Zondacrypto: How an Exchange Laundered Its Credibility Through Sponsorship. Juventus, Raków, the Olympic Committee, and 4.6 Million Euros of Customers’ Money

The Juventus and Raków contracts in detail: the clauses that protected the clubs, and the ones that were missing. Twenty brands in the portfolio, a prosecutor’s dismissal with a jersey in its reasoning, an Olympic committee paid in tokens. How FTX, Terra, Voyager, and Binance ended, who answers for advertising a Ponzi scheme, and what the trustee can still claim.

Kancelaria Prawna Skarbiec · Robert Nogacki, Attorney at Law · October 17, 2026

On January 12, 2024, Przemysław Kral signed, on behalf of BB Trade Estonia OÜ, an advertising and promotion agreement with Juventus F.C. S.p.A.: five hundred thousand euros for the rest of the 2023-24 season, 1.1 million for each of the two seasons after it, plus bonuses, through June 30, 2026. Thirteen days later came an addendum: the left sleeve of the Juventus jersey for half a season, for a further 1.2 million euros, of which 1.1 million was due by January 29th. Seven months earlier, on June 6, 2023, the same company had become the strategic sponsor of Raków Częstochowa, then the freshly crowned champion of Poland, for three hundred and twenty thousand euros in the first season and three hundred and fifty-two thousand in the second, plus bonuses. In all, some 4.6 million euros of marketing commitments, entered into during a period that the interim trustee has since described as permanent insolvency, by a company that admitted in its own 2022 annual report that it was using customers’ funds. Whose money paid for the jerseys follows, then, from the exchange’s own documents, not from my conjecture; how much of these commitments was actually paid will be shown by the bank statements the trustee has requested. Both contracts sit in the bankruptcy file before Harju County Court in Tallinn, and I describe them below in detail, because they show a mechanism I would call the laundering of credibility: Zonda, which by its own reconciliation sheets had no cover for its deposits, used those deposits to buy the marks of solidity, and the marks worked, on customers, on journalists, and, as it turns out, on prosecutors.

I wrote in May about the trust factory, the campaign with Wojciech Szczęsny, the sponsored subdomain on a technology portal, and the fact that in 2024 sixty per cent of the exchange’s available cash went on marketing (The Same Trick Twice). That piece described the façade; this one adds the documents, the price lists, and the clauses.

For the record: I represent about a hundred and fifty of the exchange’s customers, and I sit on the creditors’ committee in its bankruptcy. Documents from the court file I describe as public documents. Opinions I label as opinions.

Zonda and Juventus: A Contract That Protected the Club, Not the Fans

The Juventus agreement runs to sixty-two pages and opens with a preamble in which the club explains what it is not allowed to do. As a company listed on the Milan stock exchange, it answers to Consob, to the Italian antitrust authority, and to the rulebooks of the F.I.G.C., Lega Serie A, and UEFA, and so, it stipulates, it may not advertise financial instruments or suggest that it offers them. The sponsor, for its part, declares in recital D that it runs a cryptocurrency exchange “authorised to operate in Italy in compliance with all applicable laws and regulations.” In recital H, Juventus states that it enters into the agreement in reliance on the sponsor’s representations. The whole structure is built around one question: how a club can earn money from a crypto sponsor without being answerable for it.

The definitions say what Juventus was selling and what it was not. “Core Business” means a cryptocurrency exchange platform; NFTs, blockchain services, and mining are expressly excluded. The ZND platform, built around Zonda’s own token, is granted the status of a “strict exception”: the sponsor could mention it in its materials, but Juventus could revoke that right with a single written notice, and the sponsor undertook in advance to “promptly comply.” A club that had worn the logo of a different crypto exchange, Bitget, on its sleeve for two seasons from 2021 knew where the reputational risk lay, because it wrote it into the definitions: not in the trading of bitcoin but in the sponsor’s token. What that token did in the books I described in the piece on the exchange’s contracts, and how its pump worked and how its fall of 99.75 per cent ended, separately (ZND Token: Fresh Air in a Can). Juventus fenced it off in the definitions. In its announcement of February 2, 2024, the club introduced its sponsor as an exchange “authorised to work in Italy, Lithuania, Slovakia, Estonia and Canada,” with 1.2 million active users; the contract provided no means of checking any of those figures.

