Financial "frontman" of Cosmobet: who is behind the activities of Mikhail Zborovskiy?

13 ноября 2024

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Financial "frontman" of Cosmobet: who is behind the activities of Mikhail Zborovskiy?

This oxymoron would be laughable if the real owners of this gaming platform weren’t trying to convince everyone that a native of the village of Krasylivka, Ivano-Frankivsk region, Mykhailo Zborovskyi became the beneficiary of a casino with a charter capital of 30 million hryvnias, having neither experience nor sufficient wealth.

So, meet Mykhailo Volodymyrovych Zborovskyi, born in 1991. Beneficiary of LLC "Neuralink", which in March 2024 received a license from the Commission for the Regulation of Gambling and Lotteries of Ukraine for the Cosmobet casino. He studied at the Taras Shevchenko National University of Kyiv at the Faculty of Economics. Zborovskyi was a capable student and won in Olympiads and scientific work competitions. The university records have several mentions of his achievements. In 2012, third-year student Mykhailo Zborovskyi won the All-Ukrainian Olympiad in the specialty "Statistics".

A year later, already in his fourth year, he received a first-degree diploma at the All-Ukrainian competition of student scientific papers. The direction of his research concerned quantitative methods in economics.

In 2011, student Mykhailo Zborovskyi, who was studying in the specialty "Accounting and Audit", dreamed of "preserving the moral values instilled by family education", as well as "working in one of the companies of the Big Four". This was written by the current casino owner in a biographical reference to his article "Should Water Become a Subject of International Trade? Or is it a unique common good, a subject of international cooperation?". The article was published in a brochure within the project "Saving Energy - Saving the Future" of the Hungary-Slovakia-Romania-Ukraine ENPI Cross-Border Cooperation Program.

Thus, the future owner of the online casino Cosmobet, which flooded all possible platforms with its advertising, was a good student who loved statistics and was interested in global issues. However, it is obvious that neither computer technologies nor the gambling business were areas of his interest.

Apparently, Mykhailo Zborovskyi had financial difficulties during his student years. After all, in 2018, the Taras Shevchenko National University turned to the Holosiivskyi District Court with a claim to recover the tuition fee from him.

According to the official biography of Mykhailo Zborovskyi, which was "stuffed" by bubble websites to promote him on Google, after studying, he worked as an economist in a bank, and then for three years took programming courses, up until 2019. The court register confirms that a person with the same name was unemployed in 2017 and drove a budget car Seat Cordoba. Currently, the highest price for such a car is 4,000 dollars. So, six years before becoming the official beneficiary of the online casino Cosmobet, Mykhailo Zborovskyi was definitely not a millionaire and was even unemployed for a long time.

One might assume that after retraining from an economist to a programmer, Zborovskyi’s affairs sharply improved. But here, too, it doesn’t add up. It is unlikely that the salary in the companies in which he worked could become a significant investment in the gambling business. At least their financial statements do not give even a hint of million-dollar turnovers.

The authors of his widely circulated biography report that he serviced LLC "Adtek", LLC "Epic Media" and Rikkicom as a programmer. In the first, he officially worked in 2023 with only one employee, and the authorized capital is 50,000 hryvnias.

The capital of the second is even less - 10,000 hryvnias. Both companies operate at the same address in Odesa, although they are in different offices.

The third company - Rikkicom, in which Mykhailo Zborovskyi allegedly worked, is somewhat better known. As stated on the official website, its clients are the retail chain Novus, OKKO gas stations, and the Parimatch online casino, which is under the sanctions of the National Security and Defence Council. And this is the only connection that tied Zborovskyi to the gambling business until 2023, when he became the beneficiary of the company "Neuralink", which owns the license for the Cosmobet online casino. However, he was unlikely to get rich quickly at Rikkicom. According to financial indicators, this company received only 133,000 hryvnias in revenue in 2023.

Another version of Zborovskyi’s biography mentions another company where he was involved in programming - XGen Solutions LTD. The company indeed operates in the IT and consulting spheres and is located in Cyprus.

This same company is mentioned in the case materials regarding the online casino "Cosmolot", which is suspected of evading taxes for a billion hryvnias. Investigators report that in 2023 the casino had an agreement with the Cypriot company XGen Solutions LTD for the use of licensed software. It turned out that "Kosmolot" allegedly owed the Cypriot firm about 300 million hryvnias, which were declared to the tax authorities as royalties. The casino stated that it paid the company from Cyprus for the software, but in fact, no payments were made. Antikor wrote about this, telling about the real owner of "Cosmolot" - Russian citizen Sergey Tokaryev.

The mention of the Cypriot company XGen Solutions LTD in the biography of the nominal owner of Cosmobet Mykhailo Zborovskyi is, as they say in slang, a real epic fail. It turns out that he worked for the company that was used by another casino, "Cosmolot", to deceive the Ukrainian tax authorities. Thus, the connection of the real owner of "Cosmolot", Russian citizen Tokaryev, with the new online casino Cosmobet becomes even more apparent. Although journalists spoke about this a few months ago.

The question arises: why was it necessary to directly link the named beneficiary of Cosmobet, Mykhailo Zborovskyi, with a Cypriot company that leads to Russian roots and the scandalous "Cosmolot"? And why did a simple statistician with a student debt and minimal IT work experience appeal so much to the Russian owners of Cosmobet that they began to "mold" him into a guru of the gambling sphere? However, the obviousness that Mykhailo Zborovskyi is simply a "patsy" in the position of the owner of Cosmobet, given his biography and experience, leaves practically no doubt.