Cyprus authorities have launched an investigation into 70 employees of Wargaming

~ Sebastianul

The Auditor General of Cyprus, Odysseas Michailides, has launched an audit of 70 employees of the Wargaming Studio who received Cypriot passports in the 2012-2020 period . This was written on Facebook (link) by the leader of the “Russian party”, a member of the political Council of the EOP (EOP is a political party of Cyprus) Alexey Voloboev. According to him, the government of Cyprus has the task to take away their passports.

“It is much easier to take away passports from clean, toothless IT-guys than from toothy sharks with dirty money and methods. Moreover, the authorities are deeply involved in their local criminal schemes in cooperation with major international scoundrels and do not want it all to come out»
– Alexey Voloboev.

In a conversation with Forbes, Voloboev said that the co-founders of Wargaming, Viktor Kislyi and Ivan Mikhnevich, received Cyprus passports in 2012, when they moved the company’s headquarters there. Later, some employees from among the top management of the Studio also received passports. According to Mikhnevich, who left the company in 2014, until 2013 passports in Cyprus were issued “for special merits or large investments.”

“We moved a company that already had serious success and earnings, and paid so much tax that it was enough to get citizenship. What we are talking about in the post is 70 passports – they were received by important employees of Wargaming. When Nicos Anastasiades became President of Cyprus, a tariff was announced — how much money you need to spend to get one passport. At first, this amount was $5 million. The Wargaming company bought and completed buildings, by and large the whole street that goes to the presidential Palace in Nicosia, it is time to rename it “Wargaming Boulevard”»
– Ivan Mikhnevich, co-founder of Wargaming.

According to Mikhnevich and Voloboev, at the moment Wargaming is the largest IT company in Cyprus in terms of number of employees and the size of investments. While the audit does not affect anyone personally, now the office of the Auditor General checks the documentation in the Ministry of Internal Affairs, which issued passports. Based on this check, the auditor’s report will be made.

The program for issuing “Golden” passports, or obtaining citizenship in exchange for investment, has been operating in Cyprus in its current form since 2013. Since then, the government has repeatedly carried out inspections of compliance with its terms. In particular, in September, the police began investigating the procedure for obtaining citizenship by 42 investors who were included in a “high-risk group”.

At the beginning of November 2020, the authorities of Cyprus completely canceled the program for granting citizenship in exchange for investment. This happened after the scandal caused by the investigation of the Al-Jazeera TV channel. The journalists posed as a Chinese citizen, allegedly convicted in their homeland for money laundering. After contacting lawyers, realtors and even the speaker of Parliament, they received confirmation that citizenship of the Republic can be granted even to a convicted person if they have money, while the authorities of Cyprus have publicly announced a strict system for selecting applicants for the program.

Wargaming does not disclose its financial performance. Kislyi explained this in a conversation with RBC that he was not ready to “show all the cards to the competition”, and said only that the company’s revenue is measured in “hundreds of millions of dollars”. In 2015, Bloomberg estimated the developer’s revenue at $590 million, the same amount counted by experts of the research company Newzoo.

Source: Forbes Russia, link.

43 thoughts on “Cyprus authorities have launched an investigation into 70 employees of Wargaming”

    1. Exactly! (I wanna be the first to dance on their grave!)

      Background music: Pharrell Williams-Happy 🙂

    2. Oh dear, WG employees ran out of Belarus and now kicked out of Cyprus and now where do they go?

  3. Ha. Perfect. Now they can really go eat dust for Xmas.

    That’s what you get for money laundry for Putin!

    #WhoreGaymingDeservesIt

    #GodBlessCyprusGovernment

        1. Officially yes. Practically the Polish catholic church is made out of gays. they just keep up the hard stance to make it not apparent

      2. if you don’t like the freedom of speech, you can go suck jack dorksey’s nose ring, you commie bitch.

        1. Yeah, and that goes both ways, too.

          Also, your idea of “freedom of speech” is funny. You know it doesn’t cover explicit hate speech? Other than that a private site can delete whatever it wants and all commenters are free to go suck their whatever for all they care. And given that this convestation is quite off topic and adds nothing of relevance whatsoever it would be likely to be deleted if someone cared enough to take the time to clean up.

          Yeah, and also #GodBlessCyprusGovernment for allowing this scheme in the first place, right? It’s only due to Al Jazeera they are pressured to look into this and probably they make it on WG employees because of all that people that bought citizenship they are the least likely to have really bad stuff on them – so it’s just to make the whole scheme look not entirely terrible by showing there were legitimate people there.

          your level of not thinking before writing makes you a funny person, I give you that :).

          3. “You know it doesn’t cover explicit hate speech? ”

            I would argue that it does; if not then there is NO FREEDOM of speech. That being said, people that spew hate speech should expect to pay a price (employer cutting ties, losing friends/family, etc). Laws based on feelings are flawed and are open to widespread abuse and expansion to idiotic proportions, such as using the wrong pronoun, even accidentally, could become “hate speech”.

            1. Well, in which case with your definition there is no freedom of speech anywhere. In almost every country with a serious legal system if you throw false allegations against someone and those can be proven to be baseless ill intended lies you can can get sued for it on various grounds. the freedom of speech is limited whenever it infringes on rights of other people.

              Well, perhaps in North Korea Kim Jong-un can say anything… though it still can have repercussions but those won’t be of legal nature.

