A Charter Signed in a Bank Branch

On 15 October 2026 the Court of Justice of the European Union ruled, in the Polish case C-63/25, that the provisions of a closed-end investment fund’s statute governing the redemption of its certificates are subject to review in the same way as contract terms a consumer never negotiated. A participant who bought the certificates outside any business or profession is a consumer, and the fund is a trader. The Court did not rule that the clause scaling down redemptions is unfair, nor that the investor will be paid once it is removed; that is for the Warsaw Court of Appeal to examine. The most interesting questions begin where the judgment ends: which participants in closed-end funds will pass the consumer test, given that for years these funds were a tool for building wealth structures, and what the ones who pass can actually claim.

The Doctor, the Pensioners and the Subscription Form

In June 2016 an adviser at a bank branch recommended to a doctor and her parents, both pensioners, that they put their savings into the certificates of a closed-end investment fund. In Poland such a fund (fundusz inwestycyjny zamknięty, FIZ) is a legal person in its own right, created and managed by a fund management company (towarzystwo funduszy inwestycyjnych, TFI); it issues investment certificates rather than units, and it redeems them only on the terms, if any, laid down in its statute, the constitutional document the management company writes before the fund has a single participant. According to the findings of the Warsaw Court of Appeal, the adviser presented the investment as safe, better than a deposit and free of risk, assured them that after three years the fund would certainly redeem the certificates, and said nothing about the fund’s right to scale down redemption requests. Each of the three subscribed for two certificates at PLN 186,714.14 apiece and paid in PLN 384,631.13, signing a standard form with a declaration that they knew the terms of issue and accepted the statute (see Protect Yourself From Unfair Contracts: A Consumer’s Guide). The price of a single certificate was just over the equivalent of 40,000 euro, the threshold from which Polish law lets natural persons buy the certificates of non-public funds at all. Behind that threshold stands, one may suppose, the assumption that whoever puts down such a sum knows what they are doing. The Court has just ruled that for the status of consumer the assumption is irrelevant.

The fund invested at least 75 percent of its assets in receivables, including receivables acquired through sub-participation, and at most 25 percent in liquid assets. The statute, as the Court of Appeal read it, provided for redemption on request, but only out of liquid assets, no more than 20 percent of their value on any single redemption date, with requests reduced pro rata. Simple multiplication shows what that meant: even at the full limit of liquid holdings the fund could, on one date, redeem certificates worth about 5 percent of its assets. Once more than a small fraction of the certificates was presented for redemption, full redemption “after three years” was an arithmetical impossibility.

In March 2019 the plaintiffs demanded redemption of all their certificates, which the management company had meanwhile split into 2,000 per person. In September 2019 the fund redeemed 234 certificates from each of them at PLN 214.05, a year later 60 at PLN 163.07, and in March 2021 73 at PLN 154.32. Each plaintiff was left with 1,633. The heart of the case hides in these numbers: on the day of the first, reduced redemption the certificate was valued about 15 percent above the issue price after the split (PLN 214.05 against PLN 186.71); eighteen months later it stood 17 percent below it. The clause held the money back while the investment was in profit and released it in instalments once it was in loss. The claim for PLN 356,962.74 per plaintiff was filed with the Warsaw District Court on 20 September 2021. Nine days later the fund’s liquidation was opened. From the redemptions itemised in the reasons of both courts it follows that by the time of the first-instance judgment each plaintiff had recovered PLN 102,746.46, a little over a quarter of what they had paid in; the District Court did give a figure of PLN 173,883.72, but that amount corresponds exactly to the pre-suit payments counted a second time.

The District Court: A Statute Like a Foundation Deed

The Warsaw District Court dismissed the claim on 2 November 2022 (case III C 1773/21). It held that a fund’s statute is “an act of will imposed by the management company”, closer to the deed establishing a foundation than to the articles of a joint-stock company, so that Article 385(1) of the Civil Code (Kodeks cywilny), the Polish transposition of Directive 93/13/EEC on unfair terms in consumer contracts, does not apply to it. In passing it added that even if the article did apply, the clause was transparent and referred to objective parameters. The court knew the judgment of the Warsaw Court of Appeal of 15 September 2020 (I ACa 263/19), which had subjected a FIZ statute to unfairness review, and called that position isolated, solitary and unconvincing.

