Zonda: What Polish Prosecutors Can Do for the Estonian Trustee, What They Must Not Do, and a Proposal to the Minister of Justice on Paying Victims Without Waiting for a Verdict
Until Tuesday, 27 October, customers of the collapsed Zonda exchange are filing their claims with the Estonian trustee. There are already about five thousand claims, worth about EUR 40 million; 237 of them, worth EUR 23.7 million, were filed by my firm. In the same week a news agency reported that cooperation between prosecutors and the trustee had been discussed at the Ministry of Justice. So here is what each of the two proceedings can do and what it cannot, why money frozen in Poland should not be shipped to the bankruptcy estate in Estonia, and what law is missing if fraud victims are not to wait twenty years for their money. On behalf of the victims, I have put a proposal for that law before Poland’s Minister of Justice.
The meeting journalists keep asking about
Let me begin with the meeting at the Ministry of Justice that journalists keep asking me about. They are right to ask: the agency dispatch has run, and the case concerns thousands of people, so their interest is their right and even their duty. I neither confirm nor deny the meeting, and that is no reproach to anyone who asks. It is a rule I apply to myself: counsel for the injured parties tells the prosecutors about the case; he does not tell stories about the prosecutors. Rules apply even when everyone knows the answer; otherwise they would be mere ornament. I also have a reason that goes beyond good manners. Working meetings are working meetings because what is agreed in them gets done rather than announced; once announced, agreements stop being agreements and become announcements, and announcements in this case are read also by those against whom the investigation is being run. If one of the participants decided that the course of such a meeting was fit for a wire story, that is his decision and his account, not the position of the injured parties. And the account that ran parts company with what the injured parties are asking for. They are not asking for assets frozen in Poland to be sent to Estonia, only for the company’s own modest funds, about EUR 167,000, to finance the trustee’s lawsuits. They are not asking for an “exchange of information”, only for an investigation that keeps its information tight, and for one thing for the trustee: a copy of the customer database, without which he cannot verify the claims. So instead of talking about the meeting, I write about the case: what each of the two proceedings can do, what it cannot, and what the injured parties expect from the state.
Where I speak from
I act for the injured parties, on a flat fee paid by them and with no share in whatever is recovered, and I sit on the creditors’ committee in the Estonian bankruptcy. I am in contact with 890 customers of the exchange. On behalf of 237 of them my firm has filed proofs of claim with the trustee totalling EUR 23,717,665.61 as of 23 October, and about 220 are injured parties in the Polish investigation. That is more than half of the value of all claims filed, which, according to the chairman of the creditors’ committee, number about five thousand and come to about EUR 40 million; the trustee expects the total not to exceed EUR 50 million. At the creditors’ meeting on 17 September the group represented by my firm held 7,209 of the 11,597 votes present, or 62 percent (Zonda: Creditors’ Committee Elected, 2,000 Claims Filed, 167,000 Euros in the Estate. A Strategy for the Bankruptcy). What we establish from documents goes to the prosecutors and the trustee; here I write about what is public and what can be counted. I promise my clients neither dates nor amounts. I have spent twenty years on the WGI case, the collapse of the Warsaw brokerage Warszawska Grupa Inwestycyjna (WGI: Guilty, After Twenty Years), and I know what promises made to victims cost, and who pays for them.
Two proceedings, different tools, different money
Since the exchange collapsed, two proceedings have been running. They appear to compete for the same money; in fact they have different tools and different money, and they ought to be doing different things. In Poland the National Prosecutor’s Office (Prokuratura Krajowa) is investigating fraud and money laundering (Zondacrypto Probe Merged With the Suszek Disappearance Case After Four Years): it pursues the people responsible and freezes their assets. In Estonia, on 27 August, a court declared the exchange’s operator, BB Trade Estonia OÜ, bankrupt and appointed a trustee, who pursues no one: he manages the company’s assets and is to divide them among the creditors (The Zondacrypto Bankruptcy Is Declared: One Deadline Now Governs). The trouble is that there are almost no assets. By the company’s books its funds at the end of March came to about EUR 167,000, while the trustee’s own estimate puts the cost of the proceedings in the region of a million (Zonda: Trustee Wants Up to €1 Million, Estate Has €167k). Everything that follows flows from that arithmetic: an estate without money must look for money, and the whole case comes down to the question of where it is allowed to look.
