exactly a month after the company’s registration, on 04/09/2021, UkrGameTechnology received a gambling license from KRAIL and started operating in the gambling market under the Pin-Ap brand.
But who is this Yaroslav Fomitsky, where did he get the money, and how is he connected to the Russians? He has no connection.
Before registering Pinup, Fomitsky worked only as a hired director of the Financial Company «Finexperts» owned by a well-known fintech investor and banker Igor Fisun.
Fomitsky is his confidant — (pound) for whom Pinup was originally registered.
And it seems that Igor Fisun is the same partner of the Russians in online casinos in Ukraine.
In addition to FC FinExpress, Fisun owns several other interesting assets, including a stake in a little-known bank called Oxi-Bank, the processing company UkrCard, and the Interkassa payment system.
Market players say that it was around Interkassa that the interests of Russian global investor Pinup Dmitry Punin and Ukrainian fintech investor Igor Fisun converged.
Fisun’s company Interkassa used to process payments for Parimatch online casinos and made a lot of money on it, but at the end of 2020, Parimatch refused their services and switched to its own 4bill and paymega systems.
It was then, as they say in the market, that Fisun started looking for new partners. And he found them in the person of Dmitry Punin and his wife Ilyina, who were also looking for partners to bring Pinup to Ukraine.
We don’t know what terms of partnership Fisun and Punin agreed on, but it seems that the agreements were reached, because in March 2021, Yaroslav Fomitsky, director of Fisun’s company FC «Finexpress», registered Ukrgametechnology, which quickly obtained a CRAIL license for Pinup and started working.
I think it is already obvious that Pinap instantly becomes a client of the Fisuna Interkassa payment system, which is reflected on the company’s website.
Again, the question arises to CRAIL, which strangely failed to analyze the roots of Pinap’s origin and easily issued a license to a newly created legal entity with a pound owner. No one has identified the real beneficiaries or verified the involvement of Russians in the company.
The entry into Ukraine turned out to be very successful for the Russians, they were actively developing and, as Alexander Riddick told us, they had the largest office in Ukraine, and their market share was growing by 10-15% per month.
It is interesting that in the letter from the SBU to KRAIL, which we started with, it was noted that back in 2021, the SBU warned about Ukrgame technology’s connection with the Russians.
But even then, the gambling commission ignored this information.
The Russians were quietly allowed to enter Ukraine, start earning money, and withdraw money to Cyprus.
The situation began to change with the outbreak of a full-scale war
The first to react was Pinap’s Russian office.
In April 2022, Pin-AP.RU LLC, which is Pinap’s main company in Russia and is owned by the familiar Cypriot offshore company Guruflo Tim, changed both its owners and name.
The company becomes Fonkor LLC and becomes the property of Clear Center Joint Stock Company and Alexander Udodov, who is a relative of Russian Prime Minister Mishustin.
It is because of his family ties to Mishustin and his influence on economic processes in Russia that Udodov is under sanctions from both Ukraine and the United States.
Another owner of the Russian pinup was a certain Alexey Dymov. There is not much information about him, but he is also on Ukraine’s sanctions lists.
There have been no major changes in the Ukrainian branch of Pinap since the beginning of the war.
The company has been quietly working, earning money and becoming a full-fledged leader.
To be fair, Pinap Global’s owner, Marina Ilyina, launched the Pinap Foundation in July 2022 and started to engage in social projects.
Changes are also taking place in Pinap’s offshore vertical. In mid-2022, the Cyprus-based company Guruflo Time Limited is fully re-registered to Marina Ilyina, and Punin, Matyashov and Ivan Bannikov are withdrawn.
Ilyina is becoming the face of Pinap, trying to obscure both her husband Punin and other Russian beneficiaries in the information field.
But it looks like this is only a formal exit of the partners, because judging by social media and photos of Punin, Ilyina, and Riddick, they continue to be and work together.
As I said before, in March 2023, Ilyina and Riddick won the SiGMA & AGS Awards Eurasia 2023.
The appearance of a letter from the SBU in KRAIL in November 2022 did not affect Pinup’s position either.
At first, this document was not noticed, then the work of the CRAIL was blocked due to the lack of a quorum, and scandals around this market regulator were becoming more and more frequent.
At the financial committee, CRAIL even receives an unsatisfactory assessment of its work. In the company itself, changes begin at the beginning of 2023, and structural changes begin in the Ukrainian division of Pin Up.
In January 23, Maryna Ilyina withdraws as a beneficiary from Pin.AP LLC, and Bohdan Shiyan becomes its owner, changing the name to Tranitadevelopment.
At the same time, Shiyan is a clean pound with more than 50 companies registered in his name, and he himself has lawsuits for non-payment of utility bills and household loans. Obviously, Ilyina simply buried Pin-Ap LLC in this way.
But the most interesting transformation is happening with Ukrgametechnology, the company that holds the PinUp gambling license
If you are not already dizzy from this web of connections, now is the time to get completely dizzy.
On April 2, 2023, Yaroslav Fomitsky, the formal owner of PinUp and a fellow fintech investor of Igor Fisun, sells Ukrgametechnology to a new owner.
It was Igor Zotko, who from that moment on became the public face of Pinap in Ukraine, giving a lot of interviews and comments.
I don’t know if you’ll be surprised, but Igor Zotko is also very closely connected with the Russians’ partner and fintech investor Igor Fisun, and most likely the change of Pinup’s owner in Ukraine was only a formality, just like the Russians’ withdrawal from Cypriot offshore.
