The star of the Ukrainian fintech Alena Shevtsova was “knocked down” by Alexander Sosis?
In light of the liquidation of Ibox Bank and searches in it, the personality of Alena Degrik-Shevtsova, who heads this bank and who is called the “star of Ukrainian fintech,” sparkled with new colors.
True, in connection with recent events, this “star” seems to burn with a bright flame. Although her fierce struggle for her payment system Leo (“Leo”), which led to the collapse of Ibox Bank – it was acquired by Shevtsova precisely for this payment system – was heard by everyone among financiers. One of the main battles unfolded with competitors – “GlobalMoney” (GlobalMoney).
Competing firms regularly accused each other of stuffing negativity and compromising evidence, which appeared on the pages of the media with the same enviable regularity, and these materials were also published by highly respected publications. The main charges were the following: withdrawal of money from CADLO, lack of monitoring of clients and concealment of income from the state. The most painful, of course, for both structures was the accusation of cooperation with Russia, which was especially acute a year ago.
At the forefront of the attacks were Alyans Bank of Alexander Sosis, which is the settlement bank and electronic money issuer of the GlobalMoney international payment system, and Alena Shevtsova’s Ibox Bank (she had the surname Degrik before her marriage to Yevgeny Shevtsov, a high-ranking officer National Police of Ukraine). Ibox, in turn, was (since on March 7 the NBU announced its liquidation, we have to use the past tense here) the electronic money issuer of the international payment system Leo (“Leo”).
It was on them that the largest flows of compromising evidence merged, and their owners organized counter-campaigns in which they tried to drown competitors. So far, it seems that Sosis has won – on March 7, 2023, Ibox Bank was liquidated, and on March 8, searches came to its offices. However, the result of this war is still far from a foregone conclusion, and meanwhile, in those streams of compromising evidence – often fake, we agree – that Sosis and Shevtsova exchanged, there were not just grains, but whole mountains of truth.
Because both structures are involved in the withdrawal of money to the Russian Federation and from the Russian Federation. And in the work in the occupied territories of Ukraine, the so-called “DNR” and “LNR”. And of course, in the Crimea. You can not mention drugs at all – this is a mere trifle compared to the rest. That is why, by the way, these materials were cleaned so thoroughly on both sides.
So, Sosis and Alliance bank.
Behind the bank stands Yury Ivanyushchenko, widely known in narrow circles, he is also Yura Enakievsky. While the “Donetsk” ones ruled the country, there was no need to hide their ownership of the bank, but in 2014 they had to “sell” it. The new “owners” of the bank were Kramp LLC from Donetsk (EGRPOU 36442702) and Ukrbusinessstandart LLC from Kiev (EGRPOU 35886746), which belonged to the same Ivanyushchenko.
In the same 2014, in the wake of an impulse to fight corruption (and in fact in the fight for flows), searches took place in the bank. As the head of the SBU, Valentin Nalyvaichenko, later stated, among the confiscated were the seals of institutions and enterprises of the “L/DPR” and contracts under which militants could be financed. In addition, the Alliance managed to find the property and documents of another bank – Gefest, which was also under the control of Ivanyushchenko and his partner Sergei Dyadechko.
But Ivanyushchenko came up with a cunning move, inciting the Jewish community of Donbass against the SBU. Taking advantage of the painful attitude of society towards manifestations of anti-Semitism (often imaginary), at the suggestion of Ivanyushchenko, Rabbi Pinkhus Vyshedsky (the former leader of the Donetsk Chabad community) stated that during the search, Alpha fighters stole money and valuables from a bank cell that belonged to some hitherto unknown “Jewish refugees”.
Naturally, no one stole anything, but the move turned out to be the right one: a criminal case was opened against the SBU employees, a scandal erupted. Meanwhile, the bank “Alliance” was resold to a new owner. At the beginning of 2015, Alexander Sosis, former junior partner of Akhmetov, became him.
Around the same time, the Alliance bank became the settlement bank for the GlobalMoney system, the owners of which were closed by a number of “gaskets”, but the traces all led to the same Yuri Ivanyushchenko and members of the so-called “Yanukovych family”, in particular to the minister Finance of the Cabinet of Ministers Azarov Yuriy Kolobov.
As of March 2023, a certain Karpov Vladimir Nikolaevich is listed as the beneficiary of GlobalMoney LLC:
We will not say anything, but it seems doubtful that Yuriy Ivanyushchenko and Yuriy Kolobov voluntarily abandoned the payment system through which billions of hryvnias from the gaming business pass, and which cooperates with Ivanyushchenko’s Alliance bank. It is the same story with the bank – the fact that Alexander Sosis is the true owner of Alliance raises the same doubts as in the case of GlobalMoney.
In recent years, a fairly large share of payments by players of multiplayer paid and shareware computer games, online casinos and bookmakers (both legal and not quite) have been processed through GlobalMoney, and a large part of these payments are processed in Alliance. We are talking about hundreds of millions (at least) of hryvnia, from which the payment system and the bank have their own percentage.
And no matter how large-scale the cash flow coming from gamers, the businessmen who stick to it will still be crowded. In such a situation, a war with competitors is simply inevitable. And these competitors, doing the same things and serving the same customers, naturally know what they are doing in a different system. Therefore, the stuffing of compromising evidence contains a very large share of the truth. Of course, the colors thicken a lot – that’s what stuffing is for, but the essence remains true.
