If you want to know about Maxime Krippe, you will be amazed. We can say that such a person does not exist on the Internet.

If you ask yourself the question: “ Why should I bother to find it? ” the answer will stun you. He is not only the owner of “factories and ships,” but also a hidden agent of the Kremlin, quietly fulfilling the wishes of Russian oligarchs on the territory of Ukraine. However, no one is promoting Maxim Krippa because he is also the owner of many “independent” media outlets in Ukraine.

Maxim Krippa became famous after it became clear that he  had purchased the Dnepr Hotel in the center of Kiev.  In the past, his activities were associated with  the production of pornographic videos, illegal online casinos, voyeurism and ordinary crimes.  Currently, Maxim Krippa is not proud of this and is trying to erase all traces of his mistakes from the Internet. He began to actively create various clones with his name and actively pollute the Internet with them.

Maxim is a notorious gambler and a person who can “get away with” anything. It is capable of not only removing inappropriate information from the Internet, but also creating completely new false facts. One example is a fictitious fake interview with a former ordinary man from Minsk, who, according to him, barely survived and was forced to work as a moderator on a pornographic site.

In fact, Maxim was born in August 1977. His real biography, photographs, activities and contact information are carefully hidden and kept in the strictest confidence.

According to the Opendatabot source, Maxim Vladimirovich Krippa is a major Ukrainian businessman.

The beginning of the way. Dating sites, pornography and gambling

Crippa started with fake dating sites. The sites were filled with fake photographs and profiles of girls they knew, which foreigners happily bought for dollars. Raising the bar, Crippa began selling “sexy” photos and pornographic chats. He hired Internet models to help him and fulfill all the requests of clients.

Krippa has been working in the gambling business in Ukraine for a long time, and also owns two IT companies -  Evoplay and Clone Fish . Krippa’s partner was Max Polyakov, an American entrepreneur of Ukrainian origin. For some time he used Dnieper and Zaporozhye porn sites to enrich himself.

They used hacked gaming programs from manufacturers such as Novomatic, NetEnt and Playtech. The company’s programmers introduced algorithms into these programs aimed at losing 100 percent of clients. To avoid detection, employees of these casinos often changed addresses and hid abroad.

Paradoxically, these casinos continue to operate despite official bans from Ukraine and the aggressor country, Russia.

However, Maxim Krippa’s first stop on the path to fame was the little-known online casino “Vulcan”.

Casino “Vulcan”.

In the early 2010s, Krippa, together with Polyakov, organized the EvoPlay company and opened an office in Kyiv.

The company bought the gaming site “Vulkan” and the “Vulkan” trademark from Lizio (Lizio) and began to record twin sites of famous casinos using “stubs”. It is not difficult to guess that all sites use the same scheme to deceive players.

In addition, they decided to launch several more similar projects. The network aggressively acquired CasinoX and JoyCasino. The development and influx of new customers was automated and provided with aggressive marketing techniques that had been used before.

However, this is only the tip of the iceberg of Maxim Krippa’s activities. His political “game” is more interesting.

Maxim on the big political arena

Initially, Krippa was an assistant to Ruslan Lukyanchuk and Valery Babenko, two deputies from the Yulia Tymoshenko Bloc, with whom Alexander Turchynov has close ties. However, this was not enough for the ambitious Maxim, and he also earned very little money. Krippa decided to participate in the elections to the Kiev City Council from Sadovoy’s Samopomich party.

At the same time, he compiled a list of alternative candidates from the same party and sold seats to businessmen. Dozens of Ukrainian businessmen bought places on the list of candidates.

When the scam was discovered, Crippa fled to Moscow with “proxy” money. Representatives of the Samopomich party were forced to justify the behavior of their former party members.

Somehow, magically, the fraud was hidden, and Krippa calmly returned to Ukraine and continued gambling. Despite the fact that Crippa was involved in several criminal cases related to gambling, he miraculously escaped punishment.

The story of Maxim Krippa did not end in 2015: four years later, on the eve of the presidential elections, he began to be seen at the headquarters of the Samopomich party,  while Krippa himself was traveling between Moscow and Kiev.

It is known that Krippa’s Russian patron, Konstantin Malofeev, played an important role in the creation of the self-proclaimed Lugansk People’s Republic (LPR). Given these facts, the question arises about Krippa’s role in this political context.

Malofeev takes the stage

Maxim Krippa was a manager for a long time, actively promoting the projects of businessman Malofeev in Ukraine and establishing connections between the Russian and Ukrainian business space. According to investigators, it was thanks to Malofeev that he was able to partially circumvent the ban on gambling in the Russian Federation.