An injured party and a creditor are two different things
In each proceeding the exchange’s customer is someone else. In the Polish investigation he is an injured party (pokrzywdzony), which is to say a party to the proceedings (Zondacrypto: The Vanishing). That status follows from the harm, not from an entry on a list. A motion for a compensation order can be filed right up to the close of the trial, at trial the injured party may act as an auxiliary prosecutor, and satisfaction comes after judgment, out of assets frozen with the persons responsible, with no intermediaries. He bears none of the cost of the investigation; the state pays. In the Estonian bankruptcy the same person is a creditor of the company. He is one only insofar as he filed a claim, preferably on time, because late claims go to the back of the queue, and only insofar as the claim is admitted. He votes in proportion to its amount, and his share of any distribution depends on how much the trustee manages to recover and how much of that the costs consume, because creditors pay for a bankruptcy. The injured party gets the perpetrator’s money; the creditor gets a share of what is left of the firm.
The model: how the work was divided in the Madoff case
The model for the division of labour is the Madoff case (What Madoff’s Bankers Could Teach the Customers of a Polish Crypto Exchange). The trustee, Irving Picard, did not pursue the perpetrators; the Department of Justice did. The trustee sued those who had withdrawn from Madoff’s firm more than they had paid in, and settled with them: by July 2026 he had recovered or agreed to recover some USD 15.5 billion against estimated principal losses of USD 17.5 billion, and the fees of the trustee and his law firm, more than USD 1.8 billion, were paid by the industry’s guarantee fund, not by the victims. The government meanwhile did what the trustee could not: out of forfeited assets, including USD 2.2 billion from the estate of the late Jeffry Picower, the scheme’s largest beneficiary, and USD 1.7 billion from the settlement with JPMorgan Chase, it created a fund of its own, which paid USD 4.3 billion to nearly 41,000 victims in 127 countries, among them indirect victims whom the trustee could not satisfy because they had never been his customers. Counting all sources, the victims recovered close to 94 percent of their proven losses.
The two tracks shared even single settlements: of the USD 7.2 billion from Picower’s heirs, USD 5 billion went to the trustee, because he had the customer list, and USD 2.2 billion to the government fund, because it could reach victims who were on no list. The money went where the list of the entitled was. That principle is worth remembering, because it returns in the Zonda case at the question of where the money frozen in Poland should wait.
What only the trustee can do: unwind contracts
What, in this division of labour, falls to the trustee in Tallinn. One thing that Polish prosecutors cannot do at all: unwind contracts. The institution is old and every bankruptcy law has it, because a debtor who sees bankruptcy coming usually does one of two things: he moves assets beyond the reach of the future proceedings, or he pays chosen creditors at the expense of the rest. Statutes answer with a catalogue of acts which, done within a set period before bankruptcy, are treated as if they had never happened so far as the estate is concerned. No one has to prove that anyone meant to harm anyone; the date and the terms of the act suffice. The contract remains valid between the parties, but to the creditors it is transparent: the counterparty hands back to the estate what it received, or its value, and the trustee divides it among everyone.
Poland’s Bankruptcy Law (Prawo upadłościowe) treats as ineffective by operation of law any gratuitous or grossly undervalued disposition made within a year before the bankruptcy petition, and any payment or securing of a debt not yet due within the last six months; dealings with related persons in that period may be set aside by the judge-commissioner. Commentators give a sense of scale: a car sold at more than a quarter below its market price may already qualify. The Estonian Bankruptcy Act, which governs the Zonda bankruptcy, works on the same principle but counts its windows from the appointment of the interim trustee. It allows the court to revoke transactions concluded within a year before that day if the other party knew or should have known that they harmed creditors, and within five years if the debtor intentionally harmed creditors and the other party was connected to him; for gratuitous transactions with a connected person the period is likewise five years, unless the recipient or the debtor proves that the company was solvent at the time. For transactions in the last six months before the interim trustee’s appointment the statute presumes that the counterparty knew of the harm; the interim trustee was appointed on 27 July, so the presumption covers transactions from the end of January 2026. Only the trustee may sue, within three years of the bankruptcy declaration, and whatever comes back comes back to the estate, that is, to all creditors. Whether, and which of, the company’s contracts from its last months fall within those windows (Money “from Suszek” Arrived Fifteen Months After He Vanished. The Exchange’s Contracts, Revealed) is for the Estonian court to decide; to put the question to it, the trustee must be able to pay for the lawsuit.
