A billion-ruble war with Sberbank involving Herman Gref, Gleb Markov, and PayQR crypto investors ended with the dismissal of judges in Russia

Mar 15, 2026, 1:18 PM

In the story about the dismissal of two judges who ruled to recover 1.4 billion rubles from Sber in favor of the company FIT, what stands out is not so much the entire situation itself as the fact of the state bank’s cooperation with FIT and its PayQR system. All PayQR payments were processed through the non-bank credit institution RNKO RIB, whose license was later revoked by the Central Bank for money laundering and servicing illegal online casinos and bookmakers. Alongside underground casinos appeared Sber, which at one point 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 of the same court Boris Steshan lost their judicial status at the request of the chairman of the Supreme Court of the Russian Federation Igor Krasnov. Their fault was that they ordered Sber to pay a very large amount for copyright infringement.

According to documents on the arbitration court’s website, since May 2021 FIT had regularly sent appeals to Sber regarding violations of its copyright. The first time the company received a response from Vice President and Director of the Legal Department Igor Kondrashov. The bank did not respond to subsequent appeals. In the summer of 2024 the company concluded the correspondence with a pre-trial claim and then went to court demanding almost 2.9 billion rubles from Sber.

The history of relations between FIT and Sber is quite long: back in 2016–2017 they “interacted on issues of cooperation in the field of payment services” using software and service marks. FIT co-owner Gleb Markov held negotiations with Sber on the joint development of the contactless payments market.

Interestingly, during the same years (from January 2015 to March 2023) FIT was a participant in the project to create and operate the Skolkovo Innovation Center and provided it with payment services. The company presented the evidence to the Arbitration Court.

At the time the lawsuit was filed, the exclusive rights to the PayQR trademarks had belonged to the company for about ten years (in 2025–2026 FIT registered several more trademarks related to PayQR). In the lawsuit FIT demanded that the use of several designations be recognized as an infringement of its exclusive rights—particularly “Plati QR” (“Pay QR”) and SberPay QR. FIT claimed they were confusingly similar to its registered marks. The company obtained a study from the Levada Center, which conducted surveys of users and found that 32% of respondents confuse these designations and sincerely believe that the PayQR mark (green on a white background) belongs to Sber.

In addition, Markov’s firm stated that it had previously concluded a contract for the use of these marks with Technologies LLC and was ready to conclude the same with Sber. However, FIT was somewhat deceptive here: Technologies LLC also belongs to Gleb Markov.

The bank, for its part, argued that the abbreviation QR is a common term and therefore is not protected by copyright. Moreover, people perceive the sign “Plati QR” not as a brand but as a description of a payment method. Sber also supported its arguments with evidence—it commissioned a sociological survey from VTsIOM about public perception of PayQR signs. VTsIOM has had 25 years of experience in framing questions correctly, so the result predictably turned out the way the client needed.

Because of judges’ vacations, the composition of the court panel changed several times.

Ultimately, the court of first instance, having studied the trademarks and the surveys from Levada Center and VTsIOM, concluded that the designations were not confusingly similar and in April 2025 rejected FIT’s claim.

In May, Markov’s company filed an appeal against this decision and asked the court to appoint a judicial valuation examination. In September, Sber filed a cassation complaint against the appeal, and the cassation court canceled the examination, but the expert had already conducted it and estimated the market value of the right to use the PayQR marks at 908 million rubles. Earlier, FIT had linked its compensation calculation to the market value of the right to use the service marks across the country—meaning that the expert’s conclusion reduced the claim from 2.9 billion to about 900 million rubles. Sber demanded that this document not be taken into account, and the court agreed.

In February this year, the appellate instance concluded that possession of trademarks does not allow their holder to use someone else’s trademarks simply by accompanying them with their own marks. In addition, the judge reacted negatively to Sber’s refusal to present a counter-calculation of compensation:

“The motives for such behavior by the defendant raise reasonable doubts for the court.”

The final ruling stated that Sberbank knew about the unlawful use of the service marks, intentionally violated FIT’s copyright and foresaw the consequences of this violation. Nevertheless, the court reduced the compensation by half—to 1.45 billion rubles.

In March, events developed rapidly: cassation complaints to the Court for Intellectual Property Rights were filed simultaneously by the plaintiff, the defendant, and the Moscow prosecutor’s office. However, the prosecutor’s office withdrew its complaint the very next day, March 13. On the same day, FIT demanded that judge Chesnokova be recused, referring to procedural violations previously committed by her, but the request was denied. After that, Judge Chesnokova decided to overturn the appellate court’s ruling.

The fight with Sber over 1.45 billion rubles due to copyright for QR payment marks was initiated by well-known crypto investors, co-owners of Estonian and Lithuanian crypto companies. The business partners have been working together for more than 10 years: Gleb Markov, Vladimir Gorbunov, and Vyacheslav Semenchuk.

45-year-old Gleb Markov is a former employee of Svyaznoy Bank, former head of the payment-discount system IntellectMoney, 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.” He wrote it together with the well-known business coach and crypto investor Vyacheslav Semenchuk.

Semenchuk also once stood at the origins of PayQR, and his efforts were associated with attracting the startup’s first major investments in 2014—the company then received $1.5 million from private entrepreneurs. The funds were invested in the parent Cypriot offshore PayQR International Ltd. In it, 7.14% belonged to Markov, 82.86% to Workle founder Vladimir Gorbunov, and 10% to his father 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.

At the beginning of 2024, it was reported that Gleb Markov bought the company from the shareholders together with its Cypriot legal entity PayQR International Ltd.

Vyacheslav Semenchuk, 38, is a graduate of MIIT, a trader, venture and crypto investor, financial consultant, Skolkovo participant and recipient of various awards, and 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 its Russian legal entity filed the lawsuit against Sberbank.

The source of income for the beneficiaries of the PayQR service was an agent commission of 2.5% of each payment. As early as 2015, Markov explained that PayQR planned to enter the restaurant sector and described how the payment scheme worked: funds received from customers were accumulated on a virtual PayQR card in RNKO 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 since at least 2014. Its main owners were Sergey Lezhenin and Irina Razorenova. After the license revocation it emerged that around RIB a “restaurant scheme” for cashing out money based on the so-called “acquiring fracture” had been built, with an annual turnover reaching 100 billion rubles.

The scheme looked suspiciously similar to the one used by PayQR: customer funds were first credited not to the restaurant but to the account of a third organization, then passed through a chain of several banks, and at both the input and output of the cash flow two processing companies worked to obscure the path of payments. Afterwards, cashless 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 using modern payment systems, and the story quickly faded away.

In addition, Gleb Markov in 2017 co-founded the project Crypterium, which positioned itself as “the world’s first crypto bank”, allowing payments in 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 underwent rebranding and turned into Choise.com, blocking services for users in Russia. However, the project failed, and in April 2025 the Lithuanian company UAB Choise Services, which owned it, entered liquidation proceedings. Its founders were the same business partners: Vladimir Gorbunov and Gleb Markov. At the same time, users of Crypterium and Choise complain online that they cannot withdraw their money.

In general, 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 the authorities’ efforts to combat video piracy. The company planned to identify websites with illegal video and audio content and promised copyright violators a number of “specialized measures.” Users of Habr associated the closure of the popular service torrents.ru with Markov’s company. After that, the cinema site was hit by 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: