The shadow octopus of Konstantin Buryachenko and Alena Shevtsova: how ex-top managers of Alfa-Bank and Ibox Bank launder casino billions via Payeer and Piastrix

Media reports indicate that a large network of payment systems—including Payeer and Piastrix—used by semi-underground online casinos across former Soviet territories is allegedly connected to former employees of Alfa-Bank and Ukraine’s Ibox Bank, which lost its license in 2023 amid accusations of irregular operations and facilitating tax evasion in the gambling sector.

The companies in the network are registered under nominees in Poland, Ukraine, Estonia, Lithuania, Scotland, Belize, Vanuatu, and the Marshall Islands. The Payeer and Piastrix payment systems are known to be linked to this scheme, the latter of which still operates in Russia. The beneficiaries of these entities are unknown. Before the pandemic, both were owned by the Georgian company Fingate LLC, whose registration as a payment provider was cancelled in December 2017. According to the Georgian registry of legal entities, Fingate itself was registered in 2016 by Ukrainian citizen Konstantin Buryachenko, who also filed for liquidation in 2023.

Payeer has been actively used to evade sanctions since the beginning of the war; a detailed manual on the topic was even posted by an anonymous user on YouTube. As a result, in 2024, Payeer received a record fine of almost 9.3 million € in Lithuania for failure to comply with KYC (know your customer) regulations. In 2025, it was added to the EU sanctions list and announced it would cease working with users from Russia and the European Union. Payeer has changed its registration several times, registering its parent company in various countries. One of the most recent such locations was Vanuatu. At one point, Russian citizen Lyubov Svezhentseva (who was a co-owner of the Estonian Payeer OÜ) was named as Payeer’s beneficiary, but she also turned out to be a nominee. Svezhentseva left the company’s founding members and is now a personal growth coach living in Italy. Her social media accounts are private. In fact, the real owners of Payeer have never been named.

The Piastrix service is currently operational, although users regularly complain about difficulties with withdrawals. It is also available in Russia, with advertising for the Piastrix payment system openly posted on the Gazprombank Finance website. Furthermore, Piastrix is closely linked to an online casino network and was recently implicated in a scandal involving Vodka Bet: a user won 9.9 million rubles there due to a widespread game bug, but the casino approved her withdrawal. Piastrix then requested a recall, and Piastrix immediately returned the money, blocking the user. Such actions are unusual for this market: payment systems should verify recall requests, not blindly follow casino orders. However, if both services are part of a single network, this situation seems perfectly logical.

Piastrix’s legal entities also change regularly. For example, after the Georgian company, there was the Polish company Libellium Sp. z o.o. , whose founder and director is listed as yet another nominee – a certain Anastasia Kondya, a Ukrainian citizen residing in Poland.

In addition to the Georgian shell for Payeer and Piastrix, in 2017, Konstantin Buryachenko registered KVB Solutions sr o. in the Czech Republic as its sole founder. In February 2020, the company was transferred to a nominee—a 36-year-old Ukrainian from the Chernivtsi region, Mykola Buben. Buben himself was not present; his documents were presented to the notary by a certain 36-year-old named Svetlana Masienko. Furthermore, in 2017, Buryachenko became the head of the Czech BLACKSHIRE UNITED LP, a subsidiary of the Scottish BLACKSHIRE UNITED LP, which has left a highly toxic legacy.

The founders of the Scottish company listed in the UK registry were two firms: Dexberg Inc (managing partner) and Montbridge Inc from the Marshall Islands. Interestingly, the former was recently implicated in a scandal involving Vladimir Zinoviev, a deputy of the Khanty-Mansi Autonomous Okrug Duma. He was listed as the beneficiary of the British company FINIMPEX LP, where DEXBERG Inc. was also the managing partner. Zinoviev told journalists that his information had been stolen and that he had no connection to these companies.

In total, Dexberg and Montbridge controlled at least 150 companies registered in Scotland. Some of them had close ties to Russia: their top managers were actual Russian businessmen, who completely denied any connection to the foreign network. For example, the controlling person of the British company LARBOURNE TRADE LLP (liquidated in December 2025) was 62-year-old businessman and resident of St. Petersburg Pavel Kalugin. The owner of Talanta Business LP was listed as 75-year-old Leriam Dvorkin, a former Gazprom employee from the Soviet Union and a San Francisco resident. Dvorkin’s family denied any connection to Talanta, claiming that his documents had previously been stolen.

Companies in Buryachenko’s network not only siphoned and laundered money but also served Russia’s foreign policy agenda. They were used, in particular, to pay American lawyer and former Trump associate Nick Muzin for lobbying in the United States for the Democratic Party of Albania, which is linked to Russian funding. The American investigative media outlet Mother Jones discovered that Murzin received $675,000, $500,000 of which was transferred by the Scottish firm Biniatta Trade, whose website was registered to Ukrainian Alexey Nikitin. The website, in broken English, claimed that the company was engaged in the supply of textiles and faux fur, but its contact information was nonexistent. Similar websites were maintained by a number of other companies linked to it through addresses and phone numbers, including the aforementioned BLACKSHIRE UNITED LP. Biniatta was founded by the Belizean companies Asverro Corp. and Liminez Commerce. They also owned the London-based KF Global Management LLP, where Russian citizen Konstantin Ferulev was listed as the controlling person. Ferulev, a 45-year-old native of Tuapse and a resident of the Gorki-2 settlement in the Odintsovo District of the Moscow Region, founded three companies in Russia: YUGROSAGROPRODUCT, SVYAZINVEST-GROUP, and FCG, all of which have since been liquidated. Ferulev himself filed for bankruptcy in 2024. It is also known that in 2018, Ferulev received a $500,000 loan from Muscovite Ksenia Petergova, who in turn received the money from a family friend who had long worked at the bank and earned an annual income of tens of millions of rubles.