Then come the rights: a Sky Box for every home match, ninety minutes of LED-board visibility in the 2023-24 season, twelve additional fifteen-second spots per match under the addendum, six metres of billboard on the training pitch, a “Squad List powered by zondacrypto” on Facebook and X before every Serie A and Coppa Italia match, a shoot with five players lasting an hour and forty minutes, with a request for Wojciech Szczęsny, Arkadiusz Milik, Federico Chiesa, Adrien Rabiot, and Danilo, and a separate right to Milik’s image “in his quality as a Juventus Player,” a meeting with a club legend in the box, ten signed jerseys, twenty unsigned, seats in the Tribuna Sponsor, and parking spaces in area P3. All of it paid for with money that, according to the reconciliation sheets from the end of 2024, covered about three per cent of what the exchange owed its customers.

A lawyer who reads this agreement after the sponsor’s bankruptcy stops at four clauses. The first is Article 3.14: the sponsor warrants that it has completed its registration in the Italian register of crypto-asset service providers kept by the O.A.M. under a decree of the Ministry of Economy and Finance of January 13, 2022, and that it will maintain that registration for the entire term. Entry in the O.A.M. is neither a licence nor prudential supervision; it is an anti-money-laundering register that examines neither solvency nor the cover of deposits. For the club it was evidence of due diligence; for a customer it meant nothing about whether his money existed. The second is Article 10.2: the sponsor represents, on behalf of its shareholders and ultimate beneficial owners as well, that none of them appears on any Italian or E.U. sanctions list. The third is Article 10.3: each party warrants that it holds every authorisation required in every jurisdiction and that it “shall at all times have the human, financial, technical and commercial means” to perform the agreement. In January, 2024, BB Trade Estonia signed that assurance with close to four million euros of obligations toward Juventus, 2.7 million under the main agreement and 1.2 million under the addendum, bonuses aside, while being, in the trustee’s later assessment, permanently insolvent since the end of 2022; if that assessment holds, the representation in Article 10.3 was false when made, and that is no longer a matter of sponsorship but of an indictment one document longer. The fourth is Article 11.2(f): either party may terminate with immediate effect if the other “is subjected to any insolvency procedure or to any legal proceeding that may harm the image of the other party.” Article 11.2(b) adds a detail that says more about Juventus than about Zonda: a ban on using the tickets in contests that would require participants to buy cryptocurrency or open an account on the exchange. The club did not want its tickets used as bait for deposits.

What those sixty-two pages do not contain: any right of the club to inspect the sponsor’s reserves, any proof of cover, any obligation of the sponsor toward the fans, any mechanism triggered when the sponsor stops paying its customers. The agreement is exquisitely careful in protecting Juventus and perfectly indifferent to Zonda’s customers, to whom that protection was to be sold. This is not a reproach; football clubs are not supervisors. It is a description of what a fan takes for a guarantee and what is, in fact, a price list.

There is one clause in this agreement worth claiming today. Article 11.4: if Juventus terminates for reasons other than a material breach by the sponsor, it returns to the sponsor a proportional part of the fee for the remaining period. The agreement was to run until June 30, 2026. Yet Juventus told Business Insider Polska in April, 2026, that its cooperation with zondacrypto had ended in June, 2025, a year early; the logo had already left the sleeve after the 2023-24 season, and since 2025-26 the sleeve has carried another exchange, WhiteBIT. On what basis the main agreement ended, and with what settlement, the club did not say. There are two possibilities, and both are valuable to the estate. If the agreement was ended by consent or for reasons other than breach, and fees for the unperformed period had been prepaid, Article 11.4 gives the trustee a claim for their return. If Juventus terminated for the sponsor’s breach, there is no refund, but there is a document that says what the club knew about its sponsor in June, 2025, ten months before withdrawals stopped. I asked the trustee, in my letter of September 17th, to put the question to Turin. The sleeve, at 1.2 million euros, was used and will not come back; what may come back is, at most, whatever was paid for a season that never happened.

Zonda and Raków: The First Club to Believe, and the First to Leave

The agreement with RKS Raków Częstochowa S.A., dated June 6, 2023, is more modest and more Polish: zondacrypto as strategic sponsor, the logo on the club’s website under “Sponsors,” stadium announcements, membership of the Raków Business Club, performance bonuses with a proviso about the full scale of a season’s fixtures. Three hundred and twenty thousand euros for 2023-24, three hundred and fifty-two thousand for 2024-25. In 2025 came the naming of the stadium: the municipal ground on Limanowskiego Street became the zondacrypto Arena, under a deal running to the end of the 2027-28 season. Zonda was thus paying the club in the very month in which transfers “from Suszek” arrived on its accounts at a Swiss bank, fifteen months after the founder’s disappearance, and in which it was converting 2.5 million euros into złotys at that bank to meet withdrawals. Whether the first instalment for Raków went out of the same account the statements the trustee has requested will show; that is a hypothesis, not a finding.

