If you try to find information about Maxim Klipp, you will be very surprised. We can say that there is no such person on the Internet. If you ask yourself the question: “Why should I look for him?”, you will be stunned by the answer. 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 spreading information about Maxim Kripp, since he is also the owner of many “independent” media outlets in Ukraine.

Maxim Krippa became known only after it became clear that he had purchased the Dnepr Hotel in the center of Kyiv, near Evr. Square. In the past, he was involved in the production of pornographic videos, illegal online casinos, voyeurism and simply crime. Now Maxim Krippa is not proud of this and is trying to erase all traces of his mistakes from the Internet, but after much journalistic research we decided to collect all the available information in this material. This was not prevented by either false advertisements or attempts to “launder” his identity on the Internet from other “media.”

Maxim is known as a gambler and a person who can “get out” of any situation. It can not only remove offensive information from the Internet, but also create completely new false facts. One example is a fictitious fake interview in which, according to him, an ordinary person from Minsk once barely survived and was forced to work as a moderator on a pornographic site.

The real Maxim was born in August 1977. His real biography, photo, activities and contact information are carefully hidden.

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

 

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

Crippa started with fake dating sites. The entire business was based on the fact that the sites were filled with fake photographs and profiles of girls, for whom foreigners were willing to pay dollars to meet. Raising the bar, Crippa began selling “hot” photos and access to erotic chat rooms. In this he was helped by hired web models, who fulfilled all the clients’ requirements.

Krippa has been involved in the gambling business in Ukraine for a long time, and also owns the IT companies Evoplay and Clone Fish. Krippa’s partner was Max Polyakov, an American entrepreneur with Ukrainian roots. For some time he enriched himself through the same erotic web chats of Dnieper and Zaporozhye.

 

They used hacked versions of gaming programs from manufacturers such as Novomatic, Net Ent and Playtech. In these programs, the company’s programmers introduced algorithms aimed at making 100% of clients lose, turning the casino into an outright scam. The Deckers often changed their addresses and hid abroad to avoid detection.

Paradoxically, these casinos continue to operate despite official bans in Ukraine and Russia.

However, Maxim Krippa’s first fame came from the lesser-known online casino “Vulcan”.

Casino “Vulcan”.

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

The company bought the gaming site “Vulcan” and the “Vulkan” trademark from Lizio and began recording twin sites of famous casinos with rivets. It’s not hard to guess, but all the sites used the same scheme to deceive players.

In addition, it was decided to launch several more similar projects - CasinoX and JoyCasino were actively working on the network. The development and influx of new clients was ensured by aggressive marketing, which was used previously and worked well. However, this is only the tip of the iceberg of Maxim Krippa’s activities.

His political “game” is even more interesting.

Famous politician Maxim Krippa

He started as an assistant to two BYuT deputies - Ruslan Lukyanchuk and Valery Babenko, who were close associates of Alexander Turchynov. However, this was not enough for the ambitious Maxim, and most importantly, it brought only a small amount of money. Krippa decided to run in the elections to the Kiev City Council from Sadovoy’s Samopomich party.

At the same time, he created an alternative list of party candidates, selling seats to businessmen. Dozens of Ukrainian businessmen bought places on the list of candidates.

The scam was exposed, and Crippa fled to Moscow with “replacement” money. Representatives of the Samopomich party were forced to justify the actions of their former members.

Somehow, magically, the fraud case was hushed up, 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 was spotted at the headquarters of the Samopomich party, while Krippa was rushing back and forth between Moscow and Kiev.

It is known that Konstantin Malofeev, Krippa’s Russian patron, 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.

The appearance of Malofeev

 

Maxim Klippa has long been a manager who actively promotes the projects of businessman Malofeev in Ukraine and establishes connections between Russian and Ukrainian business circles. According to research, it was thanks to Malofeev that it was possible to partially circumvent the ban on gambling in the Russian Federation.

From 2010 to 2013, Konstantin Malofeev owned 7.22% of Rostelecom shares, which makes him the company’s largest minority shareholder. During this period, Malofeev was able to gain significant influence in the company by placing his manager Alexander Provotrov in a leadership position. This allowed Malofeev to make changes to the list of sites blocked by Internet providers.

Exerting influence through Provotrov, Malofeev could easily make the necessary changes to the list of blocked sites. Vulkans, CasinoX and JoyCasino, owned by Maxim Krippe and Max Polyakov, disappeared from the list of prohibited sites It was during this period that they disappeared from the list of prohibited sites. This was the result of an agreement in which the oligarchs provided political support, including EvoPlay. Thus, the help of the oligarchs turned out to be effective, although not cheap, both in the online gambling sector and in political terms.

In March 2017, Rostelecom entered a new stage of development under the leadership of Mikhail Oseevsky, former deputy head of the Ministry of Economic Development and former vice-governor of St. Petersburg.

