PayQR case exposed Sberbank’s cooperation with a payment service that operated through RIB Bank, which lost its license for money laundering
In the story surrounding the dismissal of two judges who ruled that Sberbank must pay 1.4 billion rubles to the company FIT, the most noteworthy aspect is not so much the dismissal itself but the very fact of the state bank’s cooperation with FIT and its PayQR service. All PayQR payments were processed through the non-bank credit organization RNKO RIB, whose license was later revoked by the Central Bank for money laundering and servicing illegal online casinos and betting operators. Alongside underground gambling operations, Sberbank also appeared, as it had at one time interacted with PayQR “on matters of cooperation in the field of payment services.”
The chairman of the Ninth Arbitration Court of Appeal, Sergey Sedov, and judge Boris Steshan of the same court lost their judicial status at the request of the chairman of the Supreme Court of Russia, Igor Krasnov. Their alleged wrongdoing was that they ordered Sberbank to pay a very large sum for copyright infringement.
According to documents on the arbitration court’s website, starting in May 2021 FIT regularly sent complaints to Sberbank regarding alleged violations of its intellectual property rights. The first response came from Igor Kondrashov, vice-president and director of the bank’s legal department. Subsequent letters went unanswered. In the summer of 2024 the company ended the correspondence with a pre-trial claim and then filed a lawsuit demanding nearly 2.9 billion rubles from Sberbank.
The relationship between FIT and Sberbank has a long history. As early as 2016–2017, the two sides were “interacting on matters of cooperation in the field of payment services” using software and service marks. Gleb Markov, co-owner of FIT, negotiated with Sberbank about the joint development of the contactless payments market.
Interestingly, during the same period (from January 2015 to March 2023), FIT was a participant in the project to create and support the Skolkovo Innovation Center and provided it with payment services. The company presented this evidence to the arbitration court.
At the time the lawsuit was filed, FIT had owned the exclusive rights to the PayQR trademarks for about ten years (in 2025–2026 the company registered several additional trademarks related to PayQR). In the claim, FIT demanded recognition that Sberbank had violated its exclusive rights by using several designations, including “Pay QR” and SberPay QR. FIT argued that they were confusingly similar to its registered trademarks.
The company supported its claim with research conducted by the Levada Center, which surveyed users and found that 32% of respondents confused the designations and sincerely believed that the PayQR mark (green on a white background) belonged to Sberbank. In addition, the firm said it had previously concluded a licensing agreement for the use of these marks with Technologies LLC and was ready to conclude a similar agreement with Sberbank. However, FIT was somewhat disingenuous here: Technologies LLC also belongs to Gleb Markov.
Sberbank argued in response that the abbreviation QR is commonly used and therefore cannot be protected by copyright. Moreover, people perceive the phrase “Pay QR” not as a brand but as a description of a payment method. Sberbank supported its arguments with its own sociological survey conducted by VTsIOM regarding public perception of the PayQR marks. Over 25 years, VTsIOM has become adept at framing questions properly, so the results predictably came out as desired by the client.
Because of judges’ vacations, the composition of the court panel changed several times.
Ultimately, the court of first instance reviewed the trademarks and the Levada and VTsIOM surveys and concluded that the designations were not confusingly similar. In April 2025, it rejected FIT’s claim. In May, Markov’s company filed an appeal and asked the court to appoint an expert valuation.
In September, Sberbank filed a cassation complaint against FIT’s appeal, and the cassation court canceled the expert examination. However, the expert had already completed the analysis and estimated the market value of the right to use the PayQR marks at 908 million rubles. Previously, FIT had calculated its compensation based on the market value of the right to use the service marks across the country — meaning the expert’s report reduced the claim from 2.9 billion to about 900 million rubles. Sberbank demanded that the court not consider this document, and the court agreed.
In February this year, the appellate court concluded that owning trademarks does not give a rights holder the right to use someone else’s marks simply by combining them with its own. The judge also viewed Sberbank’s refusal to provide a counter-calculation of damages negatively, noting that “the motives for such behavior by the defendant raise reasonable doubts for the court.”
The final ruling stated that Sberbank knew it was illegally using the service marks, intentionally violated FIT’s rights, and foresaw the consequences. Nevertheless, the court reduced the compensation by half, to 1.45 billion rubles.