Why the Polish tools do not work here
Poland has its equivalents, but in this case they do not work. Ineffectiveness under Article 127 and following of the Bankruptcy Law is a tool of a Polish trustee in a Polish bankruptcy, and none has been declared in Zonda’s case. A Paulian action under Article 527 of the Civil Code (Kodeks cywilny) (When Mortgages Fail to Shield Against Paulian Actions) can be brought by any creditor, but by each creditor separately, in his own name and at his own expense; he must prove that the debtor acted in the knowledge that he was harming creditors and that the counterparty knew or could have known it, and he wins only for himself. For five thousand creditors that is not an instrument but a lottery.
The prosecutor’s tools answer a different question. Bankruptcy law asks about the date and the terms of a contract; criminal law asks where the money came from. A prosecutor can freeze assets (zabezpieczenie majątkowe), that is, immobilise them for the duration of the investigation to secure a future forfeiture and compensation, and a criminal court can order the forfeiture of the proceeds of crime or their equivalent (Article 45 § 1 of the Criminal Code, Kodeks karny). The strength of that tool lies in its presumptions. Where the perpetrator derived from the offence a benefit of significant value, meaning more than PLN 200,000, or committed an offence carrying at least five years’ imprisonment, the law presumes that all property he came into within five years before the offence and up to the judgment derives from crime, unless he documents its lawful source (Article 45 § 2). Where the perpetrator transferred property to someone else, under any title or merely in fact, the law presumes that the property still belongs to him, unless the acquirer could not have supposed that it came, even indirectly, from a criminal act (Article 45 § 3). That presumption is what reaching property transferred to the companies and people around a perpetrator rests on: it is not the state that must prove the property belongs to someone else, but the holder who must show that he acquired it in good faith. But a link between the property and the crime must first be shown, and forfeited property falls to the State Treasury unless it is returnable to the injured party, because return takes precedence over forfeiture (Article 44 § 5 and Article 45 § 1 of the Criminal Code). None of these routes feeds the estate and none unwinds a contract. That is why the two tracks need each other, and why neither can replace the other.
Three things to do, and one line
From this division of labour follows what the trustee needs from the Polish state in order to do his part, and what he should not get from it. I see three things to do and one line not to cross. I set out the same position, in five points and on behalf of the injured parties, in a letter to the Minister of Justice dated 22 October; here I summarise it in my own words, because I do not publish correspondence with the authorities.
First: the company’s own money, to the estate
The first requires neither a statute nor a minister, only a prosecutor’s decision. The company has money of its own, modest, held with payment operators. If it is frozen in Poland and is neither the proceeds of crime nor security for claims against natural persons, the prosecutors should allow it to pass to the estate. It is the debtor’s money, managed by the trustee since 27 August, and in his hands it has one sensible use: lawsuits to recover what left the company. Without it the Estonian proceedings will die of want before they recover anything, and that would be a loss for the Polish investigation too, because no one else will unwind those contracts. A bankruptcy in Estonia is a good scalpel and a bad wallet; we intend to use it as a scalpel.
Second: a copy of the customer database for the trustee
Thousands of claims cannot be verified without the register of customer accounts and balances, which sits on data carriers seized in Poland (What Is a Claim Worth When No One Has Counted It?). The trustee should receive a copy, with the originals staying in the investigation and with the stipulation that it be used only for the list of claims. That is not an exchange of information between the investigation and the estate; it is the return to the company of a copy of its own records, without which thousands of claims remain mere assertions. With that one exception, the flow of information towards the estate ends. Everything else runs one way: into the investigation. A trustee who knows where assets may be tells the prosecutors; prosecutors who freeze those assets owe the estate no explanation. What reaches the trustee reaches the file, which any of the thousands of creditors may inspect, and among them are people closely tied to the exchange. Victims do not need an open investigation; they need an effective one.
Third: the investigation stays in Poland
The investigation should stay in Poland, as the lead proceeding. Evidence and frozen assets are brought in from abroad; the case is not handed over there. A state that opens its own investigation into money lying within its borders seizes it as the object of its own laundering offence and forfeits it to its own treasury; the share of Polish victims then becomes a matter of a foreign state’s discretion, and any division between states comes years later, if at all. Whoever seizes, divides; and whoever divides, starts with himself. Within the European Union we have mutual recognition instruments that give victims priority; outside it, mutual legal assistance with the transfer of assets to Poland is the safer road. From experience in Liechtenstein I know that money once seized there stays seized for years.
