The World Air Sports Federation (FAI) actively cooperates with Noosphere Ventures. This year Frits Brink, the president of the federation, signed an agreement on technical partnership with the managing partner of the company Max Polyakov.

“Thanks to our strategic partnership with the FAI, we are striving to embody an innovative revolution into the world of technical sports,” Max Polyakov said at a joint meeting with Fritz Brink after signing the agreement.

But what, apart from scandals, will this partnership bring to the FAI itself and its president? Such cooperation is fraught with serious reputational risks and even criminal prosecution.

In recent years, Max Polyakov has been trying to position himself as a propagandist for technical innovation. His company invests in technology projects and is looking for promising start-ups around the world.

However, the personality of a businessman is surrounded by scandals. And their number is increasing every day.

According to the media, the umbrella brand Noosphere Ventures has been at a loss since its creation. The only goal of the company is shaping the image of its creator Max Polyakov and the concealment of the sources of businessman’s real income.

To this end, this March Polyakov’s company EOS even bought back the aerospace project FireFly totally mired in debt. Since signing the contract in March 2017, the startup has not been developing. But it is regularly mentioned in the media as an asset of Noosphere Ventures and personally Max Polyakov.

The question is not only the fate of the project, but also how Polyakov got it. The American control organization ITAR sanctioned the startup sale. This body always scrupulously treated innovative projects and did not allow foreigners to own strategic enterprises. And given that the owner of the company EOS Max Polyakov changed his citizenship (he was a citizen of Ukraine and of the UK), and now resides in the US, the deal seems completely impossible. But not this time.

Interestingly, the conditions for bidding for FireFly meant making an advance payment of $ 100,000. EOS managed to bypass this condition and participate in the bidding without reserving an advance amount.

FireFly and other Noosphere Ventures projects cost a lot of money, but do not bring earnings. Max Polyakov does not need this – his income has long been far from scientific breakthroughs.

Since the beginning of the 2000s, Polyakov, along with his partner Bill Dobbie, has been developing Cupid plc. It included a whole network of dating sites. In 2013, when the company was at the peak of popularity, Polyakov provoked a scandal in the media. The value of Cupid’s shares fell to a minimum and the businessman sold off assets to off-shore companies for a pittance, the largest of which was the holding Together Networks. Later it turned out that the ultimate beneficiary of the offshore companies was Polyakov himself, and the sale was only an excuse to force out his partner Bill Dobbie from business.

Polyakov’s dating business regularly becomes a figurant of various scandals. Together Networks’ resources have been repeatedly accused of fraud. On Polyakov’s dating sites, there is a whole network of bots profiles that imitate living people and provoke new users to connect to additional paid services. Recently, journalists have proved that these accusations are not groundless. The functioning of bots is even spelled out in terms of the use of sites. It is said that the bots are created, ostensibly, to check the operation of the system. A different formulation would be fraught with criminal proceedings. In addition, Polyakov’s websites reserve the right, at their sole discretion, to use personal data of users. In particular, create profiles of bots with data of real users on other resources.

And more recently, journalists from the city in Ukraine Zaporozhye, where Max Polyakov was born and raised, conducted an investigation and proved the businessman’s involvement in creating a network of porn video chat rooms. One of Polyakov’s companies called Bulova, on which the sites of the holding company Together Networks are registered, also owns several video chats of category 18+. In Polyakov’s hometown – Zaporozhye, a number of studios of web chats were opened, in which Ukrainian girls undressed in front of cameras for foreigners and performed their sexual wishes for money. Some of these records were published on porn sites. This is evidenced by a criminal case opened on the fact of the spread of pornography in Max Polyakov’s Ukrainian office EasyDate.

As reported by the media, Polyakov’s activities is not limited with dating business and porn chats. He is also associated with gambling networks Vulcan, joycasino and Casino-X. These projects are controlled by Maxim Krippa, the Ukrainian partner of Max Polyakov. The EvoPlay company is engaged in resource management. Several times Krippa himself was involved in criminal cases on the basis of illegal gambling, which is de jure banned in Ukraine.

Max Polyakov’s companies are registered on the offshores in Cyprus, Malta, the British Virgin Islands, etc., in a number of countries their activities are illegal or semi-legal. Journalists do not exclude that the company Noosphere Ventures is a simple gasket that legitimizes or, simply speaking, launders Polyakov’s illegal income from gambling and porn.

Given such a serious track record and actualization of scandals around Max Polyakov, all partners of this businessman and his companies can suffer. Reputational risks threaten the The World Air Sports Federation and its president Fritz Brink. Moreover, while working with Noosphere Ventures, the FAI and its president are in jeopardy of criminal prosecution for possible participation in Polyakov’s unlawful schemes and assistance in money laundering. Is such partnership worth such risks?