Total exposure of the largest lottery in Russia "Stoloto"

2024 Author: Seth Attwood | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-16 15:55

At the very beginning of 2020, the state organizer of the Stoloto lotteries announced a record win in the history of the country - 1 billion rubles. This fantastic amount has already seriously stirred up the sales of lottery tickets - all the latest editions are being sold out. Why are there questions about winning a record, how is money distributed in this business and how big is the chance of getting rich by winning the lottery?

At the beginning of the year, the amazing story of Nadezhda Bartosh, a resident of the Moscow Region, did not leave indifferent many. Winning 1 billion rubles is an absolute record for Russian lotteries. On the website of the state organizer of these gambling events, the Stoloto company, the name of Nadezhda Bartosh is the first in the list of the lucky ones.

Many people also remember the amazing story of how the lucky ticket was bought - at the last minutes of the shopping center in Odintsovo on December 13th. In total, Nadezhda Bartosh, together with her children, bought three tickets. Then they were presented to the woman by her daughter for her birthday on December 31, and on January 1 Bartosz won the New Year's Russian Lotto draw, in which more than 53 million tickets took part.

Initially, the media reported that a record amount in the history of lotteries went to a modest resident of the Moscow region, but then the press began to promote the version that Bartosh is far from a poor man, is the founder of the fish business, and her son owns a fish farm in the Tver region.

Zigzag of good luck by Nadezhda Bartosh and Armenian "tails" of the owner of "Stoloto"

On January 1, the country did not yet know the name of the winner of the Russian Lotto New Year's drawing. Stoloto sent out a press release to the media in which it announced that it had won one of the tickets purchased in Moscow or the Moscow region, and that the winner had not yet applied for a prize.

On January 3, the daughter of Nadezhda Bartosz checked the results of the rally and could not believe her eyes. Then she rechecked the results several times, and also asked her mother and brother to do so. The winning ticket was one of about ten tickets for the New Year's raffle, bought earlier by Nadezhda Bartosz, but the billion was won by the one that was presented by her daughter and son. According to Nadezhda herself, she asked to buy this ticket for her as a birthday present.

One of these tickets brought the resident of Russia Nadezhda Bartosh a record win of 1 billion rubles. Photo: Kirill Kukhmar / TASS

On January 9, the Bartosz family was already at the Stoloto lottery center, where they registered their winnings. According to the winner, the realization of incredible luck came to her only then. Bartosz will continue to develop the family business, and with the money won, he also intends to buy herself a piece of jewelry.

However, from that moment on, quite serious criticism fell upon the woman. It turned out that the Bartosz family leads a well-to-do life, the level of which does not correspond to the image of a woman modestly living in the Moscow region, posing for a photo with a small bouquet of flowers against the background of not luxurious interiors. Such photographs literally immediately began to appear on the pages of many media outlets.

The son, Aleksey Alekseevich Bartosh, owns the Shostka LLC fish farm near Tver, and Nadezhda Bartosh herself is the founder of the Tsarsky Sturgeon Trading House. The trading house, as it turned out, is the exclusive distributor in Russia of the products of the Caviar Court food processing company (Kingdom of Saudi Arabia) - granular sturgeon caviar. The main activity is wholesale and retail trade in sturgeon caviar. Critics immediately suspected Bartosz of conspiring with Stoloto to legalize 1 billion rubles. Behind the first disclosure of the lottery winner was the MediaKiller Telegram channel.

This version was then refuted by the head of the Center for Regional Policy Development (CRDP) Ilya Grashchenkov. In his telegram channel, he called the investigation of "MediaKiller" "stuffing", and the information found in five minutes using Google.

And substituting "Stoloto" does not make any sense, after all, there is a smooth business for years, and not a casino at a vegetable store. They have a turnover of tens of billions and a transparent business under state roof since 2014,

- wrote, in particular, Grashchenkov.

He called the 1 billion won by Nadezhda Bartosz not such a cosmic sum, considering that Stoloto owns 27 lotteries and makes monthly payments to the winners totaling 1–2 billion rubles.

At the same time, "Mediakiller" pointed to the Armenian connections of Bartosz, which may indicate the involvement in the withdrawal of 1 billion rubles in such an extravagant way in the interests of the owner of "Stoloto" Armen Sargsyan.

What do these connections look like? The key intermediate figures between Bartosh and Sargsyan are a certain Sergei Karaoglanov and a former Moscow administration official under Yuri Luzhkov, Iosif Ordzhonikidze.