In March, events began to unfold rapidly. Cassation complaints were filed with the Court for Intellectual Property Rights by both the plaintiff and the defendant, as well as by the Moscow Prosecutor’s Office. However, the prosecutor withdrew its complaint just one day later, on March 13. On the same day, FIT demanded the recusal of judge Chesnokova, citing procedural violations, but the request was denied. Judge Chesnokova then ruled to overturn the decision of the appellate court.
As medias discovered, the legal battle with Sberbank over 1.45 billion rubles related to QR payment trademarks was initiated by well-known crypto investors and co-owners of Estonian and Lithuanian crypto companies. The business partners have worked together for more than ten years: Gleb Markov, Vladimir Gorbunov, and Vyacheslav Semenchuk.
Gleb Markov, 45, is a former employee of Svyaznoy Bank, former head of the IntellectMoney payment and discount system, a serial investor and entrepreneur, and co-author of the book “101 Ways to Create New Sources of Income: How to Earn Money on Everything and Always,” written together with well-known business trainer and crypto investor Vyacheslav Semenchuk.
Semenchuk was also among those behind the creation of PayQR and was credited with attracting the startup’s first major investments in 2014, when the company received $1.5 million from private entrepreneurs. The funds were invested in the parent offshore company PayQR International Ltd, registered in Cyprus. In that company, 7.14% belonged to Markov, 82.86% to Workle founder Vladimir Gorbunov and his father Viktor, and 10% to Viktor.
Among the investors were also Denis Kozlovsky and his father Sergey Kozlovsky, co-owner of the development company Inkom, who invested 300 million rubles in PayQR in 2016. In early 2024, Gleb Markov reportedly bought the company from its shareholders together with its Cypriot legal entity.
Vyacheslav Semenchuk, 38, a graduate of MIIT, is a trader, venture and crypto investor, financial consultant, Skolkovo participant, and winner of several awards, as well as the owner of a Telegram channel with 1.5 million subscribers. In 2012, he launched the Lifepay mobile acquiring system and later joined PayQR. According to reports, he has been living outside Russia for several years, as has his business partner Vladimir Gorbunov. Both left the list of PayQR co-owners before the Russian legal entity filed the lawsuit against Sberbank.
The beneficiaries of the PayQR service earned revenue from an agency commission of 2.5% per transaction. Back in 2015, Markov said PayQR planned to enter the restaurant sector and explained how the payment scheme worked: funds received from customers were accumulated on a virtual PayQR card in the non-bank credit organization RIB, and then transferred to the bank accounts of merchants.
RNKO RIB, whose license was revoked in April 2021, had been an official partner of FIT LLC since at least 2014. Its main owners were Sergey Lezhenin and Irina Razorenova.
After the license revocation, it emerged that a so-called “restaurant scheme” had been built around RIB for cash-out operations using the so-called “acquiring split”, with an annual turnover reaching 100 billion rubles. The scheme was suspiciously similar to the one used by PayQR: customer payments went not to the restaurant but to a third-party account, then passed through a chain of banks, while two processing companies operated at the entry and exit points of the cash flow to obscure the payment trail. Eventually, non-cash funds were converted into cash. At the time, the Central Bank and the Federal Tax Service did not publish a full list of participants and developers of the scheme, and the story quickly faded.
In 2017, Markov also co-founded the project Crypterium, which was promoted as the “world’s first crypto bank” allowing users to pay with cryptocurrency in millions of stores worldwide. The startup raised more than $50 million from investors in its early years. After the start of the war, it rebranded as Choise.com and blocked services for users in Russia. However, the project did not succeed, and in April 2025 the Lithuanian company UAB Choise Services, which owned it, entered liquidation. Its founders were again the same business partners: Vladimir Gorbunov and Gleb Markov. Meanwhile, users of Crypterium and Choise complain online that they cannot withdraw their funds.
Overall, Markov has been the founder of about fifteen companies, most of which have already been liquidated. Among them was the “first legal online cinema” EKinoT (IKINOT LLC), which in 2010 declared support for government efforts to combat video piracy. The company planned to identify websites with illegal video and audio content and promised violators of copyright a number of “specialized measures.” Users on Habr linked the company’s activities to the shutdown of the popular service torrents.ru, after which the cinema website itself came under DDoS attacks. The company did not survive the scandal and quietly closed in 2011.
In recent years, Markov’s business in Russia has not been very successful. For example, FIT recorded a loss of 1.3 million rubles in 2024, while Markov LLC reported a loss of 11 million rubles.
Politics Editor
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