That earlier judgment shows the other end of the scale. It concerned subGO Fund Wierzytelności, a receivables fund managed by GO TFI. An investor demanded redemption and received 5.7 percent of the amount requested, because the management company had scaled the redemption down to the cash it held, cash which, as the Polish financial supervisor (Komisja Nadzoru Finansowego, KNF) later found when revoking the company’s licence, it had made no effort to raise. The Court of Appeal held the clause unfair because the investor could not estimate its consequences, and the management company got nowhere with the argument that whoever invests 40,000 euro is not a consumer. The industry spoke of a judgment that had shocked the market. The story has a sequel, however, about which the commentary after the Luxembourg judgment is silent. By a judgment of 30 April 2025 (II CSKP 2151/22) the Supreme Court (Sąd Najwyższy) set aside the ruling in the investor’s favour and itself dismissed his appeal. It distinguished two relationships: the contract by which certificates are acquired, and participation in the fund, which flows from the instrument itself rather than from any contract; it held that a closed-end fund is not a party to any contract with the buyers of its certificates, that the statute is not a standard-form contract, and that the participant’s relationship with the fund is quasi-corporate, which rules out unfairness review. It added that the investment community rules it out a second time, because protecting one participant would force the fund to sell assets at the expense of the rest, and that striking out the reduction clause, which co-creates “the conditions, procedure and terms of redemption of certificates”, would leave behind no redemption rules at all and no default statutory provision to put in their place. A detail that will matter: that investor had not subscribed for his certificates; he had bought them from a third party on the secondary market. Eight months earlier, in a judgment of 22 August 2024 (II CSKP 242/23), the Supreme Court had not excluded review of a statute, but it held that a redemption request is an offer which the fund accepts in whole, in part or not at all, so that even striking out the reduction clause creates no claim for payment, and it found a clause with a threshold of 5 percent of all certificates per redemption date to exclude any discretion and not to be unfair.

The split in the case law was therefore real. The Warsaw Court of Appeal came down on the side of consumer protection again on 29 April 2024 (I ACa 1657/22); the Wrocław Court of Appeal came down against it on 3 June 2020 (I ACa 547/19). By an order of 21 November 2024 (I ACa 556/23) Judge Dagmara Olczak-Dąbrowska sent three questions to Luxembourg (see The Preliminary Reference Procedure Under Article 267 TFEU): on the participant’s status as a consumer, on the fund’s status as a trader, and on whether a provision of a statute can be a term not individually negotiated when the participant accepted it in writing. She also put the opposing argument fairly: it follows from the very nature of collective investment that the rights of one participant cannot be exercised at the expense of the others.

What the Court of Justice Decided

The Court took the three questions together and answered all of them in the affirmative, in four steps.

First, the tenth recital of Directive 93/13 excludes “contracts relating to the incorporation and organisation of companies”, but a preamble has no binding force of its own, though it helps in interpretation, and exclusions are construed narrowly. A statute has a dual nature: alongside its constitutional provisions it contains contractual ones, on the conditions of redemption and on the calculation of liquid assets, and questions of company law must not be confused with contractual ones (paragraph 36).

Second, between the fund and the plaintiffs a separate contract for the subscription of certificates was concluded: a written proposal and a signature on a standard form, with the statute’s redemption provisions becoming an integral part of that contract (paragraph 39, subject to verification by the national court). If they were exempt from review merely because they formally sit in the statute, a trader could move provisions unfavourable to consumers into the statute and sidestep the Directive (paragraph 40).

Third, the clause was drafted before any contact with future participants, to regulate many relationships uniformly; it is not negotiable and is imposed as a condition of joining (paragraph 43). It is therefore a term not individually negotiated, and a signature under a declaration accepting the statute changes nothing.

Fourth, the concept of consumer is objective and independent of what a given person knows (paragraph 47); the proprietary and corporate character of the rights attached to a certificate is irrelevant (paragraph 48). A fund that carries on investment activity in its own name, continuously and in an organised manner, is a trader (paragraph 51).

