In March 2024, a new casino opened in Ukraine operating under the Cosmobet brand – the Commission for the Regulation of Gambling and Lotteries issued a license for its activities. However, the paradox is that no one really knows who exactly owns this casino.
The license to conduct gambling under the Cosmobet brand was granted to NeuroLink LLC, registered on November 23, 2023, in Kyiv. It owns the Cosmobet trademark and operates the casino under the same brand. The owner and ultimate beneficiary of NeuroLink LLC is Mikhail Vladimirovich Zborovsky, through NeoPlay LLC, which is the founder of NeuroLink LLC. According to the company’s reports, only one person works there – the director, Vadim Klimenko.
NeoPlay LLC, in turn, was registered on July 6, 2023, with Mikhail Zborovsky as its beneficiary and sole founder. The director is also Vadim Klimenko. It remains unclear why NeoPlay LLC did not directly acquire a casino license and instead needed a “front” company in the form of NeuroLink. Moreover, NeoPlay itself also owns the Cosmobet trademark.
The situation becomes even more puzzling. No one knows who Mikhail Vladimirovich Zborovsky is, suddenly emerging in Ukraine’s gambling market. The resource Opendatabot provides the following information: before entering the gaming business and founding two companies with a combined authorized capital of 30,300,000 hryvnias, he was an ordinary entrepreneur in the village of Krasylivka, Ivano-Frankivsk region, where he worked in programming.
It’s possible that programmer Zborovsky indeed earned enough money to register two companies and the Cosmobet trademarks (there are five in total, each with slightly different designs), purchase a license, acquire equipment, and hire staff to run the casino. But the story clearly doesn’t quite add up.
Apparently, the real owner of the newly established casino realized that the figure of Cosmobet’s “beneficiary” looked suspiciously ordinary. That’s why a biography of Mikhail Zborovsky suddenly appeared online.
The biography was clearly thrown together hastily, with every possible detail stretched to fit, just to somehow legitimize Mikhail Zborovsky as the figure behind the casino. But even more suspicious than this rather shaky biography is the sheer number of platforms where it has been posted.
If you type “Mikhail Zborovsky” into a search engine, the results are truly astonishing – the biography, in the form shown above, even appears in Hebrew. And that’s not all – the screenshot below shows the result on the tenth (!) page of the search results:
All of the previous nine pages were the same, and after that it was simply too tedious to check further, though there are suspicions that the results remain similar beyond the tenth page. Flooding search results like this requires a huge amount of money — and very strong reasons to spend it on such an absurd endeavor.
There are reasons for this madness. They fully justify both the expense of filling the internet with the same text and explain where the funds came from — for all of this, for registering the companies, for purchasing licenses, and for setting up the operations of the Cosmobet casino.
More precisely, there is one main reason. His name is Sergey Alexandrovich Tokarev. Owner of the Cosmolot casino, friend of the Minister of Digital Transformation Fedorov, and also holder of a Russian passport. In 2018, he was added to sanctions lists for financing popular “jamahiriyahs” in Donbass, where he was supposed to stay until 2021, but in 2020 he received an “amnesty” from the new authorities.
It is Sergey Tokarev who is the true owner of the new casino operating under the oddly similar brand and name, Cosmobet. The scandal surrounding the Cosmolot casino hasn’t died down, and although it has so far been managed — SpaceX LLC, operating under the Cosmolot brand, is also registered to a nominee — Tokarev either learned that his Cosmolot might lose its license, decided to hedge his bets, or simply made enough money from Cosmolot to expand his business.
This is how the two new companies appeared — NeuroLink LLC (whose name, by the way, is clearly copied from Elon Musk’s Neuralink) and NeoPlay LLC, along with the Cosmobet casino and its “beneficiary” Mikhail Zborovsky. Zborovsky has already posted two blogs on Liga.net, intended to showcase his supposed expertise in gambling and business. The site also features his only publicly available photograph to date.
You can read the blogs of the newly minted “beneficiary” of the Ukrainian casino Cosmobet via this link — though it’s probably not worth your time. It’s far more informative to take a closer look at the real owner of Cosmobet, Sergey Tokarev, his connections with the Ukrainian authorities, and the scheme through which he registered Cosmolot casino in Ukraine.
