A violent murder, money-laundering operations shielded by influential figures, and multimillion-dollar Dubai assets — this investigation exposes the complex layers of a high-stakes conspiracy
Journalists of BRC uncovered them by investigating the activities of a successful Minsk casino. Thanks to the testimony of a former employee of the leader of a criminal organization, journalists understood how the money laundering scheme from illegal online bets works. And they found out the connection of its authors with the KGB and the Ministry of Defence of Belarus.
In the summer of 2021, the largest casino in Belarus, H Casino, as its owners presented it, opened in the multifunctional center Galleria Minsk. In the first six months, it made more than the long-standing market players in the capital: the profit exceeded $7.5 million. And by 2023, H Casino became the most profitable casino in Belarus. Although there were no reasons for this — at the end of the last decade, the industry was experiencing a decline.
In five years — since the beginning of 2015, the number of gambling establishments in the country has decreased by approximately 25%, said the head of the Association for the Protection of the Interests of Belarusian Gambling Organizers, Alesya Pakhomenko, to journalists in October 2019.
The situation could be worsened, among other things, by rising taxes. For example, the tax on a gaming slot increased by 12.5% from 2016 to 2021, and on a betting shop cash register — by 230%.
In 2020, the coronavirus pandemic also had a negative impact on the market. This is indicated by the amount of paid gambling business taxes — from 47.3 million Belarusian rubles in 2018 (in the previous four years it was also higher) decreased to 39.6 million. In addition, some players moved online due to COVID-19.
BRC found out how H Casino succeeded under such conditions and what the KGB has to do with it.
Turkish Baron
The story of Belarusian H Casino began in Turkey. Local media in February 2022 reported the murder of businessman Halil Falyalı in northern Cyprus. It was reported that armed men shot at his car. The driver died on the spot. Falyalı received 16 gunshot wounds and died in the hospital.
The murdered businessman had great wealth and a criminal reputation. Falyalı owned a casino and the Les Ambassadeur hotel in northern Cyprus, lived with his wife and three children in a mansion by the Mediterranean Sea.
Halil Falyalı, Özge Falyalı
In 2015, the United States issued a warrant for his arrest for money laundering from illegal activities, including drug trafficking.
And in the 2022 report of the Turkish Financial Crimes Investigation Board MASAK, there was information about Falyalı’s criminal organization, which controlled a network of sites for illegal betting. It mentioned approximately $50 million obtained illegally and stored in cryptocurrency wallets.
What relation did Halil Falyalı have to the casino in the center of the Belarusian capital?
In 2022, sources of BRC reported that he was the investor of the Minsk H Casino. Although in the documents the businessman was not considered, and the legal entity — LLC "Gaming Cartel," which owns the establishment, belongs to a Turkish citizen Mustafa Egemen Şhener.
Before H Casino, Mustafa Egemen Şhener owned a restaurant business in Kyiv and had problems there due to tax evasion.
At home, he was renowned for his generosity: he paid for Turkish artists’ performances in Minsk. Media reported fees of millions of dollars.
OCCRP journalists managed to find another proof of Falyalı’s connection with Şhener and Minsk H Casino. This was confirmed by Falyalı’s former CFO Cemil Önal, who is imprisoned in a Dutch jail. Investigators contacted his lawyer in March 2024 after they discovered audio recordings, allegedly of Önal’s voice, on the YouTube channel of an exiled Turkish reporter. It took five months to obtain permission for an interview with the incarcerated. The first conversation took place in August of the previous year.
Cemil Önal was the CFO in Falyalı’s companies, according to him, from 2014 until November 2021.
Journalists were able to confirm that he officially worked there at least from 2016 to 2020. In 2018, Turkish prosecutors accused him of laundering money for a criminal organization engaged in illegal online betting. In 2022, he became a suspect in Falyalı’s murder. In December 2023, Önal was arrested in the Netherlands at Turkey’s request.
The prisoner insists that he is not involved in his boss’s death, and due to the compromising material he knows about some influential people, he has become a target for the Turkish government. Therefore, Önal and his lawyer are trying to avoid extradition to Turkey. Documents with such requests are in BRC’s possession.