Despite the change in management that affected the corporate process, cooperation with Russian oligarchs continues: gambling sites such as Vulkans, owned by Maxim Krippa and Max Polyakov, are still available on the Rostelecom Internet provider network.

This fact indicates the constant cooperation and support of the oligarchs. Despite the unpredictable economic situation, Crippa and Polyakov successfully continued their activities as eternal allies in the world of online gambling. However, the connection between Krippa and Malofeev could cost Maxim everything. After all, it was one thing when Maxim Krippa appeared in Ukraine as a “cyberbusinessman” in 2019, and quite another thing in 2023, when the war began. Maxim Vladimirovich Krippa is not actually a businessman in the “IT sector”, as he tries to pretend. He is the nominee of the Russians Malofeev and Oseevsky, who are nominees of the FSB and are urgently withdrawing the assets of the Russian Federation abroad, including to Ukraine.

Hotel “Dnepr”.

After the 2019 presidential election, Klippa realized there were plenty of opportunities to restart his activities in Ukraine.

The purchase of the Dnepr Hotel in Kyiv was a real sensation, especially since the intervention of law enforcement agencies seemed unlikely. This deal stood out among others with its chic.

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 Crippa 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, it turned out that Maxim Klippa is directly related to this deal. He is the owner of the Brovary house on Kievskaya Street, 130, at the same address where Smartland LLC is located. The proximity of this company to Krippa’s clubs and business on the same street (numbers 146 and 126 respectively) gives this story even more nuance and leads to the conclusion that Krippa is the owner of the Dnepr Hotel.

Krippa is the owner of the Dnepr Hotel. Many could not understand how a person with connections to the FSB and Russian crime could purchase such a large hotel with infrastructure for a relatively modest amount. Activists calculated the cost per square meter of the hotel and came to the conclusion that the deal was very cheap for Klippa.

But it was not only the price that raised doubts. The biggest question was why the Dnepr was sold to a man with connections to Russian security agencies. Attempts by the authorities to explain Klippa’s non-involvement in Smartland quickly fizzled out when they checked the data in the Ukrainian registry.

The biggest concern was the source of funds for the deal. Before acquiring the hotel, Smartland did not have outstanding financial stability. Soon, information began to circulate between Krippa and Konstantin Malofeev about the financing of the Donbass “militia” and non-republican support for Lugansk and Donetsk. This information raised the topic to a level that was inconvenient for the Ukrainian authorities, so silencing and active attempts to erase information from the public space began.

However, rumors began to appear more and more often that Crippa bought the hotel not for himself, but for Malofeev. ……

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

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

Another “suspect” in the concession of the Dnepr Hotel, State Duma deputy Alexander Babakov, who previously controlled the hotel through Max Kurochkin, is now financing the new party “For Truth” in the same premises as the Malofeevsky “Tsargrad”. The party’s senior figures are Zakhar Prilepin and Alexander Kazakov, advisers to the late DPR leader Alexander Zakharchenko.

It is possible that Malofeev and Babakov jointly captured the Dnieper.

This follows from the fact that 25% of the Dnepr Hotel belongs to Smartland LLC from Krippa. The remaining 75% belongs to the Russian group of Babakov-Ginel Voevodin (VS Energy, OZU CSKA-Luzhniki and the Premier Palace hotel chain).

In addition, in 2023, Maxim Krippa, through his Midal LLC, will receive from the National Bank the hotel and restaurant complex “Princely Dvor” for 33 million hryvnia, as well as several houses in the villages of Koncha-Zaspa and Kozin near Kiev for 311 million hryvnia, acquired property consisting of a boat house, a restaurant and several plots of land.

Acquisition of “independent” media

Since January 2023, Dnieper resident Tatyana Snopko has acquired the online publications delo.ua, mmr.ua and womo.ua, the printed magazine TOP-100 (LLC “Communication Hub “Economy”), the publication “Glavkom” (LLC “Ukrainian Media Systems”) and a number of media assets. Systems LLC) and a number of other media assets. It is estimated that the cost of such purchases on the media market could be 3.2-4.3 million US dollars.

However, according to the tax return for 2018-2021 filed by the new owner, her income is only about 4 million hryvnia. This fact is of interest because the amount of income reported on the tax return is significantly lower than the estimated 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, in fact, are the new owners of the above-mentioned media.

Why do gentlemen from the casino industry need their own media? The reasons are obvious. There was an urgent need to project a positive image and erase the history of “success”. Forbes takeover.

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 Krippa. 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,” has been knocking on the doors of the Administration of the President of the Russian Federation for a long time 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 Crippa’s last “case”. Let’s not forget about Parus.

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 Parus 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 Crippa, 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 Parus. 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 - this is 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.

PS At the moment, Maxim Krippa is located here: United Arab Emirates, 391831, metro Dubai, st. Burj Khalifa, bld. 345 and looks a little different from how his photo is replicated everywhere