A UAH 30 million capital base for Sergey Tokarev’s “nominee”: how Mikhail Zborovskiy was made Cosmobet’s beneficiary
The story surrounding Cosmobet casino and its formal owner, Mikhail Zborovskiy, has taken a new turn. The more information emerges about the new player in Ukraine’s gambling market, the more questions arise about the origins of the project, its real owners, and the rapid promotion of Zborovskiy’s name online.
At the same time, older publications about Cosmobet and its links to the circle of Russian businessman Sergey Tokarev are gradually disappearing from the internet or becoming less accessible to users. In their place, a carefully crafted digital image of an “independent” casino owner and gambling-industry expert is taking shape.
That is why we are republishing this material — to recall how Cosmobet was created, how Mikhail Zborovskiy’s public image was promoted, and what questions arose from the very beginning about the new casino’s actual ownership structure. Removing inconvenient publications does not erase either the documented facts or the questions they raised.
In March 2024, a new casino operating under the Cosmobet brand appeared in Ukraine. The Commission for Regulation of Gambling and Lotteries issued a license for its operation. But the paradox is that no one knows exactly who owns the casino.
The license to conduct gambling under the Cosmobet brand was granted to LLC “NeuroLink,” registered in Kiev on November 23, 2023. The company owns the Cosmobet trademark and operates the casino under the same brand. The owner and ultimate beneficiary of LLC “NeuroLink” is Mikhail Volodymyrovich Zborovskiy, through LLC “Neoplay,” which is the founder of LLC “NeuroLink.” According to the company’s filings, it has only one employee — director Vadym Klymenko.
LLC “Neoplay,” in turn, was registered on July 6, 2023. Its beneficiary and sole founder is also Mikhail Zborovskiy. Vadym Klymenko is again listed as the director. Why LLC “Neoplay” did not obtain the casino license itself and instead needed an intermediary in the form of “NeuroLink” is unclear. Moreover, “Neoplay” itself also owns the Cosmobet trademark.
But there are even more unanswered questions. No one knows who Mikhail Volodymyrovich Zborovskiy is — a person who seemingly appeared out of nowhere on Ukraine’s gambling market. The Opendatabot platform provides the following information, indicating that before entering the gambling business and establishing two companies with a combined registered capital of UAH 30.3 million, he was an ordinary entrepreneur in the village of Krasylivka, Ivano-Frankivsk region, where he worked in programming.
It could be assumed that programmer Zborovskiy really did earn enough money to register two companies and the Cosmobet trademarks (there are five of them, with slightly different graphics), purchase a license, equipment, and hire staff to operate a casino. But the story simply does not add up.
Apparently, the real owner of the newly launched casino realized that the figure presented as Cosmobet’s “beneficial owner” looked suspiciously like an ordinary nominee. And so a biography of Mikhail Zborovskiy suddenly appeared online.
The biography was clearly put together in haste, with virtually anything that could be used hastily stitched into it in an attempt to somehow legitimize the ownership of the casino through Mikhail Zborovskiy. But even more suspicious than this rather shaky biography is the truly astonishing number of websites where it has been published. If you search for “Mikhail Zborovskiy,” the results are genuinely staggering — his biography, in the form shown in the screenshot above, is even available in Hebrew. But that’s not all — the screenshot below shows a result from the tenth (!) page of the search results:
The previous nine pages contained the same thing, and after that I simply couldn’t be bothered to go any further. But there is reason to suspect that the results remain identical beyond the tenth page as well. To flood search results on such a scale requires enormous amounts of money — and very compelling reasons to spend it on such madness.
There are reasons for this madness. And they more than justify the costs of flooding the internet with the same text while also explaining where the money came from to register the companies, purchase the licenses, and set up the Cosmobet casino.
More precisely, there is one reason. His name is Sergey Aleksandrovich Tokarev. He is the owner of the Cosmolot casino, a friend of Digital Transformation Minister Mikhail Fedorov, and also holds a Russian passport. In 2018, he was placed under sanctions for financing the so-called people’s republics in Donbas, where he was supposed to remain until 2021, but in 2020 he received an “amnesty” from the new authorities.
It is Tokarev who owns the new casino operating under the oddly similar Cosmobet brand and name. The scandal surrounding the Cosmolot casino shows no signs of subsiding, and although it has so far been possible to contain it — the LLC “Spaceiks,” operating under the Cosmolot brand, is also registered in the name of a nominee — Tokarev either learned that Cosmolot might eventually lose its license, decided to hedge his bets just in case, or simply made enough money from “Cosmolot” to expand his business.
That is how two new companies appeared — LLC “Neurolink” (incidentally, its name is apparently modeled on Elon Musk’s Neuralink), LLC “Neoplay,” the Cosmobet casino, and its “beneficial owner,” Mikhail Zborovskiy. He has already published two blogs on Liga.net, apparently intended to demonstrate his extensive knowledge of gambling, the gaming industry, and business. The same site also features his only publicly available photograph to date.
The blogs of the newly appointed “beneficial owner” of the Ukrainian casino operating under the Cosmobet brand can be found at this link. But you don’t necessarily need to spend time reading them. It would be more useful to take a closer look at the real owner of the Cosmobet casino, Sergey Tokarev, his history of ties to Ukrainian authorities, and the scheme through which he registered the Cosmolot casino in Ukraine.