Raków was first in both directions. The first Polish club to give Zonda the title of strategic sponsor, and the first to terminate the agreement, on April 17, 2026, the day the Regional Prosecutor’s Office in Katowice announced its investigation. GKS Katowice, Pogoń Szczecin, Wieczysta Kraków, and Lechia Gdańsk followed. Lechia had signed in August, 2025, through the end of the 2026-27 season, moved the exchange’s logo from the back of its shirt to the front on January 10, 2026, as main sponsor, and on May 4th played in Radom with the front of the shirt blank. Wieczysta had been quarrelling with the exchange before the collapse: the club said it was not being paid, the exchange said the club was not performing. None of the clubs broke with Zonda in the first week of April, when customers stopped receiving withdrawals; they broke when the prosecutors announced an investigation or when the instalments stopped arriving. Juventus, by its own account, left a year earlier and did not say why. The order of events is constant throughout this story: first the club’s interest, then the statement.

Zonda: Twenty Brands, or Credibility Wholesale

Juventus and Raków are two documents in a court file. The portfolio, built from 2023 onward and not all of it active at the same time, was larger, and zondacrypto listed it gladly in its press releases: Atalanta, Bologna, Parma, AS Monaco and a box of honour in Monaco, AS Monaco Basket with a courtside VIP zone renamed the zondacrypto Lounge, Pogoń Szczecin as “key partner,” GKS Katowice, Wieczysta, Dziki Warszawa in basketball, Flora Tallinn in Estonia, Lechia. In cycling, Strade Bianche, Milano-Sanremo, the Giro d’Italia, Il Lombardia, the Tour de Pologne, the pink jersey of the Giro d’Italia Women, an amateur series called the PZU Gran Fondo, and, from January, 2025, title sponsorship of a women’s WorldTour team that raced as Canyon//SRAM zondacrypto, with Kasia Niewiadoma, winner of the 2024 Tour de France Femmes, as brand ambassador. In tennis, Magdalena Fręch. In Monaco, Arthur Leclerc as ambassador. In Switzerland, in January, 2025, title sponsorship of the HC Davos arena, announced together with the opening of an office in Zug and a “strategic partnership” with a bank, in a release that claimed “more than 1.35 million active users.” In March, 2026, the Tour de Suisse announced Zonda as sponsor of its young-rider classification; in May it terminated the deal as “unsustainable.” On May 29th, Canyon//SRAM ended the partnership with immediate effect, citing breaches of contract, and reverted to its old name ahead of the Giro d’Italia Women, whose pink jersey the same Zonda was sponsoring.

Each of these contracts was a message with the same content: we are big, we are everywhere, we are regulated. The message came with reinforcement in the fine print: alongside the jerseys ran promotions of the “ten dollars in a digital asset of our choosing for registering with the code” variety, as with the Lechia deal. In Britain, sign-up and refer-a-friend bonuses of that kind have been banned since October 8, 2023, and every crypto-asset advertisement must be “clear, fair and not misleading” and carry a standard risk warning. In Poland, the same bonus was the text of a press release.

Zonda had no bitcoin. It had a box.

Zondacrypto and the Polish Olympic Committee: A General Sponsor Who Paid in Tokens

