Automatically translated version. May contain inaccuracies compared to the original.
The owner of the Ukrainian lottery Patriot, a Russian Oleg Boyko, officially finances the Russian army. This is stated in a report by Nadia Burdei.
Patriot PJSC, through the Cypriot Cehriba Investments Limited, is part of the investment holding Finstar, owned by Russian billionaire Oleg Boyko. The Patriot owner has a lottery business at home as well. In Russia, Boyko is the operator of the lottery Victory, with profits from which are directed to supporting the Russian army.
The Russian businessman evidently compensates for his costs in Ukraine. After all, profit reshuffling in Ukraine is more favorable to businesspeople. In Russia, besides taxes, operators pay the state a further 10% of revenues.
In addition to Patriot, there are two other operators in Ukraine: LLC M.S.L and Ukrainian National Lottery.
LLC M.S.L is controlled by one of the wealthiest Russians, Mikhail Friedman. Ukrainian National Lottery belongs to an offshore from the Virgin Islands, “Olympic Gold Holdings Limited.”
Over 2,5 years they officially earned 3 billion UAH, contributions to the budget totaled 720 million UAH. Another 13,5 billion went to the prize fund.
Meanwhile, the state created for lottery operators the most favorable conditions. The point is that since March 2014 year all Ukrainian lottery operators have been operating without licenses and without paying for their activities.
According to the Law on State Lotteries from 2012 year, which canceled old licenses, if the state did not create new regulatory acts, operators continue their activities without licenses.
The regulator in the lottery market is the Ministry of Finance. However, this ministry has not initiated any changes to the law nor prepared documents for licensing in the last two years.
In 2010, the then head of the Ministry of Finance, Viktor Pynzenyk, proposed increasing the cost of the license document to 40 million UAH for one type of gambling activity. Now, by issuing licenses to operators, the state could raise at least 160 million UAH.
It is worth noting that the term “state” or “state-run” in the lottery names by no means implies that the state has any involvement.
Russian business also earns in Ukraine from supplying gaming machines, in particular for the KING network of gambling establishments, which today also sell what look like lottery tickets through “special terminals.”
“The first terminals were manufactured in Russia. Later they began to be produced in Ukraine,” says Sergei Boyko, a lawyer of the company Lotostar, which owns the KING network of gambling establishments.
The lawyer claims that previously the machines for KING clubs were manufactured by the Russian company martGames, and now by the Ukrainian LLC LOTOPROM.
However, there is a court case in the register about the import of gaming machines from Russia. The company UkrLotoprom sued Sumy Customs over inflated tariffs for the transportation of gaming machines. The founder of UkrLotoprom is Valeriy Romashov, owner of Lotoprom. And the manufacturer of the machines that the businessman is importing from Russia to Ukraine is the Russian company Stal-Kom.
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