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Automatically translated version. May contain inaccuracies compared to the original.
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Maksim Sihalov, who is involved in a corruption scheme for siphoning funds from casinos, has been feeling free at large for 4 years. Rasim Tagiyev is also not on the defendants’ bench with him.
Sihalov is currently being sought for extradition from Spain. However, the prosecutor’s office declined to comment on that point, and the Bureau of Economic Security actually “lost” one of the criminal proceedings concerning Sihalov’s companies.
The Office of the Prosecutor General declares three parallel investigations.
✔️No.72022000400000003 dated 19.09.2022, HSU of the SBI.
✔️No.72025001510000016 dated 25.09.2025, BEB
✔️No.72024001510000001 dated 03.05.2024, BEB
The Bureau of Economic Security acknowledged the existence of only one criminal case, No. 72024001500000001 dated 03.05.2024, under Art. 212 part 3 and 209 part 3 of the Criminal Code of Ukraine. The second proceeding was not mentioned at all. It is therefore unclear whether Tsyvinsky’s agency is intentionally hiding another proceeding or whether the level of organizational work is such that it truly was lost.
The SBI confirmed the existence of proceeding No. 72022000400000003 dated 19.09.2022 and briefly outlined the essence of the suspicions: officials of a number of companies, in prior collusion with unidentified persons, using the details of fictitious firms, evaded paying taxes in especially large amounts, illegally organized gambling without a license, unlawfully used someone else’s trademark, and conducted financial transactions with signs of money laundering.
The first criminal proceeding regarding Sihalov’s structures, including “Diamond Pay,” was opened as early as 19 September 2022 — almost four years ago. Since then, the National Bank established that the company serviced up to 70% of all gaming payments in Ukraine: seven of its eight clients were gambling operators. 22 July 2024, after the July 19 cancellation of the company’s registration as a participant in the Visa and Mastercard payment systems, the regulator revoked Diamond Pay’s license — the official reason, according to the NBU, was false information in documents and the owners’ links to the Russian Federation.
However, neither that nor the criminal proceedings or freezes on the company’s accounts stopped the illegal business. At the end of August 2024, perpetrators attempted to withdraw at least 53,8 million UAH from Diamond Pay’s arrested accounts via sham claims by affiliated companies — Tach-Star, Middlesky, Kiramit and others — and at the beginning of October attempted another 72,5 million UAH, presenting the transfers as payment for “advertising services” and “software development.”
Sihalov’s payment infrastructure did not disappear; it went underground: settlements were moved to a P2P format — transfers between individuals that are harder for banks’ financial monitoring tools to trace.
This is exactly the algorithm detected by inspections of the NBU and Financial Monitoring: illegal operators switching to P2P payments and recruiting a network of drops — people whose bank cards are used to split up and mask financial flows.
By approximate estimates, the volume of such operations at Diamond Pay over just two years reached 238,17 billion UAH, a significant portion of which came from cards issued in the RF.
Despite this, law enforcement has still been unable to bring Sihalov to justice. Instead, the businessman bought a villa in Marbella, Spain, and freely travels around Europe in a Rolls‑Royce worth half a million euros.
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