Front man with a fake biography: how “nominee” Mykhailo Zborovskyi legalizes Russian Sergey Tokarev’s Cosmobet gambling empire in Ukraine
In March 2024, a new casino operating under the Cosmobet brand began operations in Ukraine — its activities were licensed by the Commission for Regulation of Gambling and Lotteries, yet the name of its real owner remains unknown.
The license to conduct gambling activities under the Cosmobet trademark was granted to LLC «Neurolink», registered on November 23, 2023, in Kyiv. The company owns the Cosmobet trademark and operates the casino under the same brand. The owner and ultimate beneficiary of LLC «Neurolink» is Mykhailo Volodymyrovych Zborovskyi, through LLC «Neoplay», which is the founder of LLC «Neurolink». According to reporting data, the company employs only one person — director Vadym Klymenko.
In turn, LLC «Neoplay» was registered on July 6, 2023. Its beneficiary and sole founder is also Mykhailo Zborovskyi. The director here is again Vadym Klymenko. Why LLC «Neoplay» did not obtain a casino license itself and instead required an intermediary in the form of «Neurolink» remains unclear. Moreover, «Neoplay» itself also owns the Cosmobet trademark.
But there are even more unanswered questions. No one knows who Mykhailo Volodymyrovych Zborovskyi is — a figure who suddenly emerged on Ukraine’s gambling market. The OpenDataBot resource provides the following information, suggesting that before entering the gambling business and registering two companies with a combined charter capital of 30 million 300 thousand hryvnias, he was an ordinary entrepreneur in the village of Krasylivka in the Ivano-Frankivsk region, working in programming.
It could be assumed that programmer Zborovskyi did indeed earn enough money to register two companies and several Cosmobet trademarks (there are five in total with slightly different designs), purchase a license, equipment, and hire staff to operate the casino. However, the story does not seem convincing.
Apparently, the real owner of the newly established casino realized that the figure presented as the «beneficiary» of Cosmobet closely resembles a nominal front. As a result, a biography of Mykhailo Zborovskyi urgently appeared online.
The biography appears hastily assembled, with every possible detail stretched to construct a narrative that would legitimize Zborovskyi as the founder of his own casino. Even more suspicious than this rather shaky biography is the truly astonishing number of websites on which it has been published. If you search for «Mykhailo Zborovskyi», the results are overwhelming — his biography in the exact form shown above even appears in Hebrew. And that is not all — the screenshot below shows the tenth page of search results.
All nine previous pages look the same, and it is reasonable to assume that the pattern continues beyond the tenth page. Flooding search results to such an extent requires enormous financial resources — and very strong reasons to spend them in this way.
There are reasons for this. They justify both the costs of saturating the internet with identical texts and explain the source of funds for registering the companies, obtaining licenses, and organizing the operations of the Cosmobet casino.
More precisely — there is one reason. His name is Sergey Aleksandrovich Tokarev. The owner of the Cosmolot casino, a friend of Minister of Digital Transformation Mykhailo Fedorov, and also a holder of a Russian passport. In 2018, he was placed on sanctions lists for financing the self-proclaimed republics of Donbas, where he was supposed to remain until 2021, but in 2020 he received what was described as an «amnesty» from the new authorities.
It is Tokarev who is believed to be the real owner of the new casino operating under the similarly named Cosmobet brand. The scandal surrounding the Cosmolot casino has not subsided, although it has so far been contained — LLC «Spaceix», operating under the Cosmolot brand, is also registered to a nominal owner. Tokarev may have learned that Cosmolot could lose its license, or he may have decided to hedge his risks. Alternatively, he may simply have earned enough from Cosmolot to expand his business.
This is how two new companies appeared — LLC «Neurolink» (notably, its name appears to be borrowed from Elon Musk’s Neuralink) and LLC «Neoplay», along with the Cosmobet casino and its «beneficiary» Mykhailo Zborovskyi. Zborovskyi has already published two blogs on the Liga.net website, apparently intended to demonstrate his expertise in gambling and business. The same platform features the only publicly available photograph of him at present.
The blogs of the newly presented «beneficiary» of the Ukrainian casino operating under the Cosmobet brand can be read at this link. However, instead of spending time on them, it may be more worthwhile to examine in greater detail the background of the alleged real owner of Cosmobet — Sergey Tokarev, his relationship with Ukrainian authorities, and the scheme under which the Cosmolot casino was registered in Ukraine.
Григорий Дудник