Online casinos VBet and Pin-Up are looking for opportunities to withdraw almost UAH 3 billion from Ukraine, and the Prosecutor General’s Office continues to monitor these attempts. This was reported by journalist Yevhen Plinsky on Telegram.
In early April, the State Financial Monitoring Service blocked the accounts of casinos suspected of collaborating with the enemy for 30 days. During this time, the Prosecutor General’s Office was supposed to prepare measures for a long-term, not temporary, arrest of accounts to prevent operators from withdrawing money from the country.
“But prosecutors did not run away, they are watching what is happening and waiting for something. At the same time, they have a huge amount of evidence on VBet and Pin-Up on their desk. As for Pin-Up, in fact, we are talking about economic terrorism, when under the pretext of online casino activities, the laundering of Ukrainians’ funds to offshore was organized, and their further legalization through the purchase of assets in Cyprus by the main investor, Russian Dmitry Punin,” reminds Yevhen Plinsky.
He adds that while British law enforcement is seriously investigating Punin, in Ukraine, Prosecutor General Andriy Kostin is giving interviews to Forbes, which is owned by VBet co-owner and Belarusian businessman Artur Granz.
“Artur Granz is doing everything right. By giving Kostin the front page, Granz is addressing the issue of prosecutors’ loyalty to both VBet and his monopoly DutyFree network, which falsely sold dozens of liters of alcohol and hundreds of packs of cigarettes to Ukrainians during the war. Have you heard of any criminal cases related to this scheme? There was a scheme, there were losses to the state, even a separate law was passed against this lawlessness, but there are no criminal cases against the implementers of the scheme,” writes Yevhen Plinsky. (Forbes project manager Volodymyr Fedorin claims that no one but the editorial staff manages either the front or back pages of the publication).
According to his sources, VBet and Pin-Up plan to “hold off” the prosecutor’s office until May 20, when the temporary blocking of money expires, and quickly withdraw it from Ukraine.
As a reminder, the NSDC decision stipulates that the Commander-in-Chief of the Armed Forces and the leadership of military formations should ban military personnel from accessing gambling facilities and participating in online gambling for the period of martial law.
The initiator of the changes was Pavlo Petrychenko, a junior sergeant of the 59th Separate Motorized Infantry Brigade named after Yakov Handziuk, who created the petition. He was killed at the front on April 15, and the next day, President Volodymyr Zelenskyy promised to consider the petition to ban online casinos in Ukraine in his evening video address.