Advocate General Andrea Biondi, in his opinion of 4 June 2026, added two arguments. First, the reduction clause is permitted by statute but not required by it; the content of the reduction mechanism is the management company’s own decision, so it is not sheltered by the exemption for terms that reflect provisions of law, though he left the final check to the national court. Second, the argument about equality among the remaining participants goes to the consequences of a possible finding of unfairness, not to the scope of the Directive.

What the Court Did Not Decide

The judgment settles the scope of the Directive, not the outcome of the dispute. The Financial Ombudsman (Rzecznik Finansowy), who has taken a pro-consumer position on this case from the start, is right that an investor does not stop being a consumer merely by investing. Before the Court of Appeal, however, at least five thresholds remain, and each of them can stop the claim (see Unfair Contract Terms).

The first threshold is the main subject matter. The second sentence of Article 385(1) § 1 of the Civil Code exempts from review terms that define the main performance of the parties, provided they are drafted in plain language. The fund will argue that in a closed-end fund, where redemption is the exception, the terms of redemption define the essence of the performance. The plaintiffs will answer that the contract can be performed without the reduction clause, and that the clause itself is anything but plain as to its economic effects. The second argument is stronger than it looks: since Kásler the Court of Justice has required that an average consumer be able to estimate the economic consequences of a term, and a reduction that depends on “liquid assets” after deductions, defined by cross-references to other articles of the statute, may fail that measure. A probable assessment, not a certain one.

The second threshold is the unfairness test itself, assessed as at the moment the contract was concluded (Article 385(2) of the Civil Code; see Court Review of Unfair Contract Terms). The District Court found the clause transparent and objective; the Court of Appeal in subGO found a similar one unfair, though that judgment did not survive the Supreme Court. The difference lies in the facts. There the management company was itself choking liquidity, which the Supreme Court rightly referred to the company’s liability for its management rather than to the content of the clause; here the statute assumed from the outset that three quarters of the assets would be illiquid, and the product was sold as a safe investment with redemption after three years. The fund has a ready argument from II CSKP 2151/22: the absence of an upper limit on reductions creates no contractual advantage, because the gains from putting money to work in assets rather than freezing it in cash accrue to the participants. It also has a model of a clause that passed the test: in II CSKP 242/23 a threshold of 5 percent of all certificates, which could be raised to 20 percent, was found to be numerically defined and to exclude discretion. The doctor’s clause differs from it in its denominator: not the number of certificates but liquid assets after deductions determined by the manager. The construction of the clause, the manner of sale and the later management are three different grounds of liability, and it pays not to mix them, though the circumstances of the sale do count in assessing the clause’s transparency.

The third threshold is the construction of the claim, and here lies the biggest trap. The plaintiffs claim the redemption price as at the redemption date, as if, without the reduction clause, a redemption request executed itself. In II CSKP 242/23 the Supreme Court took the opposite view: the participant’s request is an offer, redemption requires a declaration by the fund, and without it there is neither cancellation of the certificates nor a claim for the price; the unfairness of the clause could at most enlarge the obligation to redeem, not turn it into a money debt. In II CSKP 2151/22 it added that the participant should in that case sue under Article 64 of the Civil Code for a judgment that stands in for the fund’s declaration, and that an action for payment is premature. In that logic the doctor’s fund statute requires such a declaration, because redemption depends on the reduction mechanism and is carried out by the management company through cancellation and an entry in the register, while the plaintiffs, as the District Court noted, sued for payment and not for a substitute declaration of intent. The District Court did hold that the action for payment was not premature, because a reduction can be treated as a refusal to redeem; but that is precisely the construction the Court of Appeal adopted in subGO, and the Supreme Court rejected it. The Luxembourg judgment does not overturn this line, because it does not touch it; it does, however, oblige us to ask whether a refusal based on a clause that does not bind the consumer can deprive him of a claim, and whether sending a consumer to an action under Article 64 against a fund in liquidation is still effective protection within the meaning of Article 7 of the Directive. For years the Court of Justice has repeated that a court may neither modify a clause nor replace it with rules of equity, but must restore the situation that would have existed without it; it allows the unfair element alone to be removed if it constitutes a separate obligation that can be assessed on its own. Whether the reduction is such an element, separable from the right of redemption, as the Supreme Court assumed in II CSKP 242/23 when it wrote of an obligation to redeem a larger number of certificates, or whether, as it held in subGO, it falls together with that right and leaves the participant without any redemption until the fund dies, the Polish courts have yet to decide; the Supreme Court speaks here with two voices. That is a question of consequences, not of scope, and that is exactly where the Advocate General sent it.