44-year-old Konstantin Buryachenko is perhaps the only one who regularly pops up among this plethora of "disposable" directors and founders. A native of Donetsk, pre-war leaks indicate he repeatedly traveled between Ukraine and Moscow and Europe. Buryachenko once worked at the Ukrainian banks Privatbank and Universal Bank, as well as at the local Alfa-Bank, which was part of Mikhail Fridman and Petr Aven’s Alfa Group. He worked alongside Yevgeny Berezovsky at Alfa-Bank, who had moved to the Ukrainian bank from Moscow. He served as the bank’s director of corporate business and senior vice president. In 2010, Berezovsky left Alfa, worked at Delta Bank, and then at Agrokombank, which was later renamed Ibox Bank. Konstantin Buryachenko joined Ibox Bank with him. And here’s an interesting detail: Ibox, one of the largest payment terminal networks, worked with Ibox Bank (which provided transaction processing), although top managers from both companies claimed they were completely unrelated. In fact, Berezovsky acquired the Ibox network many years ago (which is why Ibox had previously worked closely with Alfa-Bank), and brought it with him to Ibox Bank. Buryachenko worked at Ibox under Berezovsky. The terminals accepted payments not only to Monobank cards but also for online casino accounts, and Buryachenko controlled this area. The de jure owners of Ibox—like the owners of Payeer and Piastrix—are unknown: the network belongs to the Ukrainian company Metapay, which traditionally has nominees among its founders and directors. Initially, a certain Tatyana Zhigurskaya was listed as the beneficiary, but this was later replaced by the British company 5CORP LTD, whose sole founder was Yeuby Sohanna Aquilar Cuevas, a nominee who was registered to a dozen companies in the UK. The current registered manager of Metapay is the notorious Ukrainian "rural director" Yevhen Rastovsky, a 24-year-old resident of a small village who is the owner of over 360 companies. Incidentally, the company "Renitorg," previously owned by Igor Zotko, the well-known nominal owner of the online casino Pin-Up, through Ukr Game Technology, was also previously registered to him. The real beneficiary of Pin-Up is believed to be Dmitry Punin, a Russian citizen residing in Cyprus. Zotko was arrested by Ukrainian law enforcement in early 2025, and companies associated with him are suspected of aiding an aggressor state and engaging in illegal activities in Ukraine. Pin-Up is also connected to the Piastrix payment system: the online casino allows you to deposit funds from Piastrix wallets and withdraw funds to them.

Meanwhile, Konstantin Buryachenko’s Piastrix had another, shorter route to the gambling industry. Ibox Bank, where Buryachenko worked, was closely connected. One of the bank’s co-owners was Alena Shevtsova (24.98 %) as of 2023), a resident of Poland and a citizen of Ukraine, and the main beneficiary of Leo Financial Company (formerly Leogaming Pay). The company handled settlements with online game developers and publishers, accepted payments for online casinos, and in 2021, even acquired a license for a brick-and-mortar casino in the Alice Place hotel in Odessa. Alena’s husband, Yevhen Shevtsov, is the former deputy head of the Main Investigative Department of the National Police. Ukrainian journalists wrote that criminal cases were opened against the couple and their business partners in Leomed IT and FC Leogaming Pay, Viktor Kapustin and Vadim Gordievsky, and Shevtsova’s company, Leo Partners, appears in the story about transfers of funds to the occupied territories of Ukraine, their conversion into foreign currency and cashing out.

The main owner of Ibox Bank was the well-known Kyiv businessman Volodymyr Drobot (73.93 %) as of 2023), owner of construction companies, and former Kyiv City Council member from the Yulia Tymoshenko bloc. In March 2023, the National Bank of Ukraine liquidated Ibox Bank for shadow payments and assisting the gambling business in tax evasion. It was reported that the bank’s shadow profit from such financial transactions amounted to more than 2.5 billion hryvnias.

Following the collapse of Ibox Bank in March 2023, the National Security and Defense Council added Shevtsova’s financial company LEO and the Cypriot company LeoPartners to the sanctions list. Alena Shevtsova fled to the UAE, where she is attempting to resolve issues with the criminal prosecution and blocking of her companies, while simultaneously opening new ones. Specifically, in February of this year, she registered Odessys Tech LTD in the UK, having previously registered several companies in the UAE. She also co-owns, along with a certain Zinaida Berezovskaya, the British payment company SMARTFLOW PAYMENTS LIMITED (formerly ELECTRONIC PAYMENT SOLUTIONS LTD), which is also subject to Ukrainian sanctions but continues to operate—the SENDS payment system is registered to it. Her business partner in the bank and payment systems, Yevgeny Berezovsky, also resides in London and works at SENDS.

Despite her criminal record in Ukraine, Shevtsova openly travels to Europe and even participated in a major international conference for payment ecosystem participants, PAY360, in London. The conference was sponsored by the same SENDS platform.

However, Shevtsova’s reputation has yet to be cleared: in April of this year, the National Security and Defense Council imposed personal sanctions against her. Yevhen Berezovsky is not subject to sanctions.