Fourth, which is the line: criminal freezes do not travel to Estonia
The fourth is a line, and the one my clients asked me to name publicly: assets frozen in Poland on the property of suspects and of entities connected to them should not pass to the bankruptcy estate in Estonia. Polish law knows no procedure by which property frozen with third parties is wired to a foreign estate at a trustee’s request. If the estate has a claim against someone, it must first win it in court, and in the meantime the criminal freeze stands. It is worth seeing how unequal the tools are. The Polish freeze on the assets of entities around a perpetrator rests on the presumption in Article 45 § 3 of the Criminal Code; the Estonian estate enjoys no presumption at all, so for the same assets it would have to bring an action and prove everything in it. In its decision of 12 February 2025 (case I KZP 5/24) the Supreme Court (Sąd Najwyższy) declined to issue a resolution, but it said in terms that there is no provision in Polish law under which a criminal freeze lapses because bankruptcy has been declared, and it pointed to case law under which freezes imposed before bankruptcy remain in force and are effective against the trustee. That case concerned the bankrupt’s own property; a fortiori it applies to the property of third parties. The position was defended before the Supreme Court by the same division of the National Prosecutor’s Office that now runs the Zonda case; I am asking the prosecutors for nothing beyond what they themselves have already defended.
In Poland that money waits for a judgment and for the injured parties, including those who have not yet come forward anywhere. In Estonia it would become part of the estate, out of which the costs of the proceedings are paid first, with the remainder divided proportionally among customers and all the other creditors on a list whose composition nobody yet knows. The transfer would be practically irreversible, and irreversible decisions are not taken on the strength of a list that does not yet exist. The Polish track can reach every injured party, the Estonian one only those on the list; it is the same principle that divided Picower’s money in New York. Poland has been here before: the bankruptcy of Amber Gold, the pyramid scheme that collapsed in 2012, took nine years and returned to customers PLN 66 million of the PLN 582 million claimed, about 11 percent, while the criminal court ordered compensation also for more than a thousand people who had never filed with the trustee at all. I say this as counsel for the victims. As a member of the committee I am bound to look after all creditors, and I see no contradiction: an estate that lives on its own lawsuits serves everyone; an estate that wanted to live on other people’s freezes would be stuck in litigation over them for years. There is no judgment of the trustee in this, only of the tool. For the exchange’s customers the practical conclusion is a single one, and the Minister himself keeps repeating it: the claim is filed with the trustee by 27 October, whatever the outcome of the dispute over the money.
Why the Ministry says little
Now the question that comes up most often: why the Ministry does not say more. The Minister of Justice, who in Poland also serves as Prosecutor General, speaks of things done, charges and freezes, and is silent about things intended. The reason is in the file. From the interim trustee’s report it follows that between December 2025 and April 2026, that is, when the exchange’s troubles were already public (Zonda: EUR 501k to the CEO, EUR 118k to Lake Constance, EUR 230k to Łódź. The Last Month Before Withdrawals Stopped), about USD 21 million in cryptocurrency left its wallets for a single address at another exchange. Cryptocurrency has no borders and no office hours; a transfer takes minutes, and every prosecutorial communiqué is read also by the one who holds the keys. A prosecutor who talks stops freezing. The statute allows the Prosecutor General to inform the media about a pending investigation if he finds that the public interest so requires; his reticence is therefore a choice within the law, not a necessity. I do not read it as a lack of interest; I read it as the price of effective freezes. The victims understand this better than is assumed. In the WGI case I watched an investigation that was open to the public and helpless against the assets; I prefer a state that says little and seizes much. My clients do not expect communiqués from the Minister; they expect that when the time comes to pay, there will be something to pay with.
The missing link: the proposal I put before the Minister
There is one more thing, which goes beyond this case, and here the Minister holds a tool that no prosecutor or court has: he can initiate a change in the law. In my letter of 22 October I put before the Minister, on behalf of my clients, a proposal for legislation on returning to victims property taken from perpetrators without a conviction. Polish law can seize a fraudster’s money in a week and return it to the victim in twenty years. The proposal concerns the second of those numbers.