The fourth threshold is equality among participants, and the bill for it. The Advocate General referred that argument to Article 3(3) and Article 64 of the Act on Investment Funds (ustawa o funduszach inwestycyjnych). A hypothesis I put forward with caution: if protecting some participants depletes the assets of others, the bill should go to the management company that wrote the defective statute, not to the fellow participants who did not write it. That, however, is a separate claim in damages with its own requirements, not a consequence a court will order as a by-product of the dispute with the fund.

The fifth threshold is time. The fund is in liquidation, and liquidation treats a creditor holding a claim for the redemption price differently from a participant waiting for the distribution of what remains (Article 249 of the Act on Investment Funds); the dispute over what the plaintiffs are has a practical dimension. For other participants what counts is limitation: a consumer’s claim for payment becomes time-barred after six years, at the end of the calendar year (Article 118 of the Civil Code), so one that fell due in 2020 will be barred on 31 December 2026, unless the courts accept, following the Court of Justice (joined cases C-776/19 to C-782/19), that time could not start running before the consumer could have learned of the term’s unfairness. Claims for the price, for restitution and for damages are time-barred separately; these are arguments to be used in litigation, not a common calendar.

The Polish Backdrop: From Tax Machine to a Wave of Liquidations

In April 2017 the assets of closed-end funds, at least PLN 139 billion, exceeded the assets of all open-end and specialised open-end funds put together. The sector ran on two engines: the exemption from corporate income tax which, until the end of 2016, allowed profits from companies to be reinvested untaxed, and the sale of certificates by banks to affluent clients as a product safer than a deposit (see The GAAR Clause in Poland: Anti-Avoidance Rules). From 2017 the exemption was curtailed, and in 2018 the GetBack affair broke. The Lartiq (formerly Trigon) Profit funds, guaranteed by GetBack, earned Lartiq a fine of more than PLN 7.2 million from the Office of Competition and Consumer Protection (UOKiK) for misleading presentations of the product, and the bank that distributed them decisions finding mis-selling and ordering compensation. The W Investments funds managed by Fincrea TFI locked up nearly PLN 500 million belonging to almost 2,000 people; the KNF imposed fines on the depositary totalling more than PLN 50 million.

The statistics tell the rest. In 2016 there were 832 closed-end funds; at the end of 2025 330 were operating and 130 were in liquidation, and their net assets stood, according to a KNF report, at PLN 111.9 billion, of which PLN 76.2 billion sat in non-public asset funds. A drop of PLN 32 billion in a single year is largely one transaction: the redemption of certificates worth more than PLN 36 billion in a dedicated Ipopema fund. That figure teaches how to read the judgment: the fund a bank sold to a doctor and the fund an entrepreneur’s family set up for its own group of companies are closed-end funds in the sense in which a kayak and a container ship are both vessels.

Europe: The Same Problem, Different Roads

The Court did not rule in a vacuum. In E. Friz (C-215/08, 2010) it brought within the Doorstep Selling Directive a consumer’s accession to a German closed-end property fund organised as a civil-law partnership, where the purpose was to invest capital rather than to become a partner. In Verein für Konsumenteninformation v TVP (C-272/18, 2019), concerning a trustee through which Austrians took stakes in German closed-end property and shipping funds, the Court held that a trust agreement does not fall under the exclusion for company law and that a choice-of-law clause may be unfair; the Austrian Supreme Court subsequently found all the challenged clauses impermissible.