In October, 2025, zondacrypto became general sponsor of the Polish Olympic Committee; the committee’s president announced it in Monaco, five days after he had himself asked the Internal Security Agency about the risks of cryptocurrencies, and without waiting for the answer. TVN24 and Wirtualna Polska obtained the contract: the document, dated October 28, 2025, was concluded not with the exchange itself but with another company; it provided that Olympic athletes would receive their benefits in TMPL tokens, and in ZND tokens until TMPL was launched; that the committee would open an account on the exchange, hand out tokens, and take half of the proceeds from their sale to Poles; that it would pass on, every month, the data of everyone following the TeamPL profile on Facebook, for ad targeting; and that the sponsor “shall not be liable for fluctuations in the exchange rate of the Token.” Committee staff received their Christmas bonus in tokens in December. The TMPL token made its début on zondacrypto on February 6, 2026, with a “TMPL Earn” program rewarding holders who locked their tokens for three hundred and sixty days; the Games’ medallists received half their bonuses in it, and the most decorated of them was unable to cash out tokens worth, on the day of payment, five hundred and fifty thousand złotys, because the exchange told him to wait until the end of April. The committee’s president acknowledged buying TeamPL tokens privately for two hundred thousand euros; on August 27, 2026, he was charged with passive influence-peddling and with participating in the satisfaction of selected creditors to the detriment of the others, because, prosecutors say, he recovered a hundred per cent of his capital from the exchange while everyone else’s withdrawals were blocked. The neon sign came down from the committee’s headquarters on April 30, 2026, when the deadline for overdue payments passed. The Games had ended on February 22nd. The mechanics of the Olympic token, from the Saturday-morning credits to the medallists’ accounts to the drip-feed of issuance, I took apart in September (ZND Token: Fresh Air in a Can).

This is not sponsorship in the sense Juventus understands it. Juventus sold Zonda visibility and fenced itself off from the token in the definitions. The Olympic committee sold Zonda itself: the image of the Olympic movement as a distribution channel for a token, with a share of the revenue from selling that token to Poles. The difference between advertising and participating in a token’s distribution for a share of the proceeds is, in law, the difference between a vendor of space and a participant in a venture, and the second role carries other consequences, of which more below. Whether that participation amounted to issuance, a public offer, or another regulated activity will be settled by the full documentation and by what was actually performed; the contract, as TVN24 writes, has expired.

Laundering Credibility: How It Works

A cryptocurrency exchange’s service is what economists call a credence good: the customer cannot check its quality before buying, or after, until he tries to withdraw. In such industries, people buy signals. An audit of reserves is an expensive and credible signal, because a falsehood in it exposes the auditor to professional and financial liability. A Juventus jersey is an expensive and worthless signal, because it says only that the sponsor paid, and nothing about whose money it was. A signal bought with customers’ deposits is the inverse of a signal: the more jerseys, the less cover. Zonda never published a proof of reserves; the last certificate in existence dates from 2021 and rests, for bitcoin, on a chart from an internal system. Instead it published twenty logos, a campaign called “Tales from Crypto,” with Szczęsny and two of Poland’s best-known actors, and an interview in Monaco in which its chief executive called it one of the most regulated exchanges in Europe.

None of this is new. Warszawska Grupa Inwestycyjna, the Warsaw brokerage whose collapse in 2006 remains the mother of Polish financial scandals, mailed its clients a monthly called Inwestor on glossy paper, bought stands at investment fairs, and seated a former head of the national statistics office on its supervisory board; one of the victims testified later that “the firm invested heavily in marketing,” and the closing speech, twenty years on, put it in a sentence: the clients’ trust had been not naïve but engineered (WGI DM: Guilty, After Twenty Years). The glossy monthly and the Juventus sleeve are the same product in different packaging: institutional visibility in place of analysis.

The mechanism had three audiences. The first was customers: in the criminal complaints I file on their behalf, the Juventus and Raków sponsorships recur as one of the most frequently cited reasons for trust; people paid into Zonda because an exchange that can afford Serie A cannot vanish. The second was the press, which reprinted releases about “the leader of the region” and “one of the largest regulated exchanges in Europe.” The third was the prosecution. When the Regional Prosecutor’s Office in Katowice discontinued, on April 29, 2024, investigation 2003-1.Ds.17.2024 into suspected misappropriation and fraud against customers, attributing the blocked withdrawals to anti-money-laundering procedures, its reasoning noted, among other things, that Zonda “still operates” and sponsors Juventus. The sleeve, bought three months earlier for 1.2 million euros of deposits, had become a law-enforcement argument that the deposits were safe. It is hard to imagine a cleaner example of laundering: customers’ money went in as a sponsorship fee and came out as credibility, which was then accepted as evidence.

The contracts of 2023 and 2024 were concluded, by the trustee’s account, after access to the cold wallet had already been lost. If that account is right, the sponsorship was not the marketing of a growing firm but the cost of keeping deposits flowing in, out of which earlier customers were paid; the counter of deposit vaults shows that the record month for new customers, March, 2024, came six weeks after the Juventus partnership was announced. That is correlation, not proof. But it is a correlation someone paid for. As late as April 5, 2026, the chief executive was declaring the exchange a “stable, solvent and secure entity” with more than full cover; on April 16th he admitted that the key to 4,500 bitcoin was held by the missing founder. The jerseys hung on the fans through both statements.