What Polish law can already do, and what it cannot
Taking without a conviction is something the law has been able to do since 2017: Article 45a § 2 of the Criminal Code, added by the amendment of 23 March 2017 implementing an EU directive of 2014, allows a court to order forfeiture where the evidence shows it would have been ordered on conviction, including after the perpetrator’s death, after discontinuance because he was never identified, and after the proceedings have been stayed because the accused is in hiding or seriously ill; at the investigation stage the court decides on the prosecutor’s motion (Articles 22 § 4 and 323 § 3 of the Code of Criminal Procedure, Kodeks postępowania karnego). The same package rebuilt the presumptions of Article 45 §§ 2 and 3 described above. The legislature justified it in so many words by the observation that frozen property, over the years a suspect spends in hiding, “systematically decapitalises, losing value”; in a case in which crypto-assets have been frozen, that argument weighs more than in any other. Only that forfeited property goes to the State Treasury. To a victim the law gives back, without a conviction, only a specific thing or a specific benefit shown to be returnable to that very person (Articles 44 § 5 and 45 § 1 of the Criminal Code, Article 230 § 2 of the Code of Criminal Procedure). Where the pool is commingled and the victims number in thousands, there is no such procedure: whoever claims a right to forfeited property is sent to the civil courts (Article 340 § 3 of the Code of Criminal Procedure), and a compensation order under Article 46 can be made only against a perpetrator who has been tried. Where the perpetrators are unreachable, dead or hiding abroad, that means waiting measured in decades; in the WGI case the first-instance verdicts came after twenty years. The state, then, has learned to take without a conviction; it has not yet learned to give back without one.
Two answers I know
I can hear two answers, and I know both from my own cases. The first: the victim has the civil courts. So she has, against the heirs of a dead man, the guardian of an absent one, or someone who has moved to a country with no treaty on legal assistance; along the way lie years, costs and property that has meanwhile fallen to the State Treasury. The second: paying out before a conviction violates the presumption of innocence. It does not, because it decides nothing about guilt. That property derives from crime is something a court already decides today, in forfeiture proceedings, under a standard the legislature itself wrote; legal scholarship treats forfeiture under Article 45a as a protective measure, not a penalty, which opens the way to deciding about property without deciding about guilt. Whoever wishes to defend his property has the forfeiture proceedings in which to do it. The European Court of Human Rights, from Raimondo v. Italy in 1994 to Gogitidze v. Georgia in 2015, leaves states a wide margin in controlling the ownership of property that may derive from crime, including the reversal of the burden of proof, on one condition: the owner must have a judicial procedure in which to defend himself. The dispute, then, is not whether the state may take this property, because it already may; it is about whom it should give it to.
The model: civil forfeiture and remission
A model exists and has worked for years. United States federal law severs the compensation of victims from the conviction of the perpetrator. The government brings a civil forfeiture action against the property itself, in which it proves the link between the property and the offence on the preponderance of the evidence, with statutory protection for innocent owners and bona fide purchasers and with a stay of the proceedings where they could prejudice a parallel criminal investigation (18 U.S.C. §§ 981 and 983). Once the forfeiture is final, the recovered funds go to the victims through the administrative procedure of remission (18 U.S.C. § 981(e)(6) and 28 C.F.R. Part 9): the claimant shows a documented loss directly caused by the offence, no part in it, no prior compensation and no other reasonably available source of compensation, and where the money falls short of the losses, the division is pro rata within the net proceeds. That is how the Madoff Victim Fund worked. The mechanism needs no trial: when Allen Hilly, indicted for fraudulently obtaining more than USD 18 million, died before trial, the Department of Justice completed a civil forfeiture and in 2014 returned more than USD 14.6 million to nine victims. The same route recovers crypto-assets from hackers attributed to North Korea, who will never stand before an American court. Between 2002 and 2015 the American forfeiture programme returned more than USD 4 billion to victims. The essence of the solution does not lie in its American origin: if a state can take away the proceeds of crime by a final decision, it should have a procedure for assigning them to the verified claims of the injured, independent of whether the perpetrator can be tried.
