Zonda: Creditors’ Committee Elected, 2,000 Claims Filed, 167,000 Euros in the Estate. A Strategy for the Bankruptcy
On Thursday, September 17th, the first meeting of creditors of BB Trade Estonia OÜ in Tallinn confirmed Margus Lentsius as trustee and elected the creditors’ committee. Just under two thousand creditors have filed claims so far, the deadline is October 27th, and the assets the trustee has been able to establish from the books amount to about 167,000 euros against 432 million euros of liabilities; in Estonia, as he said himself, there is nothing to secure. That much follows from the Interia report and from the interim trustee’s report. I was elected to the committee as the representative of a group of creditors whose counsel is my firm, and on my motion the committee will work without remuneration. Below I write about how this bankruptcy should be run so that 167,000 euros turn into proceedings rather than minutes.
Zonda in Bankruptcy: The Starting Point
Before strategy, four facts that dictate it. First: the balance sheet of Zonda’s operator on the day of the freeze showed 476 million euros of assets, 347 million of them in cryptocurrency and 129 million in loans and shareholdings, and of all this the trustee could confirm 167,000 euros in cash on accounts abroad; everything else consists of book entries without source documents, prepared, as the trustee himself established, from aggregate data passed to the bookkeeper by management. Second: liabilities to customers, 429 million euros, exist in the books on several aggregate accounts, with no breakdown by customer; who is owed how much is known only to the exchange’s database, which the trustee does not have. Third: 77 per cent of the assets in the 2024 financial statements is a single bitcoin address holding 4,503 coins, to which, according to the chief executive, there is no key, although in a statement with a notarised signature in June, 2025, he assured that access existed; a notary certifies the signature, not the truth of the content, and that is exactly what makes this document evidence rather than security. Fourth: the company had thirteen employees, its bookkeeping ended on April 22nd, one board member resigned after a conflict with the other, and the other is outside the European Union.
From these four facts follows one conclusion: Zonda’s bankruptcy is not one in which a trustee sells assets and distributes money. It is one in which the assets must first be found, then taken, and only then valued. Proceedings of this kind are won with information and lost through patience toward the people who hold it.
Przemysław Kral and the Trustee: The Defence’s Declarations and the First Actions
Przemysław Kral’s defence has publicly declared that he is able to demonstrate assets that will cover the injured parties. The declaration is worth setting against what Kral did when he was given the first opportunity, because the opportunity was the interim trustee’s written request for information about assets and for documents.
The trustee’s report describes the reply of June 15, 2026: no information on the composition of the assets, no source documents, and an explanation that Kral has no access to the servers, the cloud, the databases and the backups, because they are under the control of the Polish authorities, that part of the information is covered by the secrecy of the investigation, and that the accountant has the books, so the accountant should be asked about the books and the prosecutors about the rest. To a demand of August 5th, Kral replied on August 12th, attaching an unaudited management balance sheet as of the end of 2025 and listing the company’s accounts from memory, still without source documents and without indicating which asset is available, and where. The other board member, asked for the same, wrote back that he lacked the required knowledge and did not answer the reminder. On that basis the trustee stated that he could not confirm the existence of any asset beyond the cash on the accounts, and recorded in his report that he considers it expedient to try rational cooperation with Kral first.
Set this against two dates. In June, 2025, Kral assured, in a statement with a certified signature, of access to 4,503 bitcoins, and a balance sheet resting on that asset went to the register. Between March 2nd and 24th, 2026, in the last weeks before withdrawals stopped, fourteen payments totalling 501,037.80 euros went from the company’s accounts to his account; who ordered and approved them, and what covered them, remains to be established. The man to whose account payments flowed from the company in March, and who a year earlier had vouched for its reserves, pointed the trustee to not a single available asset in June or in August. This is not a comment on intentions; it is a comparison of three documents. Kral’s first actions in Zonda’s bankruptcy are disappointing and fall short of the declarations of his defence. The measure is simple and public: if assets can be demonstrated, they are demonstrated to the trustee, in writing, with documents, and access to a wallet is demonstrated by signing a fresh message chosen by the trustee or by handing the medium to an expert. Nothing indicates that either has happened to date.
