The Art-B Veteran Who Rebuilds Somalia
How a man who taught the banks that the same money can be in several places at once became an ambassador of peace. A story about a photograph from Jerusalem, and about what the prudent reader declines to conclude from it.
In the photograph, six men are smiling.
One of them holds a medal in the shape of a menorah, which, as was explained during the ceremony, is given for bringing light into the world. The scene is the Friends of Zion Museum in Jerusalem, on an evening in June. A few days earlier the President of Somaliland had opened an embassy in the city, the eighth in the capital and the first diplomatic mission his country maintains anywhere in the world. He had also laid a wreath at the grave of Theodor Herzl and bowed his head at Yad Vashem. Everyone is pleased, and with reason, for thirty-five years is a long time to wait for recognition, and Israel recognized Somaliland first.
The second man from the left, in a suit and no tie, is neither a president nor a diplomat. He is, according to his own website, the Peace Ambassador of the World Peace Council and the chairman of a foundation called Helping Hand Global Forum.
His name is Andre Gasiorowski.
Thirty-five years ago, when Somaliland was declaring its independence, he was called Andrzej Gąsiorowski, and he had other business in Poland.
The Oscillator
That business consisted in the same money being in several banks at once.
The mechanism was called the oscillator. It was simple, and its authors maintain to this day that it was legal, which in a sense is what makes it a masterpiece: there was no need to break the law, it was enough to notice that the law was asleep. Banks posted checks with a delay, the mail dragged on for days, sometimes weeks, so that between the moment money left one account and the moment that account learned of it there opened a gap. In that gap the oscillator lived. You opened a deposit, drew a certified check, carried it to the next bank, opened a deposit, drew a check, and round it went, until the same capital was working in many places at once, accruing interest everywhere. At the inflation of those years, the interest was impressive. Gąsiorowski, by his own later account, built the first version on a borrowed copy of Lotus 1-2-3 and called it Moneytron.
The company was called Art-B, and the press christened its owners, the throat doctor Andrzej Gąsiorowski and the organist and piano tuner Bogusław Bagsik, the business artists. They bought tractors from the bankrupt Ursus works to keep the factory alive a little longer, which endeared them to the authorities of the day, and at their manor outside Warsaw, on whose walls hung a Renoir, a Picasso, and a Malczewski, everyone came calling. Prosecutors would later value their work at more than four trillion old złoty, or roughly four hundred and twenty million in today’s money. A senior official of the central bank declared that, had the oscillator run a few months longer, the Polish banking system would have ceased to exist. One could hardly wish for a finer review.
The technique, for that matter, was no Polish invention. In the West it is called floating, from float, the flow of money, and in its multi-bank variant check kiting, from the old phrase about flying a kite, since what circulates is paper with nothing behind it but air. The thing had long been described, named, and outlawed in the United States, where it carries up to thirty years. Art-B, then, invented nothing; Art-B imported, efficiently and at scale, a mature mechanism of someone else’s banking fraud. In the Poland of the early nineties, good ideas did not go to waste.
Which leads to a question more modest than the size of the losses, and more awkward: not where the idea came from, since it lay ready in the textbooks, but who assigned the parts. A piano tuner can tune a piano; he does not usually write the score for an international banking fraud. Who, then, used an organist and a throat doctor as the face of the operation, and taught them the cross-border choreography of the accounts, remains a question the affair has dragged behind it, unanswered, for thirty years.
The Escape
In the summer of 1991, warned in time by an obliging politician (who happened to be the head of the National Security Bureau, which lends the whole thing a certain symmetry), the two artists left the country. They went to Israel, carrying in their suitcases the equivalent of more than a hundred million złoty in dollars. Bagsik was caught three years later at the Zurich airport and sentenced to nine years. Gąsiorowski stayed; he lives in Israel to this day.
That same summer, let it be noted for the record, Somaliland was declaring its independence. The dates rhyme. History is full of such rhymes, and the prudent reader draws no conclusions from them.
The Limitation Period
With the Polish justice system the oscillator played one last round, and won it with the same weapon it had used on the banks: delay. The fraud charge lapsed under the statute of limitations in 2011. The investigation into the oscillator was quietly discontinued in 2014, and the warrant for Gąsiorowski’s arrest was withdrawn. It turned out that the mail of the Polish state could travel longer than any check. In this sense the Republic, too, was running an oscillator, only in reverse: the capital of guilt circulated among the courts for so long that it evaporated before anyone managed to enter it in the books.
The Second Career
A man who has mastered the art of being in two places at once will not waste it on money alone. Money is merely the warm-up.
Andre Gasiorowski is today, all at once, the chairman of a confederation said to bring together more than two hundred and fifty organizations, the head of a technology and investment company, a patron of Holocaust survivors, a supplier of humanitarian aid to the Gaza Strip, to Druze villages in Syria, to refugees, and a Peace Ambassador. His websites report all of it in real time, with photographs, day by day: here the trucks rolling in, here a visit to a centenarian, here a medal, here a president. The same capital, his own person, works at once on many moral accounts, and everywhere accrues interest in the form of gratitude. The old technique, the new asset. In place of checks, gestures circulate, and the gap between a gesture and its settlement can be every bit as long as the old postal route.
Journalists who have looked into this activity (among them The New Humanitarian) have noted that alongside the aid there also flowed support for Israeli military units and equipment for settlers in the West Bank, and that some of the material disappeared from the web once it was revealed. Gasiorowski denies any ties to the army, stresses his independence and his coordination with the Israeli authorities, and calls the images of famine in Gaza false information, “Gaza(wood),” and Hamas propaganda. We do not, therefore, claim that the trucks did not cross. They crossed, and, according to the United Nations, several hundred of them, which makes the foundation one of the larger suppliers outside the UN system. We merely draw attention to the structure: aid, like a check before it, is most valuable in that brief interval once it has left the giver’s hands and before it has reached anywhere it could be counted.
The City of Hope
The flagship project is the City of Hope, a plan to rebuild Gaza out of modular containers, with a mention of a Riviera-style district for tourists. The plan, for now, exists chiefly as a plan, which happens to be its most coherent feature. A man who made a fortune on the interval between the promise of payment and the payment itself naturally specializes in the interval between catastrophe and reconstruction. That, too, is a gap, and one can take up residence in it.
Reconstruction
That leaves Somaliland, which gave this story its title and which our protagonist, the headline notwithstanding, is not rebuilding. Neither is he rebuilding Somalia, with which Somaliland is sometimes confused, though the two are different entities, and confusing them is itself a small geographical oscillator: one country that exists and does not exist at the same time, depending on who is looking. Gasiorowski was at a reception. He stood beside the president, smiled at the lens, and ended up in a photograph his foundation described with the word historic. From a reception, suitably photographed, a great deal can be rebuilt, though rarely a state.
What is really under reconstruction here is a biography. And one must admit it is the only project that always finishes on time and under budget. The throat doctor who once heard a gap in the banking system has become a philanthropist the world can hear. The medal in the shape of a menorah brings light. Everything adds up, everything shines, and only somewhere at the back, like a check not yet posted, a question travels by mail, one that for now no one is obliged to answer.
The prudent reader, as we have established, draws no conclusions. He notices only that certain people, having once learned how to make money appear where it is not, learn in time how to make virtue appear where it was not. The method stays the same. The whole art lies in finishing before the mail arrives.
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.