Judge for yourself. From 2016 to 2020, and this is confirmed by Zotko himself in an interview with NV, he headed the same payment system of Fisun, Interkassa, which served gambling market players.
«Around 2016, I accepted an offer to head Interkassa, a Ukrainian payment platform that operates in international financial markets.»
In 2019, when Fisun bought the processing company Ukrkart and Igor Zotko became its director again. He simultaneously works for Interkassa and Fisun’s Ukrkart.
But in July 2020, Zotko resigned as director of Ukrkart, left Interkassa and became the owner of the United Space Financial Company, which is unique in that it monopolistically serves all payments in the Diia application and no one can explain how this happened.
I don’t know how far FC «United Space» is an independent project of Zotko, but it is possible that he may also represent the interests of Igor Fisun, since according to the financial statements of FC «United Space» half of all company funds are kept in the bank Oxi, which is co-owned by Fisun. There are no such coincidences, you will agree.
Of course, the story of the monopoly of payments in Diia is a separate big topic, and my colleague Vlad Sidorenko has written a lot about it, but in the context of the Pinup detective and his Russian roots, it is an important episode.
It is important because at the beginning of 2023, the flow of all the finances of the state project Diia and the Pin-Up online casino, which the SBU suspects of being a Russian-controlled structure, ends up in the hands of one person.
Moreover, in an interview with NV, Zotko openly states that he has been involved in Pinap since 2020, when the Russians brought it to Ukraine, and he has been cooperating with the real owners of Pinap since 2016.
Here are the quotes
— Your second business is the PIN-UP online casino in Ukraine. Previously, you gave comments as an operational director. And this year, you became the owner. How and why did it happen?
— This path was already clear to me (smiles). But seriously, I was at all stages of creating the PIN-UP brand in Ukraine. I met its owner Maryna Ilyina back in 16-17, when I provided services to her projects in terms of payment acceptance.
When the process of gambling legalization in Ukraine started, I was working on the Single Space. However, there was a non-core investor who consulted with me, in particular, I helped to choose a brand that was not yet present in Ukraine to compete with other players. And in 2022, I received an offer to officially lead the project.
— How did you become the owner?
— At the very start, we agreed with the investor that I would have the opportunity to partially or fully buy out the project. The only thing that stopped me was the availability of sufficient funds and the investor’s desire to sell the business. We were gradually moving along this path, but the war broke out, everything turned upside down, and taxation changes were added. In general, the value system changed dramatically. At the end of the 22nd and beginning of the 23rd, the media began to put pressure on the company, which was being «painted in the tricolor,» «sewn on» to the Russian roots of PIN-UP, and other nonsense.
A number of factors came into play, perhaps something personal, so the owner decided to withdraw his investment. Not everyone is comfortable being in the epicenter of a turbulent, unformed market during a war. We parted ways very well, he didn’t lose a single penny of his investment. All obligations are closed, and we communicate sometimes.
First of all. In response to Mr. Zotko’s thesis about the nonsense of sewing on Russian roots, I want to show him again a photo from the celebration of the fifth anniversary of pinup in Ukraine in 2021.
On the festive stage, along with Marina Ilyina, whom he mentions as the owner of Pinap, are other shareholders of the parent offshore company Guruflow, her Russian husband Dmitry Punin and Russian Alexander Riddick.
For some reason, Zotko does not mention these people in the interview, but as a person who has been with Pinup since the first day, and even since 2016, he must know more about them than we have dug up.
Secondly, it is very interesting to understand who was the investor in Pinap’s emergence in Ukraine and from whom Zotko actually bought it, if he did buy it, and did not come in as a formally new owner under the old beneficiaries — the Russians with whom he had been working from the very beginning.
And it looks very much like the investor is banker Ihor Fisun, but then I wonder on what terms this project was put together with the Russians?
Who has what shares and obligations? How is the profit distributed and where is it withdrawn?
Why doesn’t KRAIL, which issued the license to Ukrgametechnology, know about this, and why doesn’t Yaroslav Fomitsky own a pound?
If Zotko’s purchase of the casino is a formal action, the actual partnership between the Russians and Fisun remains, as does the withdrawal of money from Ukraine by the Russians to offshore.
Is KRAIL not interested in this either?
In general, there are a lot of questions to KRAIL, because issuing licenses to legal entities registered for front companies and not analyzing the origin of the casino is either very unprofessional or very corrupt, and given the blindness to the facts, the second option is more profitable.
And the issue is not that we are interfering in the commercial activities of any company, but that at the time of entering Ukraine, Pinap openly concealed the presence of control by the Russians, which we have now decomposed to molecules.
And this presence was confirmed by the SBU in its letter to CRAIL, which first announced the consideration of this issue, and then got scared and hid.
In fact, someone’s invisible hand divided Russian business in Ukraine into two parts during the war. We mercilessly punish, nationalize, and close one business because it is in someone’s interest, and we protect, guard, and defend the other. This is also very profitable for someone.
Similarly, someone benefits from keeping a monopoly on the state-owned app Diia, which someone somewhere signed over to the Russians’ Pinup partner Ihor Zotko and his FC United Space.
However, the extent to which Zotko acts as an independent player in it is still an open question, as is whether his Pinup partners have access to data from Diya.
So far, there are more questions than answers, but under all these questions we have put solid facts and arguments, which, I think, should definitely be responded to this time.