"This Mustafa Egemen Şhener is a friend and partner of Halil Falyalı. Casino F (H — ed.) in Minsk, Belarus, belongs to Mustafa Egemen Şhener. In reality. But Falyalı’s group is a 50% partner (invested half the funds to open the casino — ed.)" explained Önal.
Halil Falyalı, Özge Falyalı, Mustafa Şhener.
Indirect confirmations of Önal’s words that Şhener and Falyalı were partners in Minsk H Casino were also found by BRC journalists. Cyber partisans provided us with data on Şener crossing the Belarusian border. He traveled from Belarus to Ukraine and back along with an employee of the Les Ambassadeur family hotel-casino, Ayhan Buyuksari.
According to photos on Buyuksari’s wife’s social media, he visited H Casino more than once. According to the establishment’s director, Andrey Prokhorenko, Buyuksari not only visited the Minsk casino: "Ayhan Buyuksari worked at our casino and left Belarus, in my opinion, last June. And he never appeared again. He resigned and left," said the interlocutor during a phone conversation with a BRC journalist. Journalists tried to reach Buyuksari — he did not pick up the phone.
The business partnership between Şhener and Falyali was confirmed under anonymity to BRC by another source who worked in the casino sphere in Belarus.
Fictive Revenue
Why was the casino opened in our country? "Belarus did not lock down during the pandemic. There was no quarantine," the former financial director of Falyalı told journalists. And explained why: "Why do you need a casino? Because you can launder money.
This is not the first evidence that the owners of Minsk H Casino make money by circulating ‘dirty’ money. Even before the establishment opened, the KGB received a letter:
"I have some files about the director of the company IGOR KARTEL (LLC “Gaming Cartel” – ed.), Mustafa Egemen Şhener, showing how he transfers illegal money and bitcoins. I want to report on him," the person under the nickname yatko wrote to the law enforcement officers in December 2020. Journalists discovered this message among documents published by "Cyber partisans" obtained after hacking the website of the Belarusian State Security Committee. As far as known, no consideration of this complaint against the Turkish businessman took place. We will tell you the possible reason for this below.
The money laundered in H Casino comes from illegal bets from Poland, Germany, the Czech Republic, and other European countries, Cemil Önal told:
"Say, they come from Poland to Belarus. They come in cash form. You show more revenue at the casino than your actual income. Mustafa… launders them in his casino in Belarus. Then he sends them to Dubai."
Şener often used planes to transport large sums, Önal added. According to independent aviation base data, obtained by BRC, the business jet owned by Şener made 41 flights to Belarus from September 2021 to January 2022.
Money Web
Journalists of BRC and OCCRP figured out how the system is likely organized and functions, allowing Turkish businessmen to profit by bypassing laws. Describing its operation, journalists mainly rely on the words of Cemil Önal, whose accuracy we cannot fully confirm. However, they found many pieces of evidence for the truthfulness of the details of his story.
The company registered in the name of Halil Falyalı’s underage children, Larsen Technologies, in 2017 received a license from the Turkish-Cypriot administration to organize bets on the site BetCyp.com.
But, as Cemil Önal revealed, Larsen Technologies is a front for a large system of receiving illegal bets, in which Minsk H Casino is involved.
The Mediterranean island of Cyprus has been divided by barbed wire and minefields for five decades. The northern part of Cyprus has been occupied by Turkey since 1974.
The Turkish army invaded the island in response to a coup organized by Athens to annex the entire Cyprus to Greece.
As a result, the unrecognized territory in the north ceased to adhere to international law and global banking rules, making it more attractive for operations with "dirty" money. After casino gambling was banned in Turkey in 1996, and online gambling prohibited in 2006, northern Cyprus became a local Las Vegas.
OCCRP journalists established that the BetCyp.com website was registered by the company Total Gaming Solutions.
This company manages dozens of online gambling sites without licenses. Some of them used the personal email of an employee of Falyalı’s family, İbrahim Tokkan, for registration.
