The prominent media company in Ukraine, NV.ua, conducted a research on new gambling licenses which have been distributed recently. As it appeared, two companies have been granted the license by the Gambling and Lotteries Regulation Commission. These companies are Parimatch LLC and Gamedev LLC. Even though these legal bodies have been established quite recently, they already have a significant number of customers.
So, overall, there are three legal entities which have a license that allows them to deliver gambling services online. Further on in the article there will be details presented on Parimatch license and how the company earned it.
Parimatch LLC
The Parimatch company has applied for two licenses – poker and bookmaker; however, it has only been allowed to become an online casino licensee. The other ones were rejected by the authorities. The CEO of the company, which was founded on 22 November 2019 in Kyiv, is Natalia Gilevich. Whereas the owner of Parimatch LLC is Ekaterina Belorusskaya who is also the founder of Parimatch Foundation.
Sergey Portnov is a director of First PM Entertainment LTD that was established almost 3 weeks before Parimatch LLC was registered – on 5 November 2019. Both Ekaterina Belorusskaya together with Sergey Portnov are the beneficiaries of PokerMatch, the founder of which was the Cyprus company Weplay Media Holding Limited. Formerly, it was linked to the Techiia Ukrainian holding whose direction is WePlay Esports among other ones. On 12 June 2019 Weplay Media Holding Limited requested for the establishment of the WePlay; however, the application was declined. JKR Investment Group was an investor in WePlay Esports, but it sold the shares. Consequently, Parimatch took possession of the Cypriot Weplay Media Holding Limited.
Erisius Investments Limited is a Cypriot company which owns the following trademarks:
- Parimatch;
- Parimatch Sport;
- Parimatch Tech;
- PM Club, etc.
Sergey Portnov and Ioanna Paraskeva are the directors of this company. TM Parimatch was registered by Ericius Investments Limited on 3 February 2021.
Gamedev and gambling license
The company Gamedev LLC has applied for a casino license 3 times and all these requests have been turned down by the authorities because of the incomplete package of documents.
Only the fourth attempt was successful and the company got a license. Gamedev LLC was founded in December 2019 in Kyiv. Maxim Kovtonyuk and Dutch Storm International are considered to have been the co-founders of the company until December 2020. After that, Ruslan Nonka and Boettcher Michael Paul become the beneficiaries of the company. The latter one worked as a simple taxi driver in London and one day managed to establish the greatest chain of casinos in Moscow. Gamedev has a plan to request for license for offline casino in Ukraine. Slot City is the brand for Gamedev online casinos which aims to open offline gambling clubs in Ukraine.