Germany reached a similar result half a century earlier, by another road. Its Civil Code exempts company law from the review of standard terms (§ 310(4) BGB), but since the 1970s the Bundesgerichtshof has subjected the agreements of mass-participation companies (Publikumsgesellschaften), which investors join on a pre-printed form, to a review of content founded on good faith (§ 242 BGB). By a judgment of 3 May 1982 (II ZR 78/81) it held void a clause allowing the general partner to take over limited partners’ shares at its own discretion, and by a judgment of 27 November 2000 (II ZR 218/00) it confirmed that standard-form silent partnership agreements with thousands of investors are subject to a review resembling the review of general terms and conditions, despite the exclusion then found in § 23 AGBG. The Court of Justice arrived at the same intuition in EU law: the corporate form does not undo the fact that someone signed somebody else’s form.

The second European lesson concerns not consumer law but liquidity. In October 2008 twelve German open-end property funds holding 32 billion euro of assets suspended redemptions, and the legislature responded with a minimum holding period of 24 months and a notice period of 12 months; in 2019 the British Woodford Equity Income Fund suspended redemptions because only 8 percent of its holdings could be sold within seven days, which ended in a redress scheme of up to 230 million pounds. The conclusion runs against intuition: European regulators did not ban redemption gates, they standardised them. Directive 2024/927 requires managers of open-end funds to select at least two liquidity management tools from a catalogue that includes redemption gates, and Delegated Regulation 2026/465, applicable from 16 April 2026 with a one-year transition for existing funds, describes how a gate is built: a predefined and disclosed activation threshold, which may also be expressed as a percentage of liquid assets, and, once the gate is activated, pro rata execution of all investors’ requests at least up to the level of that threshold. The 2016 clause is therefore nothing exotic; a threshold and pro rata reduction are today the European standard. The dispute is about what in it is not standard: a denominator defined by cross-references and by deductions set by the management company itself, and the fact that nobody mentioned the gate at the point of sale. EU law, moreover, looks not at a fund’s name but at whether a participant can demand redemption before liquidation; Delegated Regulation 694/2014 defines an open-end fund that way, so a Polish FIZ with redemption on request is in that sense open-ended. The 2026 standard neither settles the assessment under Directive 93/13 nor tests a statute written ten years earlier; it is a measure of what the market today regards as a fair gate.

Who Passes the Consumer Test

The communiqués after the judgment stress the investor who carried his savings to a bank. That story is true and it concerns thousands of people (see Investment Fraud: Help for Victims in Poland). Non-public funds are, however, by force of statute a product for the wealthy, and for years they served to hold family companies, to build holdings and to defer tax (see Holding Structure: Protect Your Assets from Business Risks and Tax Planning: Strategic Tax Optimization Advisory). The functional criterion cuts both ways, though not where intuition suggests.

Wealth is not the boundary. In a judgment of 18 July 2019 (I CSK 587/17) the Supreme Court found no grounds to deny consumer status to a pensioner who had about PLN 24 million invested on the stock exchange and had carried out more than 1,200 transactions in a single year, and it listed in terms what is irrelevant to that status: profit, tax advantages or leaving an estate to one’s heirs as the purpose, affluence, the scale of the funds, competence and experience. In II CSKP 242/23 the participant recognised as a consumer had declared on his brokerage questionnaire an occupation connected with the financial market and income from shares, and the Supreme Court did not question that classification. A natural person who, outside her business or profession, bought certificates for cash on a bank’s recommendation is therefore a consumer regardless of how much she had and how much she knew. At the other pole, a company, a family foundation or any other legal person is never a consumer.