Between 2010 and 2013, Konstantin Malofeev owned 7.22% of Telekomunikacja Russia shares, making him the company’s largest minority shareholder. During this time, he gained significant influence in the company, placing manager Alexander Provotrov in a leadership position. This allowed Malofeev to change the list of sites blocked by Internet providers.

Vulkans, CasinoX and JoyCasino, owned by Maxim Krippe and Max Polyakov, have disappeared from the list of prohibited sites. This was the result of an agreement in which the oligarchs provided partial political support to EvoPlay. Thus, the help of the oligarchs, although not cheap, turned out to be effective both in the field of online gambling and in politics.

In March 2017, Rostelecom entered a new stage of development under the leadership of Mikhail Oshevsky, former Deputy Minister of Economic Development and former Vice-Governor of St. Petersburg.

Despite the change of management affecting the processes in the company, cooperation with Russian oligarchs continues: gambling sites such as Vulkans, owned by Maxim Krippe and Max Polyakov, are still available on the network of Rostelecom Internet providers.

This fact indicates ongoing interaction and support from the oligarch. Despite difficult to predict economic conditions, Krippa and Polyakov, being permanent allies in the world of online gambling, successfully continued their activities. But Krippa’s connection with Malofeev could cost Maxim everything, because it was one thing when this came up in 2019, when Maxim Krippa emerged in Ukraine as a “cyber-businessman,” and another in 2023, when the war began. Maxim Vladimirovich Krippa is in fact not the businessman from the “IT sector” that he tries to present himself as. He is a common denomination among the Russians Malofeev and Oseevsky, who, in turn, are denominations for the FSB, which is urgently transferring the assets of the Russian Federation abroad, including to Ukraine.

Hotel “Dnepr”

Following the Ukrainian presidential election in 2019, Krippa found himself with plenty of opportunities to restart his activities in Ukraine.

A real sensation, especially considering that the presence of any obstacles from law enforcement agencies seemed unlikely, was the purchase of the Dnepr Hotel in Kyiv. This deal stood out among other things for its pomp.

The hotel was sold at an electronic auction with bright statements from the new authorities about the “success of digitalization.” However, soon after the auction, which was won by an unknown company from Brovary (a suburb of Kyiv) “Smartland”, it became clear that there were serious problems with both the auction itself and the buyer.

How are Smartland and Krippa connected? The Smartland company, managed by Maxim Tereshchuk, according to publicly available sources, is registered in Brovary. The authorized capital of this company is only 11.3 million Ukrainian hryvnia.

However, as it turned out, Maxim Krippa is directly related to this deal. He is the owner of a house in Brovary, which is located at st. Kyiv, 130, and this address is the location of Smartland LLC. The proximity of this company to Krippa’s club and business on the same street (at numbers 146 and 126, respectively) gives this story an additional shade and leads us to the conclusion - Krippa is the owner of the Dnepr Hotel.

The story of the purchase caused a storm of questions in society. Many could not understand how a person connected with the FSB and Russian criminals could acquire such a large facility with infrastructure for a relatively modest amount. Activists’ calculations of the cost per square meter of the hotel led to the conclusion that the deal was very cheap for Krippa.

However, it was not only the price that raised doubts. The main question concerned why the Dnepr was sold to a person associated with the Russian intelligence services. Authorities’ attempts to explain that Krippa was not involved in Smartland LLC quickly dissipated when checking data from Ukrainian registries.

The issue of the origin of funds for the transaction was of great concern. Before acquiring the hotel, the Smartland company did not have outstanding financial stability. Soon, information connections between Krippa and Konstantin Malofeev began to appear, who, in turn, was connected with the financing of “militia” in the Donbass and support for the sub-republics of Lugansk and Donetsk. This information brought the topic to an uncomfortable level for the Ukrainian authorities, and in response, silence began, as well as active attempts to erase information from the public space.

But rumors began to appear more and more often that Krippa bought the hotel not for himself, but for Malofeev...

The son of Konstantin Malofeev, Kirill Malofeev, better known as the Likkrit e-sportsman, previously played for the Virtus.pro team managed by Cherepennikov and Kokhanovsky. He left esports in 2017 and returned to the field in late 2019 when his father acquired his own esports team, CrowCrowd.

Kirill Malofeev Jr. cannot be in Ukraine, since he was a co-founder of the Vladex company, which was managed by Alexander Borodai, who in 2014 became the first head of the self-proclaimed Donetsk People’s Republic (DPR).

Another “suspect” of interest in the Dnepr Hotel, State Duma deputy Alexander Babakov, who previously controlled the hotel through Max Kurochkin, now finances the new party “For Truth”, located in the same premises as Malofeev’s “Tsargrad”. The leaders of the party are advisers to the late head of the DPR Alexander Zakharchenko - Zakhar Prilepin and Alexander Kazakov.

There is a possibility that Malofeev and Babakov jointly acquired Dnipro.