This list also includes the site Betebet with various name variations. In Turkey, it has been blacklisted.
The web resource is mentioned in the prosecutor’s report from Adana (a city in Turkey) from 2018.
As Önal shared, Falyalı’s network forms curator teams worldwide that seek individuals willing to earn. To do this, they are offered to accept payment to their bank card, crypto wallet, or payment platform account. This way, they receive money from players of unlicensed online casinos.
According to Turkey’s financial intelligence, the network contains over a hundred thousand such accounts, through which more than 10 thousand transactions were processed in just one minute.
"Accounts are opened in the names of students, housewives, pensioners, and those receiving minimum wages,” reported the Turkish state news agency Anadolu Ajansı, citing an indictment regarding Falyalı’s network from December 2024.
When a player makes a bet on an illegal site online, the money does not go to the casino but rather to a person from the created network. Then they must withdraw the cash at an ATM and give it to the curator — a person who established the work of this scheme. The account owner and curator each receive 5% of the amount. The remaining 90% of the bet goes to Falyalı. Only through approximately a hundred cryptocurrency wallets, about $1.4 billion was moved in this way. This emerges from the Turkish financial crime investigator’s report and its analysis by OCCRP.
Mustafa Şhener, Halil Falyalı
Then, for example, the cash is brought to Belarus and deposited at the Minsk H Casino’s cash desk, as if a player came there, made a bet, and lost. The illegal income is presented as casino profit, and the money formally becomes clean.
If a player has questions or problems with a payment, technical support is provided by Turkish students who are also working at H Casino, sent there by Larsen Technologies.
"Mustafa [Egemen Şhener] doesn’t earn real money at the casino. Mustafa finds these people with credit cards. He takes 10% for himself and 5% (half of 10% — ed.) gives to the guys. If he withdraws 1–2 million euros a day, he earns 100,000 euros without doing anything," explained Önal.
According to the former financial director, whose direct confirmation we don’t have, Halil Falyalı’s income from illegal activities worldwide amounted to €50 to €60 million a month. He received another €10 million for illegal operations in Cyprus.
The scheme described by Cemil Önal is confirmed by a prosecutor’s report from Adana, a report by the Turkish Financial Crimes Investigation Board MASAK, and the indictment of Ankara’s Chief Prosecutor.
"Roof" in Uniform
The gambling business in Belarus is strictly controlled by the state. For example, betting shop cash desks, gaming tables, and slot machines are connected to a special computer cash system that allows relevant authorities to monitor financial flows. Video surveillance is conducted in casinos, including near cash desks. In gaming establishments, player identification is done using a passport. Besides, casinos, slot machine halls are periodically checked. Tax authorities and law enforcement have repeatedly exposed illegal earning schemes in this sphere.
BRC found an explanation why, despite such a strict approach, the activity of H Casino has not attracted the attention of the authorities. It is likely that Belarusian law enforcement is aware of the illegal schemes but does not disrupt its operations. This is evidenced by the aforementioned appeal to the KGB by the person under the nickname yatko.
Cemil Önal claimed in a conversation with an OCCRP journalist that H Casino is "covered" by a former Belarusian law enforcement officer. He couldn’t name the surname. However, he said that he saw this person when communicating with Mustafa Şhener via video link.
BRC investigators took on the task of finding out who it was. Journalists discovered among the contacts of the owner and director of H Casino a list of people associated with the KGB and the Ministry of Defence of Belarus. For example, Mustafa Şhener traveled by car to Lithuania in November 2019 along with Igor Narkevich.
According to "Cyber partisans," he worked as the head of the medical service of military unit 43194, which belongs to an intelligence battalion.
Director H Casino Andrey Prokhorenko crossed the border 232 times by car with influential law enforcement officials.
Among his companions are former judge of the Belarusian Military Court Alexey Shchepetov, Ministry of Defence retirees Nikolai Konkolovich, and Alexander Shleverda.
Prokhorenko shares not only trips with the aforementioned but also work at the closed gambling establishment "Olympic Casino Bel."