What the fund is for is the boundary. Article 22(1) of the Civil Code denies consumer status for a transaction directly connected with a person’s business or professional activity, and in C-570/21 the Court of Justice adopted, for contracts with a mixed purpose, the test of a non-dominant purpose, assessed quantitatively and qualitatively. Where a natural person took up certificates in exchange for contributing to the fund the shares of her own operating company, or as part of a designed structure alongside a holding company and a foundation (see Succession Planning in the Family Business), the fund gains a serious line of defence, that the acquisition was directly connected with her business and that the economic purpose dominated. The defence is not certain: the Supreme Court has already held that the status of shareholder and the exercise of corporate rights do not exclude consumer status (III CSK 167/15), and Judge Olczak-Dąbrowska recalled this in her reference, adding, with the commentators, that an investment in company shares for future gain is in principle the management of private assets. In my view, where the fund is a vehicle for the participant’s own business, the defence has a chance, because it is hard to call savings the shares in one’s own firm moved from one pocket to the other. Where the fund holds a portfolio bought with private money, however large and however tax-minded, the Supreme Court stands with the participant.

A separate threshold is the dedicated fund. The Court wrote of a statute drafted before any contact with future participants; in a dedicated fund the statute, redemption rules included, usually comes into being with the investor’s advisers at the table. The burden of proving that a particular provision was individually negotiated lies on the trader (third subparagraph of Article 3(2) of the Directive, Article 385(1) § 4 of the Civil Code), and negotiating one term does not exempt the others from review. In a dedicated fund, however, this is a proof that can actually be run, with the correspondence and the successive drafts in the file. The paradox of the judgment fits in one sentence: the more say a participant had in writing the statute, the less he has to say as a consumer.

For business owners who are natural persons Polish law leaves a side door the Directive does not know: since 1 January 2021 Article 385(5) of the Civil Code extends protection against unfair terms to a natural person who concludes a contract directly connected with her business, provided the contract is not of a professional character for her. Contracts from 2016 are not covered, but a participant who subscribed for certificates after 2020 as a business owner not professionally engaged in investing need not end the analysis at the finding that he is not a consumer. The criteria exist; where exactly the line runs between placing private savings and building a structure, the case law has yet to determine.

Three practical conclusions follow. A participant whose redemption was scaled down should, before suing, examine his own status and the construction of his claim, not only the statute: how he acquired the certificates, for what, on whose initiative, whether the statute was tailored to him, what he signed in the bank’s questionnaire, what he was promised, whether his redemption request was actually considered, and whether to claim payment or a declaration of intent. A management company should review the statutes of funds with natural persons among their participants and give reduction clauses the shape that has already held up in the Supreme Court: a predefined threshold counted from the total number of certificates, without cross-references or discretionary deductions, with pro rata treatment; in dedicated funds it should keep the record of the negotiations. A bank that sold the certificates has no cause for relief: the judgment does not concern the distributor’s liability, and for many investors a mis-selling claim against the bank (see Disputes with Banks) remains a more realistic road than a dispute over the statute of a fund in liquidation.

What Changes

The judgment does not open the floodgates; it moves the front line. Of the three pillars on which the Supreme Court rested its ruling against the investor in April 2025, the first, that the fund is not a party to a contract with the buyer and that the statute is not a standard form, will not stand against a participant who subscribed for certificates in the fund: the Court of Justice sees a subscription contract there and forbids hiding in the statute what would be reviewable in the contract. The second, the investment community, was moved by the Advocate General from the scope of protection to its consequences; the Court said nothing about it, and by bringing the statute within the Directive it stripped that argument of its role as a preliminary bar. The third, the construction of the claim, stands untouched, and it will be the field of the next battle. Three disputes therefore begin: whether a given participant is a consumer, whether a given clause was transparent and fair, and what a participant is entitled to when the clause does not bind him. Disputes of this kind take years (see Court Representation Services in Poland); in the WGI case, in which I represent the victims, a non-final conviction came after twenty years and the proceedings continue (see WGI DM: Guilty, After Twenty Years).

The doctor and her parents are waiting for the Court of Appeal’s judgment, and their fund for the end of its liquidation. A statute imposed by the management company, like a constitution granted by a monarch, turned out to be a contract of adhesion signed in a bank branch. Whoever wants to take advantage of that contract, however, must first prove that in it he was a client and not a partner in his own business, and must know exactly what he is asking for.

Robert Nogacki, attorney at law (radca prawny), Managing Partner of Kancelaria Prawna Skarbiec. The law is stated as at 25 October 2026.

Robert Nogacki

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.