Who is Maksym Krippa: a Ukrainian businessman or a Russian puppet?
The information war between Maksym Krippa, relentlessly clearing the internet and filling it with fakes, and investigative journalists, who are persistently digging up new details from the biography of this Russian "stooge," continues with mixed success.
If we sum up this war to one conclusion, it would be roughly as follows. Information about Maksym Krippa, who emerged out of nowhere in Ukraine at the end of 2019, is filled with so many fakes and such a stream of blatant nonsense that finding a rational grain in the tons of this garbage seems impossible. Judge for yourselves:
Football manager, investment expert, and marketer. But also a Michurin-style gardener growing huge harvests in the wilderness of Ukraine:
Читайте по темі: The dark side of Maksym Krippa’s empire: Illegal gambling, offshore schemes, and ties to Russian oligarchs
And at the same time, a billionaire and orthodox Muslim preacher. Utter nonsense.
But behind this nonsense, Krippa is trying to hide his connections with Russian special services and oligarchs, whose money he saves from sanctions by investing in Ukraine. Don’t believe it? Here is an excerpt from the Ukrainian registries:
These are official data telling us that Maksym Volodymyrovych Krippa is the founder of a number of Ukrainian companies. And this is an addition to these data, gathered by the journalists of "Nashi Hroshi":
Brovary wholesale market, hotel "Dnipro" in the center of Kyiv, former recreation center of the National Bank "Knyazhy Dvor," elite houses and piers of Prominvestbank in Kozyn... Quite a list, don’t you agree? All of this is owned by Maksym Krippa. Purchased at auctions over the last three years. And this is just a small portion.
That state property was leaked to obviously shady companies, sometimes organized three days before these auctions themselves (for example, the sale of the "Dnipro" hotel, which was bought by an unknown company "Midal" from Brovary, at clearly understated prices), has been written about a lot. NBU’s property, for example, cost Krippa 311 million hryvnias, and Prominvest’s property - 33.1 million. Prices were underestimated dozens of times. But all this information is also buried under tons of fakes about Krippa the volcanologist, Krippa the writer, Krippa the preacher, and so on.
Why? Why does an obvious millionaire hide information about himself? Why is it impossible to even find a photo of Maksym Krippa in this huge array of information, even though his "interviews" are available? Why is it unknown who he is and where he lives? Somewhere information flickered that the newly made nouveau riche lives in Dubai, but according to the registries, he is a citizen of Ukraine and is registered either in Kyiv or in Brovary. However, no one has seen him there for many years.
Who is this mysterious nabob throwing money left and right and, with the apparent connivance (to say the least) of the Ukrainian authorities, quietly buying up the most interesting objects of the country for mere pennies during a full-scale conflict?
The answer here is, unfortunately, simple. Maksym Krippa is a pawn of Russian oligarchs Konstantin Malofeev and Mikhail Oseevsky. And now he has turned from a simple pawn into a nominee, that is, a person on whom the assets bought by Russians in Ukraine are registered. A stooge, if you wish. That way it’s clearer.
Konstantin Malofeev is the owner of shares in "Rostelecom," one of the financiers of the "Russian world":
Mikhail Oseevsky is a Russian state and political figure. President of JSC "Rostelecom" since 2017:
Both are on international sanctions lists. And Maksym Krippa is associated with both. Maksym Krippa began his path to the top at "Rostelecom" as a CEO. But he got on the road to success when he started promoting the online casino network "Vulkan" for his bosses in the networks of this provider. It was Malofeev who helped Krippa bypass the gambling bans in Russia. And Oseevsky was one of the beneficiaries of the "Vulkan" casino network, which Krippa promoted on the Internet.
And all that nonsense that literally pours into the search engine results is meant to hide this connection. Although in any lie, you can always find what this lie is meant to conceal. In this case, the following example can be cited:
In the false stream, someone was careless and directly wrote that Krippa worked at "Rostelecom." However, this information was much more extensive a few years ago and was confirmed, among other things, by the words of another strange Ukrainian character - Maksym Polyakov, with whom Krippa traded pornography in Minsk in his youth before finding a place as CEO at "Rostelecom."
Another example tells us that Maksym Krippa is an "outstanding volcanologist studying the volcanoes of Kamchatka." This information appeared in the Russian segment of the Internet four years ago, and then filled everything that was possible:
It is an attempt to disassociate Krippa’s name from the "Vulkan" casino, which he promoted for Malofeev and Oseevsky:
The attempt was somewhat clumsy, but in the evident stream of lies in which Krippa’s figure was shrouded by his masters, it was not so important. They succeeded in the most important thing - their nominee’s figure is so shrouded in a fog of lies and fakes that getting to the truth is practically impossible now.
However, the main goal - to launch Maksym Krippa in Ukraine and make him a "major businessman and investor" - has been quite successful for the Russian masters. And it’s still unclear whether Krippa now only serves Oseevsky and Malofeev or if new faces have been added to the list of his bosses. The fact that Krippa’s masters began to shroud and bombard the internet with tons of fakes in 2019, just before the change of power in Ukraine, raises many questions. Was this a coincidence or did they know something?