          1. Haha. Not sure if your comment is actually witty or if you don’t know where the word “forum” originates from – Because it literally means a “public space/square” as in the Forum Romanum where people meet up in real life to do business or discuss whatever they wanted? that ofc was the intention of online forums minus the real life meeting, hence the name was chosen.
            Anyways, thanks for the good laugh.

      3. Yeah, another pathetic bitch ass cunt from east europe defending WG again.

        1. Hehe, with your name, you are aware that you are painting the guy not so found of gays as one himself? I’m not insulted or anything by his comment. I don’t actually care. I’m just here for the trolling and having fun with treating what people say here as if it was serious and how often that destroys their attempted argument or insult with unintended irony 😀

          As for WG, look at Yukos and realize that even if you do not like them, in their shoes you would have done the same given the chance since the alternative would be just being stupid. When you’re at a table where no one plays fairly you either play along… or flee to Cyprus where there is at least some oversight that limits the dirty plays.

          Or don’t really care about the actual thing and are just angry cause your tank got nerfed or you lost 10 in a row and needs to blow off some steam and WG makes itself an easy target. Yeah, that would be fair position, too.

  4. The money for citizenship program was a shame for Cyprus, but of all the people who took part I would have assumed WG employees were among the few that actually met the official criteria. And with what is happening in Belarus right now it gives WG a rather fair point that securing their staff a safe haven from possible political prosecution was a very reasonable strategy.

    2. Does anyone know if the scheme was a single citizenship for minimum 5 million investment, or 1 citizenship per 5 million (which seems to be WG interpretation)?
      Not all of those staff involved would have a spare 5 million lying around…..Or they might if they all get to come up with a prem rank they’ll get the proceeds for.

  5. Due to the level of unmoderated content I had to spend a long time removing inappropriate posts.

    Also yesterday i had to resort to a punitive action by shutting down the site for a few hours. Inappropriate behavior will not be tolerated! More misbehavior and the site will be shut for good.

  6. The absolute absurd toxicity of these comments is always great and really shows what kind of a playerbase this game has achieved after so many years.

    Hopefully the employees are fine, they dont deserve any trouble unless they’ve actually done anything illegal. They’re just people doing their jobs living their lives. It’s the wargaming higher ups that I dont care for, mainly for the same reason no one likes EA. They’re the ones who push out the scummy shit and bad business practices, but theres not much you can do about it besides either trying to make enough noise that they hear your demands or just stop playing the game entirely.

  7. Fuck those people, if they can pay $5 million each for a passport they don’t deserve. The law has changed and now they are in trouble.

    1. The company paid for it. And I don’t think they are in trouble. It’s dirty politics at play in Cyprus and those politicians are those that messed up badly. Besides, with the instable situation in Minsk WG staff could now just ask for asylum anywhere in EU and they would get it which is a good start to get citizenship. And given that WG is a wealthy company a lot of EU countries would be more then willing to speed up process. With legal grounds open it won’t cost them money these days.

          1. Foul mouthed expletive laden comments should not be allowed at ANYTIME Seb, as a discussion in this Forum here it is quite Toxic
            (my Kids visit here and reading this foul mouthed crap is a bit worrying)

            honest criticism is one thing ~ but this crap?

            YOU don’t need forum members this juvenile and Toxic faceless morons ruining all your years of Hard Work Seb

            1. You should be in more control of you kids.
              If you do not like the comments section do nor come here lmao

        2. Here we go with the typical loony leftwing SJW response. Claim you fight for freedom and rights but only if they agree with your distorted vision of what the world should be. Sounds like the same fascism you claim to oppose! lol

  9. “The program for issuing “Golden” passports, or obtaining citizenship in exchange for investment” is just another description for “bribes”. A serious company should not get involved in such practices

    2. I’d agree if a company is based in a country with a serious legal system. You know where the rule of law means something. but if that’s not the case I completely understand how company want’s to hedge its risks against despotism. You just never know with politicians that win elections with a 105% majority. I think Putin has been a good motivator for companies to consider that kind of move.

  10. LOL Yes, WG will get banned from Cyprus like they banned fair and legal players. Now hope the EU forces them to give back all the money the players spent and send Viktor Kislyi to a jail for all his pathetic life. 😀

  11. Sounds like something out of Condor…spies, passports for money, investigation into 70 staff…

    Cyprus was just so happy that WG saved them from bankruptcy, remember the domino effect of the 2007 recession in Europe?.

    Media first reported Germany was going to go bankrupt, then it got passed very briefly to Italy, Spain,etc etc greece, and eventually ended at GUESS WHERE??? CYPRUS…

    It even got passed to UK, where it was extremely quickly handballed back to the Continent, though I understand Ireland took a hit. Literally blink and you would have missed that passover.

    “Both Spain and Cyprus received rescue packages in June 2012”.[3] -wiki

    “Cyprus received in late December 2011 a €2.5bn bilateral emergency bailout loan from Russia”- wiki

    Wiki mentions multiple bailouts.

    Excerpts taken from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_debt_crisis

    Please try to remember the big stuff in history.

    Remember the scenes of chaos outside Greek banks, where people weren’t allowed to withdraw their own money??. At least the media reported that with integrity and professionalism.

    I apologise for anyone whom I offend or hurt with the above report, but it was all there, in the NEWS, media, whatever you like to refer to them as.

    Check out Condor the tv show.

    1. Yeah, you are right to apologize! People get offended by facts rather easily. Maybe it would be for the best to make facts illegal? I mean facing reality can be nerve-wracking for some therefore that could improve public health, no?

      1. Lol yeah and you get so easily offended by random comments on an anonymous niche blog

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