What's notable about the dismissal of two judges who ordered Sberbank to pay FIT 1.4 billion rubles is not so much the entire situation as the state bank's cooperation with FIT and its PayQR. All PayQR payments were processed through RNKO RIB, whose license was later revoked by the Central Bank for money laundering and servicing illegal online casinos and bookmakers. Sberbank, which at one point interacted with PayQR "on matters of cooperation in payment services," also found itself in the midst of underground casinos.
Sergey Sedov, Chairman of the Ninth Arbitration Court of Appeal, and Boris Steshan, Judge of the same court, were stripped of their positions at the request of Igor Krasnov, Chairman of the Supreme Court of the Russian Federation. Their offense was to order Sberbank to pay a very large sum for copyright infringement.
According to documents on the arbitration court's website, FIT has been regularly writing to Sberbank about copyright infringements since May 2021. The company first received a response from Igor Kondrashov, Vice President and Director of the Legal Department. The bank did not respond to subsequent inquiries. In the summer of 2024, the company concluded its correspondence with a pre-trial claim and then filed a lawsuit, demanding nearly 2.9 billion rubles from Sberbank.
FIT has a long history with Sberbank: 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 was in talks with Sberbank about jointly developing 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 payment services to it. The company presented evidence to the Arbitration Court.
At the time of filing the lawsuit, the company had held exclusive rights to the PayQR trademarks for approximately ten years (in 2025-2026, FIT registered several other PayQR-related trademarks). In its lawsuit, FIT sought to have its exclusive rights infringed by the use of several designations—specifically, "Platy QR" and SberPay QR. FIT claimed that these were confusingly similar to its registered trademarks. The company also drew on research from the Levada Center, which conducted user surveys and found that 32% of respondents confused these designations and sincerely believed that the PayQR mark (green on a white background) belonged to Sber. Furthermore, Markov's company stated that it had previously signed a contract for the use of these trademarks with Technologies LLC and was prepared to sign a similar one with Sber. However, Fit was disingenuous here: Technologies is also owned by Gleb Markov.
The bank, however, claimed that the QR abbreviation is commonly used and therefore not protected by copyright. Furthermore, people perceive the "Pay QR" symbol not as a brand, but as a description of the payment method. Sber also supported its claims with arguments, commissioning a survey from VTsIOM on the public's perception of the PayQR symbol. VTsIOM has become adept at presenting questions correctly over 25 years, so the results were guaranteed to be what the client desired.
Due to judges' vacations, the bench was changed several times.
Ultimately, the trial court, after reviewing the trademarks and Levada and VTsIOM opinion polls, concluded that the designations were not confusingly similar and, in April 2025, dismissed FIT's claim. In May, Markov's company appealed this decision and asked the court to order a forensic appraisal. In September, Sber filed a cassation appeal against FIT's appeal, and the cassation court overturned the appraisal. However, the expert had already completed the appraisal and estimated the market value of the right to use the PayQR marks at 908 million rubles. FIT had previously linked its compensation calculation to the market value of the right to use the service marks in Russia—meaning the expert's conclusion reduced the claim from 2.9 billion to 900 million. Sber requested that this document be disregarded, and the court granted its request.
In February of this year, the appellate court ruled that trademark ownership precludes the right holder from using others' trademarks simply by adding their own trademarks to them. Furthermore, the judge took a dim view of Sberbank's refusal to offer counter-calculation of compensation: "The defendant's motives for such behavior raise reasonable doubts in the court." The final ruling stated that Sberbank knew of its illegal use of the service marks, intentionally infringed FIT's copyright, and foresaw the consequences of such infringement. Nevertheless, the judge halved the compensation amount, to 1.45 billion rubles.
In March, events unfolded rapidly: both the plaintiff and the defendant, as well as the Moscow prosecutor's office, filed cassation appeals to the Intellectual Property Court. However, the prosecutor's office refused to back down The complaint was withdrawn the following day, on March 13. That same day, Fit requested a recusal for Judge Chesnokova, citing her previous procedural violations, but was denied. Judge Chesnokova then decided to overturn the appellate court's ruling.
