PlayCity is changing the gambling market: how it plans to raise billions to the budget
29 August 13:36
Five years ago, Ukraine legalized gambling. The decision was made after a decade-long ban that drove the gambling industry underground. In 2020, lawmakers aimed to bring gambling out of the shadows and get a new source of budget revenues. Very soon, the state did indeed receive billions of hryvnias from licenses and taxes, but this year’s audit by the Accounting Chamber still stated that the lion’s share of potential revenues is lost in the shadows. Experts estimate that the country’s budget still loses about 10 billion hryvnias from the gambling industry every year. This is stated in the article of ZN, "Komersant Ukrainian" informs.
The situation with the gambling shadow is intended to be changed by the newly created state agency PlayCity, which officially started operating in the spring of 2025 and declared its task to digitalize the industry.
“We are digitizing the issuance of licenses and implementing online monitoring to make the market transparent and ensure that taxes go to the needs of the Defense Forces. We are destroying corruption, blocking the work of illegal casinos, and creating a system where players are protected,” the regulator’s portal says.
Huge fines for advertising
In the first months of its operation, PlayCity reported blocking more than 1300 websites with illegal gambling and closing seven Instagram accounts that violated casino advertising rules. In addition, the Telegram channel Trukha received a fine of UAH 4.8 million, and another UAH 3.2 million was imposed on eight organizers for late reporting.
“In other words, a total of UAH 8 million has already been paid to the budget from the violators,” the publication calculates.
The regulator has also launched a “tracking system for illegal websites” that allows checking whether a casino is legal in a few clicks, as well as complaining about an illegal website or even downloading the current database of “banned” websites.
How billions are planned to be raised to the budget
Ukrainian “white” players of the gambling market greeted the emergence of PlayCity with enthusiasm and plans to increase tax payments to the state.
“According to our forecasts, by the end of 2025, revenues will amount to about UAH 19.5 billion, which means an increase of 13.9% compared to last year,” says Oleksandr Kohut, president of the Ukrainian Gaming Association.
However, the new rules of the game turned out to be important not only for Ukrainian operators but also for foreign investors.
“The Bulgarian company Niko5, for example, recently announced the launch of a large-scale casino in the Premier Palace hotel in Kyiv with a total investment of over UAH 500 million. This is the first investment project of this scale (the main investor is Bulgarian entrepreneur Georgi Papazki – ed.) in the gambling industry in the context of a full-scale war. However, it may indicate that the Western investor considers the Ukrainian gambling market to be still promising, even despite the still significant percentage of the “shadow” zone,” ZN notes.
Although the Bulgarian company recognizes the problems of Ukrainian gambling, they hope for the new regulator and “transparent” rules of the game. They also emphasize that they want to “support the Ukrainian economy in times of war.”
What can be considered an achievement?
In the end, the first months of PlayCity’s operation dismantle the regulator’s resolve.
“On the one hand, there are fines and sanctions that are already measured in millions. On the other hand, there are large investments that create jobs and form the basis for the growth of tax payments in the future. However, maintaining a balance between fiscal benefits and market development will probably be the main challenge for PlayCity. After all, the real achievement of the reform will be determined not by how many websites are blocked, but by whether a fair and stable gambling market will start working in Ukraine, which is understandable to operators and really beneficial to the state,” the publication summarizes.
Bulgarian casino and former Russian hoteliers
It is worth noting that information about the emergence of a large-scale casino project in Ukraine in the Premier Palace hotel in Kyiv was previously publicized. The hotel confirmed that Bulgarian investors “rent (their premises – ed.) on commercial terms” along with other clients.
Already at the start, the ambitious foreign casino project faced a wave of negative news in the Ukrainian media space. The reason was the former informal owners of the Premier Palace hotel, whom Ukrainian law enforcement officials linked to the Russian Federation.
At the same time, according to the registers, the Premier Palace belongs to the Premier Hotels and Resorts chain, the ultimate beneficiary of which is the French company Pumorie Enterprises Investments Ltd. A number of court documents confirm that the hotel has not been seized, and the chain itself publicly condemns Russia’s aggression.
Nico5 denied any links between Bulgarian investor Georgi Papazki and the “Russian hoteliers”.
“The allegations that the Bulgarian investors of theprojecthave any ties to the current or former owners of the Premier Palace Hotel (Alexander Babakov, Yevgeny Giner, Mikhail Voevodin – ed.) are completely unfounded and false. Georgiy Papazki does not know these people. And all negotiations on the lease of the hotel premises were conducted with the manager appointed by the local Ukrainian administration.”
According to [Kommersant], Diia has selected an anti-corruption expert group for the PlayCity agency