The conclusion for the committee is equally simple. Cooperation with Kral should be accepted if it comes, and nothing should be made conditional on it. Proceedings that wait for the debtor are proceedings run by the debtor.
Principle One: Information Before Negotiation. Prosecutors, Zonda’s Trustee and Bank Data
At the meeting an expectation was voiced that the Polish prosecutors would share with the trustee what they know about the secured assets. They will not do so of their own accord, and not out of ill will. The prosecutors run an investigation covered by secrecy, access to the file requires their consent (Article 156 § 5 of the Code of Criminal Procedure), and compensation from secured assets comes, as a rule, at the end of that road, in the judgment, for the injured parties in that trial; the earlier return of items no longer needed as evidence (Article 230 § 2) is an exception, not a strategy. Criminal seizure and a bankruptcy estate are two regimes that will one day argue before a court over the same assets. A strategy built on the prosecutors opening up is a strategy of waiting.
Zonda’s bankruptcy estate has something the prosecutors do not: the right to information about its own company without asking anyone’s permission. The trustee is today the only person entitled to BB Trade Estonia’s accounts at AMINA Bank and Sygnum in Switzerland, at ZEN.COM in Lithuania, at Clear Junction in London, at Fenige, TryPay and Tpay in Poland; to the workspace in the Fireblocks system, in which zondacrypto kept the keys to 685,000 wallets and which records every user and every approval; to the wallets at BitGo; to the subsidiaries’ accounts at the Kraken and Gate exchanges. Each of these institutions will answer the trustee’s questions about the company’s own accounts usually in weeks, not years, and none will hide behind the secrecy of the investigation; in Switzerland, full access requires recognition of the Estonian bankruptcy, of which more below. For each of them I have an account number, a contract date or a transaction identifier, because since April we have been collecting them in the series on Zonda, from the loan agreements to the Fireblocks export. On the day of the meeting I handed the trustee the list and offered ready drafts; the firm will do this at its own cost.
There is one more road to information from Poland that is rarely mentioned. With respect to acts committed to its detriment, above all the siphoning of its funds by those who managed it, the bankrupt company is an injured party in the Polish investigation (Article 49 § 1 of the Code of Criminal Procedure), and the trustee exercises its rights. As an injured party it may take part in the proceedings, file evidentiary motions and apply for access to the file to the extent the prosecutor allows. This is not a key to everything, but it is the surest road on which the prosecutors are obliged to answer the trustee in a procedural, not a courtesy, mode. I believe the trustee should take it without delay, without waiting for the filing deadline.
Principle Two: Control Before Claims. Orion Software, Zonda’s Subsidiary
Zonda’s trustee established 167,000 euros on accounts abroad and found nothing in Estonia, where there were no customers. But the estate has one asset the report did not value, because its value does not fit into a balance: the shares in Orion Software sp. z o.o. in Katowice, a one-hundred-per-cent holding according to the exchange’s own documents. This is the company that built and maintained the systems of the Zonda exchange, holds its servers, code, backups, customer database and the “Funds Monitor” system with the history of wallet addresses; at the end of 2025 it employed 47 people and was still working in April. It is also the estate’s largest exposure: 80.6 million euros of debt with interest and 24.7 million euros of capital and contributions under an investment agreement, together about 105 million euros, transferred until March 16, 2026. And it is a company which, according to its own, so far unfiled, financial statements for 2025, has 254 million złotys of receivables from the Czech company Expofer, described in the exchange’s documents as the chief executive’s company, and 115 million złotys of prepayments for intangible assets.
Regulation 2015/848 recognises the Estonian bankruptcy in Poland automatically (Article 19) and allows the trustee to exercise here the powers he has under Estonian law, with due regard for Polish law (Article 21). The powers of a sole shareholder include dismissing the board by resolution, unless the articles provide otherwise. The trustee can therefore, in short order, place his own man in Katowice, who will enter Orion’s server room and accounting department by legal title, not by warrant, except for whatever the prosecutors have seized. The prosecutors can enter Orion for evidence, and probably have; the trustee can enter for the whole company, because Orion is his. A new board acts in the interest of Orion and its creditors, and Orion’s largest creditor is the estate. The same applies to ZND Ventures OÜ, wholly owned by the estate since January, 2024, which runs the ZND platform and holds the records of its over-the-counter trades, and to the Bahamian company credited in 2025 with 5.3 million in stablecoins without any agreement.