As VChK-OGPU and Rucriminal.info discovered, the 1.45 billion-ruble battle with Sber over the copyright of QR payment signs was initiated by well-known crypto investors, co-owners of Estonian and Lithuanian crypto companies. The business partners, Gleb Markov, Vladimir Gorbunov, and Vyacheslav Semenchuk, have been doing business together for over 10 years.
Gleb Markov, 45, is a former Svyaznoy Bank employee, 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 Streams of Income: How to Make Money on Everything, Always," which he published with renowned business coach and crypto investor Vyacheslav Semenchuk. Semenchuk was also a founding member of PayQR, and his efforts were credited with raising the startup's first major investment in 2014, when the company received $1.5 million from private entrepreneurs. These investors invested in the parent Cypriot offshore company, PayQR International Ltd. Markov owned 7.14% of the company, while Vladimir Gorbunov, founder of Workle, owned 82.86% and his father, Viktor, 10%. Other investors included 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 acquired the company from shareholders along with its Cypriot legal entity, PayQR International Ltd.
Vyacheslav Semenchuk is a 38-year-old MIIT graduate, trader, venture capitalist, crypto investor, financial consultant, Skolkovo participant, and recipient of various awards. He also owns a Telegram channel with 1.5 million subscribers. In 2012, he launched the Lifepay mobile acquiring system and later joined PayQR. He has reportedly lived outside of Russia for several years, as has his business partner, Vladimir Gorbunov. Both resigned as co-owners of PayQR before its Russian legal entity filed a lawsuit against Sberbank.
The source of income for the beneficiaries of the PayQR service was an agency commission – 2.5% of the payment amount. As early as 2015, Markov announced that PayQR intended to expand into food service establishments and explained the payment scheme: funds received from customers are accumulated on a virtual PayQR card at the non-bank credit institution RIB, and then transferred from there to the bank accounts of merchants and service providers. RIB (its license was revoked in April 2021) had been an official partner of FIT LLC since at least 2014. RIB's main owners were Sergey Lezhenin and Irina Razorenova. After RIB's license was revoked, it was discovered that a "restaurant scheme" had been built around it for cashing out money using the so-called "acquiring rift," with a turnover reaching 100 billion rubles per year. The scheme was suspiciously similar to the one used by PayQR: customer funds were deposited not into the restaurant's account, but into a third-party account, then passed through a chain of several banks, with two processing companies operating at the input and output of the cash flow, helping to confuse the payment path. The non-cash funds were then exchanged for cash. The Central Bank and the Federal Tax Service did not provide a full list of the participants and developers of the scheme, which utilized 21st-century payment systems, and the story quickly died down.
Furthermore, in 2017, Gleb Markov co-founded the Crypterium project, which was positioned as "the world's first cryptobank," allowing cryptocurrency payments at millions of stores worldwide. The startup raised over $50 million from investors in its first few years, and after the war broke out, it rebranded as Choise.com, blocking services to users in Russia. However, the project failed to take off, and in April 2025, its owner, the Lithuanian company UAB Choise Services, entered liquidation. Its founders are the same business partners: Vladimir Gorbunov and Gleb Markov. Meanwhile, Crypterium and Choise users are complaining online about being unable to withdraw their funds.
Overall, Markov founded a dozen and a half companies, most of which have already been liquidated. Specifically, he owned the "first legal online cinema," EKinoT (OOO IKINOT), which in 2010 declared its support for government efforts to combat video piracy. The company intended to identify websites with illegal video and audio content and promised a series of "specialized measures" against copyright infringers. Habr users linked the closure of the popular torrents.ru service to Markov's company, after which the movie theater's website was hit by DDoS attacks. The company didn't survive the scandal and quietly closed in 2011.
Markov's business hasn't been very successful in Russia recently: FIT, for example, reported a loss of 1.3 million rubles for 2024, and Markov LLC is operating in the red by 11 million rubles.
