Zonda: The Finance Ministry Confirms Income Tax on an Exchange That Never Happened. The Tax Office Will Be the Only Creditor to Recover Everything

Kancelaria Prawna Skarbiec · Robert Nogacki, attorney-at-law · October 17, 2026

Poland’s Ministry of Finance answered a journalist’s question, and Rzeczpospolita of October 16, 2026 (Przemysław Wojtasik, “Zondacrypto’s customers must pay tax even though they received no money”) reported it as a ruling: anyone who swapped cryptocurrency for zlotys, dollars or euros on Zondacrypto has income under Article 17(1)(11) of the Polish Personal Income Tax Act at the moment of “the execution of the exchange operation carried out by the exchange”, and the fact that the exchange paid nothing out “does not reduce the amount of income”. The ministry relies on the private tax ruling of the National Tax Information of July 22, 2026 (0115-KDIT1.4011.479.2026.1.MK), which I took apart in September (Zonda: PIT on Cryptocurrencies That Did Not Exist). Since then the court file in Tallinn has grown by three documents: the trustee’s report to the creditors’ meeting of September 17, his fee calculation of at least 5,295 hours, and the court order of September 23 confirming the dissolution of BB Trade Estonia OÜ. None of them supports the premise on which the ministry’s answer stands. All three undermine it. Bankruptcy estate: 167,675.04 euros. Liabilities: 431,944,846.47 euros. Coverage: 0.04 percent. Tax: 19 percent of the full amount, payable in real zlotys by April 30, 2027. That is the Zonda tax in the ministry’s version: the only item in this bankruptcy that requires no verification.

The Ministry Answered the Question of When. The Question of What Went Unanswered

On the question of timing the ministry is right, and I have conceded it since April (The Digital Mirror): Article 11(1) excludes virtual currencies from the cash method, so income arises on disposal, not on payment. But Article 17(1f), which the ministry itself cites, taxes “the exchange of virtual currency for legal tender”. An exchange requires two things and movement between them. The exchange’s own spreadsheets as of December 31, 2025 show what was missing on both sides: against 2,072 bitcoins credited to customers the exchange held, outside a dormant address without a key, about 14; against 26,910 ether, 179; coverage of USDC stood at 2.0 percent, XRP at 0.4 percent, DOGE at 0.9 percent. On the zloty side there was no money in a bank account, only a book entry of a claim against an Estonian company whose accountant, as the interim trustee recorded (Zonda: Creditors’ Committee Elected, 2,000 Claims Filed, 167,000 Euros in the Estate. A Strategy for the Bankruptcy), admitted that the books did not reflect reality. At the end of 2024 customers were owed 74.3 million euros in fiat and the company’s accounts held 4.0 million; in the fourth quarter of 2025 customers’ cash balances melted from 15.8 to 2.9 million euros. The customer exchanged a claim to cryptocurrency that did not exist for a claim to zlotys that were never paid out, both against the same company. The ministry calls this an operation carried out by the exchange. The exchange carried out an edit of a record in a database. Taxing that entry is taxing the meter of a taxi that never left the kerb.

Zonda in Numbers, as the File Stands on October 17

The Company That “Carried Out the Exchange” Has Been Dissolved

The ministry writes about the exchange as if it were a going concern. In Estonia the company will cease to exist; in Poland its transactions will live on, in PIT-38 returns. Zonda’s legal personality will last longer at the tax office than in the commercial register. On September 17 the creditors’ meeting in Tallinn resolved to dissolve the company, and on September 23 the court confirmed that resolution. At the same meeting the trustee stated that the estate contains no business that could be sold as a going concern, that the accounting documents received from the company are unsigned and lack source documents, and that the 429,037,981.18 euros owed to customers exist only as aggregate balances that he cannot attribute to any customer, period or transaction. The trustee does not know whom the exchange owes. The tax office knows how much everyone earned on it.

The only customer ledger is the platform itself, and the platform, more than 250 terabytes of data going back to 2017, was seized by prosecutors who are investigating whether cryptocurrency was ever bought and held for customers at all (Article 286 § 1 in conjunction with Article 294 § 1 of the Polish Criminal Code). From the same database the investigators learned that the victims number almost twice the complaints, because the other half is afraid of the question where the money came from; I wrote about it in August (How Zondacrypto’s Victims Became Suspects). The state knows more about every Zonda customer than the trustee does, but it switches that knowledge on in one direction only: towards the bill. The state is running two proceedings on opposite assumptions about the same entries: in one they are the instrument of a fraud, in the other the basis of taxation. Both assumptions cannot be true at once, and only one of them is supported by the file.

Two Victims, One Invoice

The ministry’s strongest argument runs: on the other side of the order stood another user, so an exchange took place, and whoever sold and was not paid has income all the same, like a seller of shares whose buyer defaults. In Zonda that argument turns against the ministry. The buyer received an entry of cryptocurrency covered at 2 percent, the seller an entry of zlotys covered by a place in the withdrawal queue; both walked away from the trade with a claim against the same insolvent company, which in its 2024 financial statements recorded against itself 82.7 million euros of liabilities “arising from the use of customer funds”. The tax office taxed an exchange between two victims of the same fraud, neither of whom received anything. The screen showed a profit and the tax office believed the screen; the screen showed a balance and the trustee did not. The state believes the screen precisely in those places where the screen owes it something. The seller got a bill for zlotys that do not exist. The buyer got a tax cost for cryptocurrency that does not exist and that he will never sell, because the exchange on which he “bought” it is ceasing to exist. The only real flow of money in this whole chain is the 19 percent to the tax office.

