The gambling business has played out: where incompetent adventurers brought it

The gambling market has been illegal for almost 10 years. As soon as he began to legalize and “bleach”, Ukrainian realities dragged him into corruption and shadow schemes. And behind this are specific people who, with their incompetence and greed, created the Ukrainian “playing Frankenstein”.

The legalization of the gambling business (in the format of opening a casino in 5* hotels in certain territories) was included in the list of election promises of President Volodymyr Zelensky. At that time, the presidential candidate proposed, in fact, to attract money to certain territories by increasing their tourist attractiveness. But, unfortunately, some characters in the guarantor’s team radically changed his sincere idea. And in Ukraine, they have introduced such a model of the gambling market that does not provide either adequate regulation, or observance of the interests of society, or, in the end, the same increase in the tourist attractiveness of individual regions.

As a result, new scandals constantly arise around the gambling market: non-payment of taxes, issuance of licenses to operators associated with the aggressor country, etc. It got to the point that the Cabinet of Ministers took the initiative to liquidate the state regulator - the Commission for the Regulation of Gambling and Lotteries (CRAIL) and submitted a corresponding bill to the Verkhovna Rada.

So how did a good initiative to bring order to the gambling market turned into what we have now? Who is behind this victory?

A fairly systematic study of this issue by journalist Alexander Kramarenko can be read on the Gdengi channel. He quite carefully described the entire “successful path” of adventurers, without any knowledge and experience in the gambling business, successfully parasitizing and receiving insane dividends.

Trojan Varangian

The architects of the newly opened gambling market were Boris Baum and Kirill Timoshenko, people who were able to surprisingly gain the confidence of the President and impose their vision on him.

Both Baum and Tymoshenko have repeatedly become the subjects of journalistic investigations (which are quite easy to find with the appropriate search query). Moreover, if Tymoshenko was considered more like an ordinary corrupt official, then Baum is a much more interesting matter.

Boris Baum is connections with the deputies of the State Duma of the Russian Federation Babakov, Giner and Voevodin (outright haters of Ukraine), and work as the general producer of the RTVI TV channel (the mouthpiece of Rospropaganda), and the citizenship of another country, and much more.

It was he who became the Russians’ guide to the Ukrainian gambling market. By the way, it was the Russians who sponsored his thematic conferences, actively commented on the legislative process, and came to consult. Yes, and the very model of legalization of the “game” was frankly called a mix of Russian, Belarusian and Kazakh legislation.

And already in June 2022, a scandal erupted in the Ukrainian media space: InformNapalm investigators learned that thanks to Baum, already during the war, the Russian betting company 1xBet received a license to operate in Ukraine.

But the most interesting thing is not even this, but the fact that both “architects of legalization” (and then the “gray cardinals” of the market) as of 2019 had almost no experience in the gambling business. Baum (according to him) once periodically visited casinos with business partners and worked briefly in Bulgaria as a manager of an online casino company. Tymoshenko’s experience in the gambling business was even more “serious” than that of Baum.didn’t really understand“, what it is.

It is not surprising that these “experts” pushed through the Verkhovna Rada such a model of state regulation that allowed businesses to feel great and not pay taxes to the budget even during the war. As a result, according to people’s deputy Yaroslav Zheleznyak, “the state did not see somewhere around UAH 10 billion per month of turnover“.

With the rest, either due to constant scandals, or for some other reason, both lost the confidence of the President and disappeared from sight to give way to a new “face of business”.

The long arm of the Kremlin

It is Baum and Timoshenko that we “thank” the appearance on the stage of the influential “hero” of the Ukrainian gaming market, Anton Kuchukhidze. Interestingly, he positions himself at the same time as an international political scientist, a military expert, an expert in the gambling business, and almost a specialist in the fight against coronavirus.

It is Kuchukhidze who is appointed as Baum’s deputy in the Advisory and Expert Council under the regulator of the Commission for the Regulation of Gambling and Lotteries (CRAIL). But that is not all. He also leads the newly re-Ukrainian Gambling Council, a lobbying organization that aims to defend the interests of gambling operators. And this despite the fact that Kuchukhidze (if you look closely at his public statements) has never been an expert on the gambling market at all. This is a random person in this area.

It is not difficult to guess that he owes his entry into this niche to the Kremlin bosses of his patron Baum and lobbyists inside Ukraine. Judge for yourself: Anton started as an expert on Medvedchuk’s channels, in the VIII convocation of the Verkhovna Rada he was an assistant to the people’s deputy from the “Opposition Bloc” of Sergei Larin, and in 2014 he ran for No. 77 in the Rada from the same party. Now Kuchukhidze is published on such media resources of Lyovochkin as Ukrainian News.

Before Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, he never hid his pro-Russian views and ridiculed all initiatives to overcome Russia since its invasion of Donbas in 2014. However, even today he has an opposite opinion and even predicts the collapse of Russia.

The pro-Russian past is directly marked on his business success, namely in lobbying Russian companies on the Ukrainian market, bypassing sanctions. Kuchukhidze, under the patronage of the same current pro-Russian deputies who still remain in the Rada, is quietly pushing Russian gambling companies into the Ukrainian market. Under the guise, of course, Ukrainian.

Zero bet

Today Kuchukhidze is the chief expert on the gambling business, the face of the market, but he does not understand anything either in the gambling business (where he never worked) or in state regulation (where he also did not work) - and is not able to realize his own incompetence.

Being in the status of the “face of the market”, he does not even feel responsible for the systemic tax evasion of the market (he even continues to say that this is a lie and manipulation). As a matter of fact, he is in no hurry to comment on the story about the connections of gambling operators close to him with the aggressor state.

And here the question arises: what else will he advise the CRAIl regulator and in whose favor will these advices be? Business? Or maybe old acquaintances - Russians? In any case, these “expert” advice will definitely not be in favor of the Ukrainian society. Moreover, it was not the activities of such “experts” that eventually prompted the Cabinet of Ministers to the idea of ​​terminating the activities of CRAIL together with experts and advisers?

Pictured in the header is Anton Kuchukhidze