Prokhorenko is also acquainted with Viktor Marakhin, a Ministry of Defence retiree who held positions in the Presidential Administration, the House of Representatives of the National Assembly, and "BelAeroNavigation."
This is also indicated by joint trips abroad. The director of H Casino also traveled with Svyatoslav Savitskiy, the chief physician of the "Belorussko" sanatorium, where a group of "Wagner Group" members was detained before the 2020 presidential elections. Previously, Savitskiy was the head of the Main Military Clinical Hospital.
Andrey Prokhorenko, Svyatoslav Savitskiy.
Another companion of Andrey Prokhorenko, with whom he crossed the border 62 times and worked at Olympic Casino Bel, is Vitaliy Matys, a former employee of Alexander Lukashenko’s Security Service.
We had a feeling that this person might most likely be involved in covering up illegal activities. Through OCCRP journalists, we passed the photo of Matys and several individuals listed above to an attorney to show it to his client. And Cemil Onal recognized the influential security patron in Matys.
"He is a KGB agent in Belarus, who is constantly with Mustafa 24/7 and travels abroad on Mustafa’s assignments. [...] This man was always with Mustafa when we spoke via video. [When I asked,] who he is, what kind of person he is, [Mustafa replied:] ’He is a former KGB agent who ensures my safety in the casino, in this hotel (DoubleTree by Hilton – ed.), protects me in everything. He is a very good person. If you come, I will ask him to meet you, settle your affairs, and even help you with citizenship,’" Onal said.
Vitaliy Matys, Alexander Lukashenko.
In response to the journalist’s question about what Matys was engaged in — "administrative and paperwork matters, or is this a person who, for example, could pay the president?" the interlocutor clarified that Matys made "payments to state officials."
The involvement of Lukashenko’s bodyguard in the casino is a "connection between the Lukashenko regime and all these matters," said in a comment to BRC, BelPol initiative representative Vladimir Zhigar:
"Who better than Lukashenko’s bodyguard, an employee of the SBP (Security Service of the President – ed.), trusted over the years, to entrust such activities? [...] It’s the same as we showed about the ’East’ residence and that there a former personal bodyguard — Lukashenko’s adjutant — controls this ’East’ residence. The same applies here. This principle of building the Lukashenko system, where only verified, only reliable people, from Lukashenko’s point of view, are entrusted with what can bring money."
A BRC journalist reached Vitaliy Matys by phone. He hung up. On the role of Lukashenko’s former Security Service employee in H Casino’s work, journalists asked the establishment’s director Andrei Prokhorenko. In a phone call with a BRC journalist, he noted that Matys "never worked with them in their lives." He added that he could not always accompany Mustafa Shener, since "Shener has not been in Belarus for over a year."
Prokhorenko also claimed he didn’t know about money laundering from illegal gambling at H Casino, and he hears the name Halil Falyali for the first time: "H Casino is not connected to any betting platforms. We have a license for the gambling business in Belarus. We do not accept bets from anyone. Especially not from some betting firms. [...] You are asking me about something that doesn’t exist."
In this conversation, Prokhorenko shared that he has been working at H Casino since November 11, 2023, and indirectly confirmed his connections with influential people in Belarus. He mentioned that he was the director of LLC "City Entertainment Group" — a legal entity that owned the casino in the "President Hotel" in Minsk. This hotel is part of the Presidential Property Management Directorate, which was headed by Alexander Lukashenko’s associate Viktor Sheiman until mid-2021.
"City Entertainment Group" merged with "Gaming Cartel" in 2022, which is the owner of H Casino.
Extensive Connections
Cemil Onal also pointed to other potential patrons of the owners of H Casino. According to him, Mustafa Shener has shared business interests with the owners of the multifunctional center Galleria Minsk, where H Casino is located. They, in turn, are connected to influential people. Journalists have confirmed this. Furthermore, the company "Gallery Concept LLC," the legal owner of Galleria Minsk, may have high-ranking patrons not only in Belarus but also in Russia.
Documents from the Cyprus company registry state that the company DG Galleria Minsk Limited — the owner of "Gallery Concept LLC" — received loans in 2018 from Mustafa Shener’s business partner, Zubair Aliyev.