Sequence is the essence of the strategy here. The claim against Orion for 80 million euros is today an entry in a ledger which Orion can contest for years, and its tranches carry ten-year terms. Control over Orion is a resolution, after which the dispute about maturity ceases to be a dispute between strangers, and Orion’s receivable from Expofer, a quarter of a billion złotys, can be pursued by a new board in Ostrava, including in insolvency proceedings against a company that has filed no accounts since 2021; it is Orion’s receivable, not the estate’s, and it returns to the estate only through repayment of the loan. Control first, claims second, and preservation of evidence and deadlines from the first day, whatever happens to the resolutions. The same move yields something more important still: Zonda’s customer database. Without it, verification of two thousand claims will take years and rest on screenshots; with it, and with the list of 227,000 deposit vaults from Fireblocks, each corresponding as a rule to one customer, it is a matter of months.
This is the most important act of this bankruptcy and it should take place before October 27th. The Estonian licence did not watch over Zonda’s customers. The Estonian bankruptcy can at least count them.
Principle Three: Where Zonda’s Assets Lie. A Map of Jurisdictions and the Order of Moves
Zonda’s assets lie in nine countries, and not everywhere is it worth going in with the same force. The criterion is one: expected recovery per euro spent from the estate.
Poland: Orion, and through it Expofer, at a cost near zero and the highest value; plus the prosecutors’ seizures, which the estate will reach only after a judgment. The Czech Republic: Expofer, where no European order is needed because the creditor is Orion; medium cost, potentially the largest value in the whole case, but dependent on whether anything remains in Ostrava beyond intangible assets. Switzerland: recognition of the Estonian bankruptcy under Article 166 of the Private International Law Act is required, with interim measures available even before recognition (Article 168); medium cost, and a twofold aim: the loan the bank in Zug granted the exchange, its use and its collateral, and the price of 2.66 million francs for the participation certificates in that bank sold in January, 2025, whose path has to be reconciled with the accounts at Sygnum and AMINA; plus three Swiss companies from the related-party statement. Estonia: AdmiTrade, ZND Ventures and ICEO, all within the trustee’s reach, including the settlement of the credit line of a hundred million euros and an assessment of the July, 2025 agreement by which Wojciech Sroka’s company settled, with a return valued at 58 million euros, a balance of 89.5 million from the start of the year; the difference becomes a claim only after the tokens, the rates and what remained in the company of the returned assets have been reconciled. Lithuania: ZEN.COM, through which the monthly transfers to Orion and ZND Ventures ran; a reminder with a copy to the Bank of Lithuania. France: two properties bought by a person now under arrest, in 2021 and in October, 2025, whose financing from the exchange’s funds follows from the contracts and transfers described in the piece on the agreements; here the prosecutors are more effective, with a freezing certificate under Regulation 2018/1805, which they have already used once for four million euros on another account, and the estate should, through French counsel, notify its claims, secure priority and apply for restitution under Article 29 of that regulation once the freeze is in place. The Emirates, the Bahamas, Cyprus: the founder’s company with its 2020 loans, the “Coin Accepted” company and the vehicle of the licence application; cheap data-preservation requests at once, expensive litigation only after the cheaper directions have been exhausted.
The order I propose to the committee: Katowice, Fireblocks, the banks and the application for recognition in Switzerland in the first month; Ostrava, Tallinn and Vilnius in the second; litigation in Zug once recognition is final; the rest when there is something to pay for it with. Whoever starts with the Bahamas ends with a handsome report and an empty estate.