FTX, Terra, Voyager, Binance: How It Ends Elsewhere

Zonda did not invent this mechanism; it copied it at a smaller scale. In 2021, FTX bought the name of the Miami Heat’s arena for a hundred and thirty-five million dollars over nineteen years, patches on the sleeves of Major League Baseball umpires, space on Mercedes’s Formula One cars, and the faces of Tom Brady, Steph Curry, and Larry David in a Super Bowl commercial. After the collapse, the bankruptcy court terminated the agreement with Miami-Dade County effective December 31, 2022; the county kept the roughly twenty million dollars already paid and filed a claim of 16.5 million for early termination. The customers’ class action against the promoters went, in May, 2025, the way most such actions go: a federal judge in Florida dismissed twelve of fourteen counts against Brady, Bündchen, Curry, Ohtani, Osaka, David, and the Golden State Warriors, without prejudice and with leave to amend, leaving two claims under the Florida and Oklahoma securities statutes standing; he found that the plaintiffs had not shown the promoters knew of the fraud, though they may have been “uninformed, negligent, or even reckless.” Shaquille O’Neal, who for months could not be served, agreed to a settlement of 1.8 million dollars, more than he had been paid to promote.

Terra paid the Washington Nationals 38.15 million dollars up front, in February, 2022, for five years; three months later its stablecoin lost its peg, and its founder later drew fifteen years in prison. In July, 2026, the Terra logo was still on the outfield wall, because the club considered itself “contractually obligated to fulfill the terms” and to this day advertises a nonexistent company rather than return the money. Voyager Digital, promoted by Mark Cuban and the Dallas Mavericks, failed in 2022; the suit against Cuban was dismissed on December 30, 2025, for want of jurisdiction, without any ruling on whether the advertising was misleading, after Gronkowski, Oladipo, and Cassill had settled for a combined 2.4 million; in June, 2026, the plaintiffs appealed. Cristiano Ronaldo, who launched the “CR7” NFT collection on Binance and was sued for a billion dollars in November, 2023, failed to have the suit dismissed, but the case stalled in arbitration, and Ronaldo released further collections. Kim Kardashian paid the S.E.C. 1.26 million dollars in 2022, not for recommending a token but for failing to disclose the two hundred and fifty thousand she was paid to do it.

The pattern repeats in each of these cases. Clubs and arenas keep the money, because the contracts are written so that they keep it. Promoters pay rarely and little, unless it can be shown that they knew, or that they forgot to disclose the fee. Customers get the remainder, years later, after costs.

Liability for Advertising: Who Pays When the Sponsor Collapses

The law answers the question of a promoter’s liability everywhere in a similar way and everywhere reluctantly. In Poland, the civil route runs through Article 415 of the Civil Code, the advertiser’s own fault, including negligence: it is enough to show that with due care he should have known what he was advertising, and that damage followed. The second route is Article 422, aiding and knowingly profiting from another’s wrong, where the case law requires awareness that one is helping to cause damage, so carelessness alone will not do. The third is the statute on unfair commercial practices, which gives the consumer claims of his own and shifts to the trader the burden of proving that the practice was not misleading, and which gives the Office of Competition and Consumer Protection the power to fine; it has fined influencers for hidden advertising, and I know of no decision concerning a sports club advertising financial services. The criminal route, Article 286 of the Penal Code, requires of the perpetrator direct, purposive intent, and of an accessory under Article 18 § 3 at least conditional intent, that is, accepting that one is facilitating a fraud. For a club that sold space on a shirt and nothing more, neither can be derived from the sale of space itself. For a body that distributes a token, takes a share of the revenue from its sale, and passes the issuer its fans’ data, the road is shorter, because the role ceases to be that of a spokesman. And when the president of such a body, according to prosecutors, receives a watch from the exchange’s chief executive and recovers a hundred per cent of his capital in the days when everyone else’s withdrawals are blocked, that is no longer advertising but the charge under Articles 230 and 302 that Radosław P. heard on August 27th. That is the difference between the Juventus contract and the Olympic committee’s: the trustee is asking about the first, and prosecutors are already asking about the circumstances of the second.