The beneficiary of "Gallery Concept" is Timur Murtazaliyev — through companies registered in Cyprus, Galleria Concept Blr Limited, DG Galleria Minsk Limited, and Oceans Solutions Limited in Nevis.
He is the son of Russian businessman Omar Murtazaliyev — a person with an award from Vladimir Putin and with political connections, particularly in Belarus.
Judging by numerous photos on the website of the All-Russian Public Organization "Russian Wrestling Federation," Murtazaliyev Sr. has friendly relations with Vladimir Kheifets, a former member of the Minsk City Council. For example, in 2015 and 2016 Kheifets participated in runs at the London half-marathon in the team of the TIKO Foundation — at that time the foundation of Omar and Timur Murtazaliyev.
Vladimir Kheifets was also found in the registration documents of "Gallery Concept." He is a minority shareholder of DG Galleria Minsk and director of "Gallery Concept."
Kheifets, according to "Cyberpartisans," had a joint trip abroad with Vladimir Sulimskiy, former ambassador of Belarus to the UAE, a person close to the Lukashenko family. This is evidenced by joint travels with members of his family.
Journalists also learned that Kheifets attended a celebration of the anniversary of Belarusian wrestler Alexander Medved, together with Dmitriy Lukashenko, the middle son of Alexander Lukashenko. Additionally, they found his profile in the database of people involved in political repression in Belarus.
The connection of the owners of "Gallery Concept" with influential people is also indicated by the fact that during the construction of the shopping center in 2012, Alexander Lukashenko issued a decree granting the company tax and customs benefits, some of which were classified.
The likelihood of security forces or officials being involved in H Casino’s activities was assessed in a comment to BRC by Ilya Shumanov, who, at the time of the interview, held the position of director of the NGO "Transparency International – Russia in Exile." He noted that even in other areas, less profitable than casinos, the influence of the state is always significant.
"There is no single area of activity in Belarus not connected to the Lukashenko family or the security apparatus in one way or another. That is, any high income generating sector becomes the subject of interest to the state in a broad sense. Well, in particular, it’s either the Lukashenko family or Lukashenko’s close circle, that is, his pockets," Shumanov explained, but added that he is not an expert on Belarus.
Where is the Money?
The "dividends" from the gambling business, as journalists found out, Mustafa Shener invests in Dubai by buying real estate. According to the Dubai leak, he may have owned 90 apartments. 70 of them collectively cost approximately $177.6 million. Investigators checked with the Dubai Land Department to see who currently owns these real estate properties. At the time of the investigation’s publication, Shener is the owner of only one apartment. The others belong to Sultan Rashid Abdullah Rashid Al Shene.
The surname Al Shene resembles the surname Shener. We have grounds to believe that this might be the new name of H Casino’s owner on an Emirati passport. Firstly, Al Shene’s phone number is linked to a Microsoft account under the name Egemen Shener with his photograph. Secondly, this number is also associated with his name in the GetContact service.
When journalists called him and asked if they were speaking to Shener, the person confirmed it.
In the indictment from the Ankara Chief Prosecutor’s Office, one of the 35 leaders of Halil Falyali’s criminal business empire is indicated as Halil Falyali’s wife — Ozge Tasker Falyali (Özge Taşker Falyalı). In 2023, she purchased a dozen properties in Dubai of a total value of no less than $53 million. Several of her apartments are in the same building as Mustafa Shener’s residence.
Halil Falyali’s civil partner, Belarusian Olga Kotova, owns a 67 sq.m. apartment in Minsk and a 2020 Porsche car.
Journalists sent requests to Ozge Tasker, Omar and Timur Murtazaliyev, and Vladimir Kheifets asking for comments on the findings in the investigation. Journalists also requested KGB if the security services were aware of the casino owners’ illegal activities and Vitaly Matys’ assistance in concealing it. As of the time of the investigation’s publication, the editorial board had not received responses. They also reached out to Mustafa Shener – he hung up.
Author: Maria Sharapova
Источник: https://liberty-gazete.com/component/k2/item/215709
