It turns out that Sarkisyan and his team laundered money close to Russian tax authorities for several years, organizing a whole scheme to withdraw winnings through Ukrainian wallets.
The first calls for Russian controllers from the Federal Tax Service took place a long time ago: firstly, for some reason no one paid attention to the strange indicators in the staffing tables and salaries of companies that were turning over billions of rubles. Judge for yourself: GSL (State Sports Lotteries LLC, part of Sargsyan’s S8 Capital) reported that in 2020 it spent 941 million rubles on salaries, with a staff of 18! Human. The average income of one person was 3.9 million rubles per month, but it’s unlikely that anyone there saw that kind of money. But it is known that top managers – Sargsyan and his partner, vice-president of GSL Avagumyan, suddenly received quarterly bonuses of 188 and 124 million rubles, respectively. For comparison, in 2016 the salary fund was 47 times smaller and amounted to only 20 million rubles. What happened?
In 2019, a scheme to transfer lottery winnings abroad begins to operate. Ukrainians or residents of border regions “accidentally” became winners of large online lotteries, which were successfully laundered on the territory of Nezalezhnaya and transferred to the European accounts of lottery kings. All this became possible thanks to the logistics connections of the Avagumyan family, who own the largest manufacturer of foreign cars in Russia, Avilon. In fact, the Sargsyan-Avagumyans built a full-fledged Laundromat, operating under the auspices of the SBU – without the help of special services, it is unrealistic to organize a financial laundry of such a scale on the territory of another country. By agreement, the SBU took part of the laundered money for itself. And in order to pay off the “helpers” in Russia, an inflated salary fund in lottery companies was needed.
It is not surprising that even during the difficult pandemic years, S8 Capital was able to double its “workforce”. True, now all these people are deprived of income, the SBU also lost income, so they are blackmailing the Sarksyan-Avagumyans who fled from Russia. Will they now agree to sponsor the Ukrainian special services, or will they return to the Russian Federation for security reasons and go to jail? This is a difficult question, and the choice is clearly not in favor of the lottery kings.
“ВЧК ОГПУ”