Karaoglanov is the former general director of the very Tsarsky Sturgeon Trade House, which Bartosz established. Mediailler also writes that Sergei and Vladimir Karaoglanov previously founded SKV International LLC. In addition, Vladimir Karaoglanov is a large Moscow developer, General Director of Stroyservice CJSC. Sergei is engaged in military construction.

Former Moscow administration official Iosif Ordzhonikidze is considered one of the key intermediate figures between Bartosh and Sargsyan. Photo: Anton Belitsky / Globallookpress

Vladimir Karaoglanov was also a member of the board of CJSC Mospromstroy, which built hotels in Moscow under Luzhkov. The curator of Mospromstroy was Vice Mayor Iosif Ordzhonikidze, who was in charge of the hotel and gambling business in Moscow.

Finally, the most unexpected thing is that Ordzhonikidze's daughter, Eka, is the wife of the owner of Stoloto, Armen Sargsyan. Logically, the chain linking Bartosh and Sargsyan closes in this very place. Based on this hypothesis, the media space is already drawing conclusions that winning 1 billion is a fiction, and a record win in the history of Russian lotteries is a banal theft of this very large amount from the company and the state.

Business "Stoloto"

Stoloto today is a giant in the field of lotteries in Russia. He owns the draws "Russian Lotto", "Golden Horseshoe", "6 out of 36", "Gosloto", "Housing Lottery", as well as instant lotteries "Rapido", "Joker" and a number of others. However, the lottery monopoly is not private: since 2014, the state has a monopoly, and Stoloto is under the wing of the Russian Ministry of Finance and the Ministry of Sports. The activities of lotteries in our country are regulated by the Federal Law "On Lotteries" dated 11.11.2003 N 138-FZ (the last changes were made on 18.07.2019).

"Stoloto" sells more than 500 million lottery tickets a year, the average income of a winner is 26, 5 thousand rubles, according to a study that was carried out in 2018 by the order of "Stoloto" by the marketing research institute "GFK-Rus".

Note that the revenue of the lottery organizer is growing steadily from year to year: in 2016 it amounted to 24.9 billion rubles, in 2017 it grew to 37.1 billion rubles, in 2018 it reached 47.7 billion rubles. The company's website does not have financial information for 2019, but analysts predict that Stoloto's revenue will reach about 60 billion rubles.

“Every week more than 25 new millionaires appear in our country, they win over 350 thousand tickets every day. More than two billion rubles are paid to the winners monthly, the Stoloto website says.

During its existence, "Stoloto" transferred to the budget more than 14, 5 billion rubles. The purpose of these funds is also known - they should go through the Ministry of Sports to the development of sports in Russia. Of course, if Stoloto's revenue grows, it’s not just that. From 2016 to 2018, the lottery has dramatically increased the share of participants - from 4% of Russian residents to 27%.

Stoloto today is a giant in the field of lotteries in Russia. He owns the draws "Russian Lotto", "Golden Horseshoe", "6 out of 36", "Gosloto", "Housing Lottery", as well as instant lotteries "Rapido", "Joker" and a number of others. Photo: Donat Sorokin / TASS

How does Stoloto earn money, how much does it keep for itself, and how much does it give to the state? And most importantly: where did the company get such impressive volumes of revenue?

According to the already mentioned Law "On Lotteries", namely Article 10 of the Law, the size of the lottery prize fund in relation to the proceeds from the drawing must be at least 50%. That is, at least half of the lottery earned must be played. In the same article, we read:

"The amount of targeted deductions from the lottery, provided for by the lottery conditions, must be 10 percent of the difference between the amount of the lottery operator's proceeds from the lottery for the reporting quarter and the amount of the prize fund generated in accordance with the lottery conditions for the reporting quarter."

The “earmarked contributions” are precisely the share that Stoloto pays to the state. By the way, for some reason this regulatory requirement on the website of Stoloto itself is given differently. The legal information page reads:

The amount of targeted deductions is 10% of the difference between the amount of the operator's proceeds from lotteries for the reporting quarter and the amount of winnings paid by him for the reporting quarter.

Let us recall that the law does not speak at all about "the amount of prizes paid out", but about "the amount of the prize fund formed in accordance with the conditions of the lottery." That is, the law speaks about the entire prize fund, while Stoloto writes only about the part that is paid to the winners.