What I proposed to the Minister
Poland need not start from scratch; it already has three of the four elements: forfeiture without conviction under Article 45a, asset freezing under Article 291 of the Code of Criminal Procedure together with the presumptions of Article 45 §§ 2 and 3, which reach property transferred to third parties, and the precedence of return to the victim over forfeiture. What is missing is the fourth: a special procedure for the collective satisfaction of injured parties out of property whose forfeiture a court has finally ordered without a conviction, where an incomplete and commingled pool of assets is to repair the losses of many people and the return of specific items to their owners is not possible. I described such a procedure to the Minister in a few sentences. Payment follows a final decision on the destination of the property, not a final conviction of the perpetrator. Entitlement is established by open criteria: a documented loss, its direct link to the offence, no part in the offence, no prior satisfaction from another source, including a bankruptcy estate. Distribution is pro rata and covers also those who never filed with any trustee. Decisions on entitlement are subject to judicial review, third parties and bona fide purchasers are protected, and double recovery is excluded. The State Treasury’s claim to the property ranks behind the victims’, because the state should not be the beneficiary of a fraud it has not managed to try. The procedure stays within criminal proceedings, because the EU regulation on the mutual recognition of freezing and confiscation orders covers only orders made in such proceedings; a separate civil forfeiture would lose that protection outside Poland. And it covers acts committed before its entry into force, which the legislature has done once already: the 2017 amendment applied the new wording of Article 45 §§ 1a and 2 to acts predating it.
It would be a bigger change than it sounds: the first procedure in Polish law under which the proceeds of crime return to the victims on the strength of a final decision about the property rather than about guilt. Today the victim of a fraud whose perpetrator has died or vanished is worse placed than the State Treasury, because the state receives the forfeiture while she waits for a trial that will never happen. After the change the order would be reversed, into the one common sense suggests: victims first, the budget second.
The deadline: 23 November
The timing is close and favourable: by 23 November, that is, in a month, Poland must transpose the EU directive on asset recovery and confiscation, which provides for confiscation without conviction and requires the protection of victims’ rights to restitution and compensation. The implementing statute is the natural place for the missing link; adding it requires no new philosophy, only one chapter. It is my clients’ postulate, because they would be the first to wait for such a law: their perpetrators may remain beyond the reach of a Polish court for years, while their money lies frozen in Poland waiting for a verdict that may never come. Their experience, with assets frozen in Poland and abroad and the prospect of years of waiting despite those freezes, is the best material on which to test whether the proposed solution works. They also know best that justice which arrives after twenty years is no longer justice but a statistic. I offered the Minister that my firm would prepare, without charge, the outline of the bill: with a comparative analysis, an indication of what fits within existing institutions and what requires new provisions, transitional rules, and an assessment of compatibility with the EU instruments of mutual recognition, within whatever time the Ministry sets.
What the victims expect from the state, and what they do not
So that there is no doubt about what my clients do not expect from the state. They do not expect an exchange of information between the investigation and the estate. The word “exchange” sounds well in a press release and badly in an investigation: information that leaves a prosecutor’s file does not come back, and it ends up where everyone reads it, including those against whom the investigation is being run. The victims of this case do not need an exchange of information; they need its protection. They do not expect investigations to be opened abroad or joint operations with third countries. A state that looks for money in several jurisdictions at once finds it in none, and what a foreign state finds, a foreign state keeps. Nor do they expect communiqués; every communiqué about intentions is an instruction to the one who holds the keys.
They expect one thing: an effective investigation in Poland. And effectiveness in this case has one name: information. Data carriers, registers of accounts and balances, exports from custody systems, account histories at payment operators, transaction trails on the blockchain: that is the ground on which this case will be decided, and it is won by whoever gets the data first, not by whoever gets the microphone first. A crypto investigation is won on the days when nobody talks about it. That is why what my clients and my firm have gathered, from an inventory of the documents in the bankruptcy file to a compilation of the data on the exchange’s custody holdings, went to the prosecutors and not to the press: only prosecutors can turn it into a freeze. In twenty years on the WGI case I saw the usual pace of the state’s response to the collapse of a financial institution: years to the first charges, decades to the verdicts. In this case, within six months of withdrawals stopping, the investigations were merged and the assets of the people and entities around the exchange were frozen. For the first time in my practice, the state in a case like this is faster than the perpetrators. The victims did not ask for attention. They gave the state documents and calm, and they ask for one thing: that it stay faster.
In one sentence
I am not asking the state to say more. I am asking the trustee to unwind contracts, the prosecutors to freeze assets, and the legislature to learn to give money back to victims as efficiently as it has learned to take it from perpetrators. The other pieces on this case are collected on one page (Zonda (Zondacrypto): the Collapse, the Bankruptcy and Legal Help For Customers).
Robert Nogacki, attorney at law, counsel for injured customers of the exchange and member of the creditors’ committee of BB Trade Estonia OÜ
The Zondacrypto Case
The Zondacrypto case is being examined by authorities in several countries, and no one today can predict the fate of the entrusted funds. We represent the victims and protect their position in the ongoing proceedings.
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.