The numbers in the file allow a calculation. Take a customer who, in April, during the run on withdrawals, converted bitcoins bought for 100,000 zlotys into 150,000 zlotys on the platform and never saw them. By April 30, 2027 he will pay 9,500 zlotys in tax. From the estate, were it to remain as counted in August, he would receive about 58 zlotys of those 150,000. That is an illustration, not a forecast: the estate may grow if the trustee goes after the 80 million euros owed by Orion (Money „from Suszek” Arrived Fifteen Months After He Vanished. The Exchange’s Contracts, Revealed). The order of magnitude, however, will stay. In this bankruptcy the tax office holds the position every creditor dreams of: it paid nothing in, risked nothing, does not stand in the queue and enforces without a court. It is the only passenger on the Zonda to walk off the deck dry, and the only one who never came aboard.

The Tax Falls on Those Who Tried to Escape

The ministry’s rule has one more feature that nobody at the ministry has counted. It does not touch those who held cryptocurrency until the freeze; they have a cost that carries forward to later years. It touches those who, in March and April, seeing withdrawals slow down, converted cryptocurrency into zlotys in order to withdraw them and got stuck in a queue of 25,000 orders from a single day. The Zonda tax is a tax on the attempt to escape: a motorway toll gate set up on the hard shoulder. Some of them sold at the prices the platform displayed in its final weeks, including ZND token rates several times higher than anywhere else (Zondacrypto: How Customers Lost Their Money. New Findings). Income computed from the price on a manipulated platform is a tax on the manipulation, and the state becomes the manipulator’s silent partner with a 19 percent share.

There is a logic here that tax law has applied for years without ever saying it aloud. A business may book as a cost a receivable that proves uncollectable, documented for instance by the order closing the debtor’s bankruptcy (Article 23(1)(20) of the PIT Act). A private individual accounting for virtual currencies gets no such cost; the Act knows only acquisition expenses (Article 22(14)). The state is the citizen’s partner in profit, never in loss, and even in profit that never existed.

The Minister Has Two Tools and Uses a Third

In May a deputy minister answered a member of parliament (interpellation no. 16866, the ministry’s reply of May 26, 2026) that a general ruling was not expedient because it could not yet be established whether the funds in Zonda were unrecoverable. Since then the court has declared the bankruptcy (The Zondacrypto Bankruptcy Is Declared: One Deadline Now Governs), the interim trustee has counted the estate, the trustee has priced his own work at about 1.0 million euros against an estate counted in thousands (Zonda: Trustee Wants Up to €1 Million, Estate Has €167k), and the company has been dissolved. The minister’s condition was met by another state.

A general ruling under Article 14a of the Tax Ordinance is the first tool. The second is stronger and the ministry has used it before: a regulation waiving the collection of tax under Article 22 § 1(1) of the Tax Ordinance, issued on March 11, 2022 for Swiss-franc mortgage borrowers, so that no tax would be collected on the loan amounts written off for them, although the Act does treat such write-offs as income; in December 2022 it was extended to the end of 2024. The banks’ customers got a regulation. The exchange’s customers got a note from the ministry that they may apply for relief under Article 67a: deferral, instalments, remission in individual cases. Relief under Article 67a does not answer the question whether the tax is due. It answers the question how to pay it. And the third tool, the one the ministry used this week, is a letter to a newsroom. It protects no taxpayer, binds no tax office and cannot be appealed. The state’s position towards 30,000 victims exists today in two private rulings protecting two people, in a reply to a parliamentary question and in a reply to a journalist. The ministry had a general ruling, a regulation and a journalist to choose from; it chose the journalist, because a journalist requires no reasoning, and since May it has been “monitoring the situation”, which is the only activity in this case that requires no findings and is not subject to any limitation period.

The same state recalls in its reply to parliament that it warned against Zonda in communication no. 77 of February 14, 2024, and that deposits there were not guaranteed. A warning is not income. It is, however, proof that in February 2024 the ministry knew about the exchange what, two years later, the tax office issuing PIT-38 summonses does not want to know: that behind the platform stood a company without a licence, without supervision and without a guarantee. A state that did not protect, did not supervise and warned by a notice on a website is today settling accounts with the citizen, over a profit that citizen never saw, more precisely than it ever settled accounts with the exchange that never paid him. Bastiat called the state the great fiction through which everyone endeavours to live at the expense of everyone else. Here the fiction is twofold: the tax office lives at the expense of the victims on the strength of an entry that is itself a fiction.

What Follows Before April 30

Anyone filing a PIT-38 return for 2026, answering a summons from the tax office or amending earlier returns should describe the exchange as the court in Tallinn found it, not as the platform displayed it; what that means for the returns I set out in September in the chapter “What this means for PIT-38” of (Zonda: PIT on Cryptocurrencies That Did Not Exist), and nothing has changed since except that the evidence has multiplied. Meanwhile tax offices are summoning people to file PIT-38 wherever they see transfers to the exchange’s payment processors (KAS rozpoczyna kryptopolowanie, in Polish). They see deposits and withdrawals, the only two things in this story that really happened. Everything in between is an entry in the system of a company the court has just dissolved.

In Tallinn they counted what was not in Zonda. In Warsaw they computed the tax on it.

Legal and factual status as of October 17, 2026. The worked example of a customer is illustrative and is not a forecast of the outcome of the bankruptcy proceedings. All our texts on the case: Zonda (Zondacrypto): the Collapse, the Bankruptcy and Legal Help For Customers.

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.