As you know, on March 30, 2022, on the 36th day of the full-scale invasion of the Russian Federation into Ukraine, the Commission for the Regulation of Gambling and Lotteries issued a license to operate in Ukraine to the Russian gambling office 1xBet, which supports the war against Ukraine, which caused a scandal in the Ukrainian society, outraged the fact that the authorities give the opportunity to earn money in Ukraine to citizens of the Russian Federation during open and brutal aggression from Russia.
On the website of the President of Ukraine, a petition demanding to ban the operation of 1xBet in Ukraine collected the necessary 25,000 votes in a week. According to the law, in this case, President of Ukraine Volodymyr Zelensky must respond to the questions raised in the petition. At the moment, the petition on the President’s website has already received the status “under consideration”.
In the meantime, while trying to figure out through whose fault and on whose instructions CRAIl issued the license to the Russians, the President’s Office “reached out” to the head of the faction of the Servant of the People party, David Arakhamia. As it turned out, it was he who instructed Boris Baum, curator of the gambling business, to lobby for the issuance of a 1xBet license. According to sources in the OP, on the eve of the decision to license the Russian operator, CRAIL members had a video call with Boris Baum, during which the latter convinced the commission members of the uncontested need to issue a license to Your Betting Company operating under the Russian brand 1xBet. To the objections of the members of the commission, Baum replied that the adoption of this decision was personally approved by David Arakhamia.
As you know, Boris Baum and David Arakhamia are far from strangers. They were neighbors in the cottage town “Romanovo” near Kyiv, and, as previously reported by the media, it was Arakhamia who brought Boris Baum to Bankovaya as a potential curator of the gambling market.
It should be noted that law enforcement agencies have already taken up the issue of 1xBet. According to the head of the Bureau of Economic Security Vadim Melnik, the bureau has already demanded all the documents on the basis of which CRAIL issued a license to Your Betting Company LLC. In addition, back in April, a month after this company received a license for betting activities under the 1xBet brand owned by citizens of the Russian Federation, the National Police of Ukraine opened criminal proceedings against it under Article 190 (“Fraud”) and Part 3 of Art. 110-2 (“Financing of actions committed with the aim of forcibly changing the state border of Ukraine, overthrowing the constitutional order or seizing state power out of selfish motives or by prior conspiracy of a group of persons”).