Principle Four: Nothing from Zonda’s Estate for What Creditors Can Supply for Free
Zonda’s creditors’ committee will work without remuneration, because with an estate of 167,000 euros every paid hour of the committee would be an hour taken from the trustee for necessary acts. The principle should reach further. The trustee should not spend the estate’s money duplicating analyses, identifiers, draft letters and the tracing of flows on the blockchains, because creditors supply these themselves and for free; independent verification of that material and expert opinions for the purposes of litigation are a different category, and on those the estate should spend. The estate should pay for signatures, seals, register entries and legal assistance where Polish and Estonian powers of attorney do not reach, above all in Switzerland and the Czech Republic.
The second part of this principle concerns what should not happen without the committee. Every settlement, release, deferral or set-off with the chief executive, with Orion, with Admitrade, with ZND Ventures and with the other related parties should reach the committee before it is signed. Not out of distrust of the trustee, but because of the nature of the situation: the other side knows the company from the inside and has defence counsel, while the estate has 167,000 euros and three years from the declaration of bankruptcy for actions to set aside transactions (Section 118 of the Estonian Bankruptcy Act), with look-back periods counted from the opening of proceedings, so that every month of delay narrows the field. A settlement in which a bankrupt company releases claims in exchange for assets disclosed by the debtor himself would turn an inquiry into a notarial deed. I have handled the WGI case for twenty years, and I know that in such proceedings one does not regret the claims pursued without success; one regrets those abandoned early because they looked uncollectible. And one caveat about myself: the committee protects all creditors, not only my clients, and material I come to know as its member will not be published without a separate assessment of whether it may be.
Principle Five: Investigation and Bankruptcy, Two Tracks, One Goal
Zonda’s injured customers have two roads to their money, and both must be walked to the end, but they must not be confused. The investigation in Katowice, merged since July with the case of the founder’s disappearance, confers the status of an injured party and, after a judgment, a claim for compensation from assets seized from the suspects, including the four million euros frozen in France and whatever has been secured in Poland; the earlier return of specific items is possible only exceptionally. The bankruptcy in Tallinn confers a share in the distribution of what the trustee recovers from related companies and from transactions set aside. The first road is longer and depends on the fate of a criminal trial with a suspect outside the Union, whose extradition we have written about separately; the second is quicker in the recognition of claims, but depends on whether the trustee reaches for the levers of principles one and two. Neither leads to the State Treasury, as we have also written, and neither will yield the whole.
The strategic problem of the two tracks is that they partly overlap: the assets of the bankrupt company and the assets of the suspects are different sets, but where they intersect, the properties in France, the funds on the secured accounts, possibly the bitcoins if the key turns up, both tracks will reach for the same thing. The collision at that intersection cannot be avoided, but it can be prepared for: the trustee should notify the Polish court and prosecutors today of the existence of the estate and its claims to those assets, so as to be a party heard, not a party surprised, at every ruling on forfeiture or return. An injured party who is at the same time a creditor in the bankruptcy will receive from one source only what he did not receive from the other, and a criminal court will not award compensation on a claim that is the subject of other proceedings (Article 415 § 1 of the Code of Criminal Procedure); a claim against the company and a claim against the perpetrator are not, however, the same thing, and that is exactly why one must be registered in both.
Three Scenarios for Recovering Money from Zonda
Zonda’s creditors’ committee cannot promise amounts, and I will not. I can describe three courses of events, marking them as hypotheses.
The lower scenario: Zonda’s trustee obtains no data from Katowice or Fireblocks, the banks reply with statements of the company’s own accounts, actions to set aside transactions stall for lack of documents, and the estate ends with the cash on the accounts and whatever the sale of the subsidiaries’ shares brings, which is negligible against 432 million. The injured parties receive anything only from a criminal judgment, years later, out of the four million euros in France and the seizures in Poland.
The middle scenario: the trustee takes control of Orion and the customer database, settles with Admitrade, challenges the ZND conversion and the tranches of 2025 and 2026, and pursues the receivable from Expofer through Orion. Recovery then depends on what actually remains in Ostrava, in Tallinn and on the accounts through which 89 million euros of the Earn programme passed; we are talking about tens of millions of euros spread over several years, not hundreds.