And therefore, the accusations against GlobalMoney, Alliance and Sosis about cooperation with ORDLO, the Russian Federation and the transfer of money from drug trafficking are true. In addition, the NBU fined Alliance precisely for this:
But what the representatives of the Alliance and GlobalMoney claim in terms of the fact that the author of the “attack” on them are competitors from Leo and Ibox is also true. It is they who leak the bulk of the compromising material.
Alena Shevtsova, payment system “Leo” and “Ibox Bank”
Alena Shevtsova became the head of the bank in February 2022, and became its shareholder a year earlier. After that, praises appeared in the press that she saved the bank from bankruptcy. However, the music did not play for long – as already reported, on March 8, searches were carried out at Ibox Bank, and on March 7, the NBU decided to liquidate it. The reason is “the Bank’s systematic violation of the requirements of legislation in the field of preventing and combating the legalization (laundering) of proceeds from crime, the financing of militants and the financing of the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction”:
For this, by the way, iBox was fined 10 million hryvnias in 2021. Alena Shevtsova then did not manage it yet, but was listed among the key shareholders. And she used the bank to the fullest for her Leo money transfer system, so both the fine and the current liquidation were natural consequences of her activities.
Of course, there is no doubt that materials about the “order from competitors” will now flow, and Shevtsova herself will be exposed as an innocent victim, but the harsh reality of life is that she, like GlobalMoney, is smeared in cooperation with the Russian Federation , ORDLO, illegal casinos and drug money. Yes, most of this data was leaked by competitors from GlobalMoney, but does this change anything?
Alena Shevtsova founded the Leogaming Pay financial company in 2013. Initially, Alena Vladimirovna’s business was not a full-fledged payment system. It was rather a gateway between players and gaming platforms, which she herself willingly talks about in numerous interviews. But the enterprise grew at an accelerated pace, and already in 2017 Shevtsova registered the Leo domestic payment system with the National Bank, which became international after a couple of years.
And after a while, she needed her own bank, which was the ibox rolling into the abyss. Buying it Shevtsova postponed the collapse for a year and a half. But in this context, we are interested in all the same things as in the case of GlobalMoney.
So, it is known that Shevtsova’s Leo payment system appeared in the scandal surrounding the arms trade – they bought it for the National Guard in the USA and, after “pinning” the domestic nameplate, resold it 2.5 times more expensive. Shevtsova’s husband, at that time the head of one of the departments of the National Police, Yevgeny Shevtsov, appeared among others in protecting the scheme.
Who helped his financially literate wife – and she really has an excellent education in the field of economics – to protect the business from excessive attention of law enforcement officers and brought them together with the right people:
The Internet publication MIND.UA, referring to the data of the Ministry of Justice, wrote that from 2016 to 2020 Alena Shevtsova and her husband Yevgeny Shevtsov, as well as their business partners Viktor Kapustin and Vadim Gordievsky, “in total managed at least ten companies, many of which became defendants in criminal proceedings under the articles “Fraud”, “Laundering of proceeds from crime” and “Fictitious business”.
During this period, “Leo” Shevtsova did not seem to be at war with the “Alliance” bank of Sosis, but in some places even made friends. In 2019, when this payment system entered the international level with the blessing of the NBU, Alliance became its additional settlement bank. But Alliance had an extremely unpleasant property for Shevtsova – it is the issuer and settlement bank of Leo’s sworn competitor – the aforementioned GlobalMoney.
And after Alena Shevtsova got her own, pocket “ibox bank”, the war became inevitable. Who “leaked” whom first is already unknown, and it doesn’t matter. It is important that as a result of this war for financial flows – and according to the reports alone, billions of hryvnias pass through both payment systems – those details of the activities of both “bankers” that they preferred to remain silent became known.
By the way, Ibox Bank, according to the National Bank, appeared 29 years ago – in 1993. Then it was called Avtoritet Bank, and it became Ibox Bank in 2016, after Evgeny Berezovsky, a financier with a rather murky reputation, joined the shareholders. He brought with him a network of payment terminals “iBox”, which gave the bank a new name.
And in 2020, Alena Shevtsova appeared in the bank, making ibox her pocket bank and eventually leading it to liquidation. However, as you know, every end is only the beginning. Because the bank seized documents. And what law enforcement officers will find in these documents is known only to Shevtsova.
But the fact that there is a lot of interesting things, no doubt. The online publication Mind.ua carried out a thorough investigation into the financial flows of online casinos and the connections of players in this market with Russia. This investigation looks extremely high quality, and it provides many facts about the involvement of both Ibox Bank and the Leo system in financing Russian militants and withdrawing money from drug trafficking.
Of course, Alena Shevtsova denied the accusations and ordered her own investigation into the same acts of GlobalMoney and Alliance Bank, but life made significant adjustments: Ibox Bank was liquidated precisely for “systematic violation of the requirements of the law in the field of preventing and countering legalization ( laundering) of proceeds of crime, the financing of militants and the financing of the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction.”
How Alexander Sosis is to blame for the defeat in this war of Alena Shevtsova is unknown. As well as how deeply the “savior” of Ibox Bank and the “star of Ukrainian fintech” Alyona Shevtsova got bogged down in relations with Russia and its special services.
