Who is behind Maksym Krippa? Scandalous acquisitions and secret connections

Debates about who Maksym Krippa is have broken many lances. Some claim he is a brilliant businessman, others claim he is an equally brilliant fraudster, and still others that he is merely a facade for Russian capital in Ukraine.

There are other versions, but they are too strange, as Maksym Krippa appears in them as a volcanologist, writer, football player, musician, even a Muslim preacher. However, there is nothing strange about this – the internet thus becomes filled with blatant nonsense meant to disguise the true face of this person. If he even exists at all. Because if you meticulously study all the materials available about Maksym Krippa, a strong suspicion arises that this person is a fake. A peculiar homunculus created by his puppeteers from the FSB Russia.

Regarding the personality (or mask) of Maksym Krippa being backed by the FSB, there is hardly any doubt. Some details and names vary, but all researchers of Krippa’s phenomenon agree that working for the Russian oligarch and ideologue of the "Russian world" Konstantin Malofeev (co-owner of PJSC "Rostelecom") and Mikhail Oseevsky (head of PJSC "Rostelecom"), under whose networks Krippa promoted online casinos banned in Russia, he could not have avoided being in the field of view of special services.

The second established fact is that in 2020, after a five-year absence, Maksym Krippa suddenly appears out of nowhere in Ukraine and becomes a major businessman, buying up top real estate in the country, which is sold at auctions by the State Property Fund. Moreover, at overtly throwaway prices, and the auctions themselves appear quite strange and clearly "tailored" for someone who needs to win. And the winners are firms owned by Maksym Krippa – directly or through intermediaries.

The most scandalous acquisition by Krippa was the purchase of the "Dnipro" hotel in the center of Kyiv in 2020, which LLC "Smartland," owned by Maksym Krippa and registered a week before the beginning of the so-called "trades," bought at a deliberately undervalued price. After the ensuing scandal, Krippa’s involvement was denied, but ultimately the fact became undeniable. After that, there were other, no less strange auctions, as a result of which Krippa acquired a substantial list of property in Ukraine.

The third reliably established fact regarding Maksym Volodymyrovych Krippa is that a considerable number of legal entities are registered in his name, through which he owns everything listed above and much more.

The fourth fact is Krippa’s attempt to enter the Kyiv City Council in 2015 from the "Samopomich" party, ending in scandal and his flight to Moscow, where he hid until 2020, when he suddenly appeared in Kyiv as a "major investor."

Fifth is that no one has personally seen Maksym Krippa since 2015. And the photo circulating online is the only one and raises doubts about its authenticity. Because on social networks, there are other people registered under this photo.

However, judging by the memories of "Samopomich" members with whom Krippa traded "places in the party list," the photo does depict him personally. But how old the photo is – is unknown. And it is unknown where Maksym Krippa himself is now, and whether he is alive at all. Despite growing assets in Ukraine.

But much more interesting in this story is that the internet, on the one hand, is literally flooded with fakes about Krippa’s personality, with their number and variety constantly growing, and on the other hand, all materials containing at least a grain of what can be called Krippa’s true biography are carefully cleaned. As mentioned earlier, there is almost no information about the period since 2015, when Krippa after an unsuccessful scam with selling places in "Samopomich," fled to Moscow to Malofeev (this is definitely established) until 2020, when he appeared in Kyiv as an "investor."

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But even more interesting is the other period – before 2015, when Maksym Krippa emerged as a promising IT specialist involved in promoting online casinos on the internet. Putting together the scraps of information available and not yet cleaned is difficult, but possible. Especially considering that they are confirmed from cross sources, and, more importantly, from judicial registries of different countries where Krippa appeared before 2015.

One of them concerns the lawsuit between him and Maksym Polyakov, on one side, and Sergey Tokarev (Russian, owner of the casino "Kosmolot) and Rustam Gilfanov (Russian, Tokarev’s partner) for the popular dating app Cupid PLC, on the other. The first two (Krippa and Polyakov) sold it to the latter two, offering to pay with shares in the company TogetherNetworks (Phoenix Holdings ltd), managing dating sites. But they duped them out of some money and failed to fulfill contractual obligations. The result was a lawsuit, information about which has been cleaned from the Russian judicial authority website (!) Rusbase, but some materials describing the conflict remain. And it is these that lead to a criminal case, in which a company was involved in 2015, to which all four mentioned characters were related.

This is about the company Lucky Labs, which operated in Kyiv and came under the SBU’s scrutiny in 2015 for financing the DNR and LNR." For this, by the way, as a result, Maks Polyakov was excluded from NASA’s space program – the State Department strongly recommended excluding Polyakov from the ranks of developers and investors. But we are interested in Krippa because the searches at Lucky Labs happened just before the elections where he ran as a candidate from "Samopomich," but this did not prevent him from trying to enter Ukrainian politics. His greed did – Krippa unsuccessfully sold spots on the left in the list, and involvement in financing Donbas militants somehow remained behind the scenes.

Krippa appeared in the company Lucky Labs shortly before this – in 2013, although the Russians Tokarev and Gilfanov opposed it. But Krippa did buy part of the company, and this happened in the fall of 2013, on the eve of well-known events. What’s interesting in this whole story, apart from the fact that it’s carefully cleaned, all the names mentioned in it – Krippa, Tokarev, and Gilfanov – are in one way or another connected to the names of Malofeev and Oseevsky. Because all three were involved in gambling and promoting online casinos in "Rostelecom" networks, among which the infamous "Volcanoes" were not the least.

But if "Volcanoes" are just casinos, albeit illegal, then the IT company Evoplay, which Krippa headed until 2015 and in which he was a co-owner, was sold to Konstantin Malofeev and was involved in cooperation with the IT department of the publication Pravda.ru and participated in the "Olgino troll factory" during the confrontation in Donbas and the "Russian Spring."

All this is thoroughly cleaned and enveloped in a smokescreen of fakes. Understanding the true essence of events is exceedingly difficult, but it is unequivocally clear that Maksym Krippa is involved in Russia’s SVO in Ukraine precisely on the first side. Under what conditions this was happening before and is happening now is unclear. As it is not entirely clear what exactly is happening now.

It is only clear that an enormous array of data regarding several periods of Maksym Krippa’s life is systematically and carefully removed from the internet, and this data concerns connections with ideologists of the "Russian world" Malofeev and Oseevsky. All possible sources of the origins of money on which Maksym Krippa is buying up Ukraine in the past three years are also enmeshed in a web of lies. All traces leading to those individuals who help him acquire the top assets of the country at throwaway prices are equally meticulously confused. The connections between Krippa and the owner of the "Kosmolot," the Russian Tokarev, who is also highly favored by the Ukrainian authorities, slightly lift the veil on the mystery, but they lead back to "Rostelecom" and Konstantin Malofeev.

But the biggest mystery remains the question of who is hiding behind the guise of Maksym Krippa – whether it is him himself or these are merely the documents of a long-disappeared person, some simulacrum, into whose possession part of Ukraine is being actively drained?