The upper scenario depends on one variable: the key to 4,503 bitcoins, worth at today’s price about 230 million euros. If the key exists and is handed over, the cover of the book liabilities to customers changes from a few per cent to about half, before costs and before it is established to whom those bitcoins legally belong, and the rest of the proceedings becomes an appendix. If there is no key, it must be established when and how it was lost; if before June, 2025, the balance sheet for 2024 and the statement of that month cease to be financial documents and become evidence. In both cases the first test is the same and costs nothing: one message to sign. After it the real work begins: reconciling reserves and liabilities by asset, date and entity, including the fate of the funds returned from the Earn programme.
Filing a Claim with Zonda’s Trustee: What to Do Before October 27th
File a claim with Zonda’s trustee, because filed claims take part in the distribution, and a late filing requires reinstatement of the deadline for good cause and loses its rank; a report to the prosecutors, however good, is no substitute. Keep evidence of deposits, withdrawals and balances, including screenshots, because until the customer database is recovered they are the evidence. Do not bring individual actions for payment or start enforcement against the bankrupt company; enforcement against the bankrupt ends by operation of the declaration of bankruptcy, and earlier titles, such as the Polish order for 106,000 euros being enforced in Tallinn, must be filed with the trustee as claims. Claims against other persons and entities need separate assessment and have separate deadlines. Do not pay anyone in advance for the “recovery” of money; the two collective roads described above are the basis, and both are in the guide. Anyone with documents about the Earn programme, about trades on the ZND platform or about the withdrawals of June, 2023, can help more than they think, because these are the places where the exchange’s books say least. And get organised: the association of injured parties, whose creation I support, exists in this case so that two thousand claims speak to the trustee with one voice rather than two thousand.
The bankruptcy of Zonda, the operator of an exchange with no customers in its country of registration, no assets in its country of registration and a chief executive outside the Union, is a proceeding in which the law gives little and information gives everything. The information is in Katowice, in Zug and in several hundred thousand rows of an export from a system whose users may still hold their permissions. The committee was elected so that the trustee reaches for it first. Hope is cheap in this case and everybody has it. What is expensive are account numbers, and those we have.
Robert Nogacki is a Polish attorney at law (radca prawny), the founder and managing partner of Kancelaria Prawna Skarbiec (Skarbiec Law Firm), which has operated continuously since 2006.
The law is equal for everyone, but the parties rarely are: on one side stands an organization with time, money, and lawyers, on the other a person with one business, one nest egg, and one life.
Clients rarely come to him with a legal problem. They come with a problem that also has a legal side: an audit that began with a single invoice, money entrusted to someone who has disappeared, a company that has to be passed on before it is too late. Most such matters are decided long before the first letter is written, in decisions made without asking and in deadlines nobody remembered. So he begins by asking how the client got here, not what the client should have done.
He advises entrepreneurs and families from more than a dozen countries, including those whose accounts the tax office has just seized and who do not know what to do tomorrow morning. He defends them in tax audits, customs and fiscal inspections, disputes with the tax authorities, and criminal tax proceedings. He represents victims of investment fraud and Ponzi schemes. He helps families set up family foundations and plan succession, so that a life’s work outlasts a single generation.
Not every case can be won. Every case can be run so that the client knows where they stand. Since 2006 he has represented the victims in the WGI case (Warszawska Grupa Inwestycyjna, the Warsaw Investment Group), one of the longest criminal cases in the history of the Polish financial market, because some things must not be left half finished, even when they take two decades. In the case of the collapsed cryptocurrency exchange Zonda (Zondacrypto, operated by BB Trade Estonia OÜ), he represents several hundred victims in the criminal investigation conducted by Poland’s National Prosecutor’s Office and in the Estonian bankruptcy proceedings.
Kancelaria Prawna Skarbiec is listed in the rankings of Poland’s largest tax advisory firms published by Dziennik Gazeta Prawna and Rzeczpospolita, and it is a four-time recipient (2015 to 2018) of the European Medal awarded by the Business Centre Club and the European Economic and Social Committee. Robert Nogacki publishes regularly, in the press and on the firm’s website, for people who have a problem rather than a law degree, because a legal opinion the client cannot understand protects only the lawyer.
He believes that the best legal advice is the kind that means the client never has to appear in court.