In general, we have a picture in which, according to the law, 50% of Stoloto's proceeds are raffled among the participants (if in 2019 the company fixes, for example, 60 billion rubles of revenue, then 30 billion will be required to raffle off in 2020), another 10 % of the difference between the fund and the proceeds is the share of the state, and about 40% is the money that the company itself controls.

Constantinople sent "Stoloto" an official request for the distribution of the remaining amount and documents that would regulate this activity. At the time of this writing, no response has been received from the company.

Can you win the lottery?

The main problem of the lottery business is its lack of transparency. Photo: Stock-vector-photo-video / Shutterstock.com

Meanwhile, experts say about the most important problem of the lottery business - its lack of transparency, even in conditions when this activity, in theory, is controlled by the state. Gambling business expert Dmitry Slobodkin told Constantinople that the lottery business in Russia raises many questions.

“We call the lottery a state one. The state should check it. How and which body, which specific authorized persons check the lottery, circulation is a question, and a very big one. You need to see a document that defines the procedure, technology for checking the state lottery and all its draws, payments and winnings, draws and so on. If we do not see this document where it is clearly written, who, how, when, why and how much checks the state lottery, then everyone has a corresponding question,”he said.

Slobodkin is confident that, by deducting only a small percentage of the proceeds to the state, the state lottery has no right to be called state. At the same time, the expert is not surprised by the growth in lottery ticket sales after Nadezhda Bartosz won.

Why are you surprised? This promotion has passed

- he summed up.

Candidate of Psychological Sciences Alexander Neveev, in turn, recalled that “free cheese can only be found in a mousetrap”, and warned the residents of Russia against the total purchase of lottery tickets.

“What is happening is well articulated in psychology, it’s called an accessibility cascade. The point is that if a rare event happens, it is precisely because of its rarity that the media report about it very widely, and people begin to think that this event, although unique and rare, is close by, it is available,”he said.

Neveev noted that any lottery is built on a very low probability of winning. The possible size of the win is very large, but the probability of it is very small, he said.

“If we calculate the mathematical expectation of success, then we will see that it is negligible. That is, roughly speaking, the chance to win the lottery is one in a million. It is clear that such episodes have taken place throughout history, but this does not mean at all that anyone who buys a lottery ticket has any adequate chances of winning. In general, the lottery is an excellent mechanism for drawing money out of the population. And the winner from the lottery is primarily the one who created the lottery,”he said.

The lottery is an excellent mechanism for drawing money out of the population. And, first of all, the one who created it wins. Photo: Kirill Kukhmar / TASS

Neveev also believes that lotteries are the same gambling business prohibited by law in the country, generated by the consumer society. With the same success, according to him, people today are involved in any projects that promise easy money, the acquisition of big money - business trainings, dubious financial enterprises and even sects built on the idea of success and high earnings. Neveev included psychics to the same category, to whom people go to "conjure them great luck." In relation to lotteries, many players also believe that a ticket must be bought, for example, with the daughter's birth number, or every tenth ticket taken from the bundle, or three from different sides of the bundle.

The lottery is a classic example of the gambling business. Only in the gambling business, if we are talking about the famous roulette with 666 numbers, the probability of winning is higher than in the lottery. That is, a lottery is a casino in a square or in a cube. It's almost impossible to win there,

- said Neveev.

conclusions

Summarizing all aspects, we can say that the lottery today is a large and effective business not only in Russia, but also in the world. In Spain, for example, about 75% of the country's population are lottery players. Over the years, such high rates of population involvement in lotteries have become the norm for developed societies, and Stoloto cannot but face the task of expanding the reach of the audience, which will generate revenue for the lottery organizer.

The record win by Nadezhda Bartosh in history is a wonderful advertisement for lotteries in Russia. The hypothesis about the withdrawal of a record amount from Stoloto in this way in the interests of the owner or third parties remains a hypothesis until the history of this gain is interested in the competent authorities, and not in the whistleblower resources or telegram channels.

Nevertheless, in the media space and among experts, questions continue to be heard regarding the transparency of the gambling business. Moreover, instant lotteries with a drawing every 15 or 25 minutes are in fact the same gambling business, an analogue of the "one-armed bandit", which is simply not prohibited in Russia in this form.

Moreover, there are not only lucky ones among the lottery players. Most of them are addicts, sometimes buying many tickets for large sums at once in a vain attempt to increase the chances of winning. Even this fact is already a very good reason to think before making a choice.