American courts showed in 2025 where the line runs. In the Bored Ape Yacht Club case, about which I wrote in the Warsaw financial daily Parkiet (Bored Apes and Broken Tests: How Courts Let NFT Promoters Off Easy), a court in California dismissed the action against the issuer and the celebrities despite a drop in the tokens’ value of more than ninety per cent, applying the whole of the Howey test but with promotional language as a material part of it: the promoters had spoken of “membership” and “community” and avoided the words “investment” and “profit.” Words carry weight. zondacrypto’s communications spoke of “the largest regulated exchange in Europe,” of a licence, of safety; the exchange itself did not promise returns, it promised that the money was there. Returns were promised by the ZND platform, which Pogoń Szczecin, in its partnership announcement, described as a place for “high-interest deposits”; whoever copied that sentence into a club’s release copied a promise. That brings their content closer to statements of fact, which can be verified, and farther from the marketing hyperbole courts do not punish. Whoever repeated those statements as his own, in a club’s release or an ambassador’s post, repeated a statement of fact.

Regulators move faster than courts. Since October, 2023, Britain’s Financial Conduct Authority has treated crypto-asset advertising aimed at British consumers like the advertising of financial instruments: a risk warning, a ban on sign-up bonuses, a twenty-four-hour cooling-off period for new customers, and liability for foreign firms as well; as early as 2021 it warned football clubs that a club which itself urges fans to use an unauthorised sponsor’s services may be communicating an unlawful financial promotion. Spain’s C.N.M.V. required, from February, 2022, notification of mass campaigns and a warning in advertisements that crypto-assets are unregulated and that the whole investment can be lost, a regime that began with a Binance ad featuring Andrés Iniesta; that circular was repealed in December, 2024, when MiCA took its place. Italy has the O.A.M. register the Juventus contract invokes. The European Union’s MiCA regulation requires service providers’ marketing communications to be fair, clear, and not misleading. None of these regimes is concerned with a logo on a shirt as such; each of them can reach a club that, in its own release, urges fans to register with a bonus code, because then it is the club that communicates the promotion. In Poland, throughout the sponsorship years, Zonda operated on an Estonian licence, with no Polish supervisor and no rules on crypto advertising beyond the general law on unfair practices, and it filled that gap with jerseys.

Should that change? The Premier League has banned gambling sponsors from the front of shirts from the 2026-27 season, by self-regulation, on the reasoning that visibility in sport shapes behaviour the law is slow to govern. For financial services whose quality a fan cannot check, the argument is the same and the consequence of collapse larger: a bookmaker takes the stake, an exchange takes the savings. The minimum standard that could be introduced without a statute is due diligence by the club toward a financial sponsor: an entitlement to serve customers in the fans’ country, in the European Union a MiCA authorisation with a passport, not a mere registration in the country of incorporation; proof of reserves or an audit as a condition of the contract; a right to terminate when the sponsor stops paying its customers, not only when it stops paying the club. Juventus had in its contract everything that protected Juventus. Nothing stopped it from having that as well.

What This Means for Creditors

Three things. First, the estate has claims wherever the contracts provide for proportional refunds: Article 11.4 of the Juventus agreement is such a provision, and the Italian, Monégasque, and Swiss contracts may contain similar ones; the trustee should read them before the filing deadline, not after. Second, some of the clubs will come to the estate as creditors for unpaid instalments, because they broke their contracts when the money stopped arriving, and they will compete with customers for the same estate, in which the trustee has so far confirmed a hundred and sixty-seven thousand euros; the creditors’ committee has the right to know how much sponsorship was paid after the date from which, by the company’s own sheets, the deposits were not covered, because that is where the question of avoidance begins, and Estonian law gives the trustee three years from the bankruptcy order for such actions, a separate clock from the filing deadline. Third, for the injured parties who cite sponsorship as their reason for trust: that fact has evidentiary value for the investigation, because it shows what the money was for and what effect it was meant to produce, and it is worth recording in the complaint, with the date and the place where one saw the jersey.

In the WGI case, twenty years passed between the first complaint and the convictions, and the victims are waiting still (WGI DM: Guilty, After Twenty Years); they, too, trusted the institutions that surrounded the fraud, because that is what those institutions were hired for.

Customers’ money went on jerseys. Some of the clubs will come for the rest. And the fan who trusted the logo is left with what a fan is always left with after a lost season: a memory and a bill.

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.