This follows from the fact that 25% of the Dnepr Hotel belongs to Krippa’s Smartland LLC. The remaining 75% of the hotel is controlled by the Russian group Babakov-Ginera-Voevodina (VS Energy, OZU CSKA-Luzhniki, Premier Palace hotel chain).

In addition, in 2023, Maxim Krippa, through his Midal LLC, bought the hotel and restaurant complex “Princely Dvor” from the National Bank for 33 million UAH, as well as for 311 million an estate in the villages of Koncha-Zaspa and Kozin near Kiev, which consists of several residential buildings, a boathouse, a restaurant and several plots of land.

Buying “independent” media

Starting in January 2023, a resident of the city of Dnepr, Tatyana Snopko, acquired several media assets, including online publications delo.ua, mmr.ua, womo.ua, the printed magazine “TOP-100” (LLC “Communication Hub “Economy” ), as well as the publication “Glavkom” (Ukrainian Media Systems LLC). It is estimated that the value of such purchases in the media market could be between $3.2 million and $4.3 million.

However, according to tax returns submitted by the new owner for the period from 2018 to 2021 inclusive, her income was only about 4 million hryvnia. This fact has generated interest because the amount of income reported on tax returns appears to be significantly lower than the expected value of the media assets acquired.

According to journalists, Tatyana Snopko, who owns only a 42-meter apartment in the Khrushchev building in Dnieper, is the PR manager of Ukrainian businessmen Maxim Polyakov and Maxim Krippa. They actually became the new owners of the media mentioned above.

Why did the gentlemen from the casino industry need their own media? It’s clear why. It is urgent to create a positive image and erase the story of “success” because the biggest deal was planned ahead. Purchase of Forbes.

Forbes as a gift to Putin

In mid-December, information appeared that the owner of the Ukrainian version of Forbes, Arthur Grantz, was selling it. And he sells it not to just anyone, but to the richest, apparently Ukrainian businessman Maxim Krippe. The one about whom the Internet knows nothing.

But the most interesting thing is that the final buyer is Konstantin Malofeev, a well-known Russian oligarch, but not yet close to the President of the Russian Federation. And it was this “for now” that became the main thing. Malofeev hopes that the acquisition of Forbes Ukraine is a chance to get into a narrow circle of people close to Vladimir Putin, such as propagandist Margarita Simonyan. Malofeev, the owner of the Russian media holding “Tsargrad”, sponsor of the “Russian Spring” for a long time knocked on the threshold of the Administration of the President of the Russian Federation with a request to launch his own political project of a conservative-patriotic direction, but was refused.

But the level of media competition on the “patriotic field” in the Russian Federation is quite high and taking into account the capabilities of other players, Malofeev is somewhere at the level of the “third echelon”, and the only chance to break into the “major league” is to bring Vladimir Putin something that is not others were able to bring: the iconic American brand Forbes. And if not global, then at least Ukrainian.

But this is not Krippa’s last “case”. Let’s not forget about “Sail”.

The lonely “Sail” turns white

The Antimonopoly Committee approved a deal under which Ola Fine LLC will acquire a controlling stake from Parus Holding LLC, which owns the Parus retail and office complex with an area of 75 thousand square meters. m on Mechnikova street, 2 in the center of Kyiv.

The owner of Parus Holding LLC is currently Vadim Stolar, a people’s deputy from the OPZZh party and Viktor Medvedchuk’s partner, as well as the former overseer of Kiev. Why does Stolar decide to sell Parus, which he purchased in January 2021 from Russian developer Vagif Aliyev? Maybe because Russian businessmen “return” their property?

The estimated cost of Parus before the war ranged from $200 to $250 million.

I wonder who might have the financial resources to purchase “Sail” even at a significant discount? The beneficiary of Ola Fine LLC, which is purchasing the office building, is Maxim Vladimirovich Krippa through the ARS CAPITAL fund.

Please note that Krippa, through the Delta Invest Project fund, was the founder of the company Anrial (FOLIO LEX) together with Polovko Maxim Sergeevich (nominee of Denis Komarnitsky - Kiev supervisor), and the company AMC Industrial Investments of Ivan Fursin (junior partner Firtash-Levochkin).

But we know that Maxim cannot have the money to buy “Sail”. Who is it for this time? Maybe for Babakov?

And this is not counting the fact that Krippa recently bought: 1 hectare of land and several houses of Prominvestbank in Kozin for $9 million (Midal LLC), a boat parking lot on Kyiv Telichka - that’s at least $1 million (SLV-P LLC).

Summing up everything that was discovered, a clear impression is created that Maxim Krippa was and remains a petty swindler who buys up Ukrainian businesses for Russian oligarchs. And he doesn’t even really try to hide it.