The Same Trick Twice
How Poland’s financial system spent twenty years perfecting the art of never learning from its mistakes
In the spring of 2006, a retired woman from Katowice—a coal city in southern Poland—took a train to Warsaw to testify in a case involving a brokerage firm that had spent years mailing her monthly account statements on heavy cream-colored stock. The statements confirmed the value of an investment account that, as it turned out, did not exist. She asked the court to reimburse her for the train ticket. Twenty years later, the case is still being tried. The woman, if she is still alive, has not recovered her money.
In the spring of 2026, clients of a cryptocurrency exchange called ZondaCrypto began arriving at law firms across Poland wearing the same expression—the particular disorientation of people who had placed their trust in a system engineered, from the ground up, to be trusted. The exchange’s C.E.O. assured them that their funds were secured by a dormant Bitcoin wallet. The wallet, much like the brokerage’s account statements, turned out to be a work of the imagination.
Between these two events, an entire generation passed. The technology changed, the vocabulary changed, the regulatory architecture was rebuilt and renamed and rebuilt again. The trick—the precise, specific, structurally identical trick—did not change at all.
The Trust Factory
Every financial fraud begins with the same raw material. Not money—trust. Money arrives only after trust has been manufactured at industrial scale.
How WGI Built Its Image
WGI Dom Maklerski—a Warsaw-based brokerage at the center of what became one of Poland’s longest-running financial-crime trials—published a glossy monthly magazine called Inwestor. It was enclosed with each client’s account correspondence and featured interviews with the board, market analyses, and strategy updates. One of the victims testified in court: “The company invested heavily in marketing. A lot of specialists appeared in the media, gave recommendations. I saw the firm at an investment fair one year.” Another recalled: “Members of the supervisory board made various presentations, organized trainings. I had confidence to invest.”
This was not naïve trust. It was engineered—built systematically, with professional tools, by people who knew there was nothing behind the façade. The company sent clients monthly “Account Value Statements” with a footnote instructing them to report any discrepancies “by telephone within seven days.” A client who stayed silent had every reason to believe the balance was real. The firm’s general director wrote to a client, in so many words: “These reports reflect the actual state of your investment accounts.” Two months before the collapse, another director informed clients that the monthly report was “the sole document confirming the state of your individual investment account.” Nobody mentioned “projections” then—because nobody needed that particular lie yet.
The factory ran like clockwork. Until it didn’t.
How ZondaCrypto Bought Poland
Twenty years on, the trust factory looks different. It is larger, louder, and more expensive. But it manufactures the same product.
Before the exchange, there was the founder. In 2018, Forbes Poland described Sylwester Suszek, the thirty-one-year-old creator of the BitBay exchange—ZondaCrypto’s predecessor—as “living proof that you can build a multimillion fortune on virtual currencies practically overnight.” The same article was later amended with an editorial note: “In June 2020, Suszek became the subject of an investigative report revealing that his former business partner had been sentenced to eight years for involvement in a murder.” Two years after Suszek’s disappearance, an acquaintance was still telling Polish television: “It’s hard for me to say what kind of fortune he amassed, but I think the term billionaire is probably accurate here. I’m convinced he’d be in the top ten richest Poles.” His sister spoke of his plan to build “Suszek Tower” in Katowice: “It was supposed to be the cherry on top of his professional career.”
This is how you build a legend. Then you convert it into a campaign.
In August, 2024, ZondaCrypto launched “Tales from Crypto”—the first full-scale 360-degree campaign promoting a cryptocurrency exchange ever mounted in Poland. The spots featured Wojciech Szczęsny, Poland’s national-team goalkeeper, alongside the film stars Janusz Chabior and Borys Szyc. The C.E.O., Przemysław Kral, announced: “We are breaking with outdated myths and preposterous stories built on stereotypes about cryptocurrency investing. We invite you to our free ZondaCrypto Academy—the future of finance is within arm’s reach.” August, 2024, was the precise month in which the exchange’s Bitcoin hot wallet held 55.7 BTC—its last remotely healthy level. From that point, it declined by 99.7 per cent. Sixty per cent of the company’s available cash was going to marketing.
But the celebrity campaign was merely the television spot. The real trust infrastructure ran deeper.
ZondaCrypto purchased a dedicated subdomain—akademiakrypto.spidersweb.pl—on one of Poland’s largest technology publications, Spider’s Web, and used it as a branded content hub dressed up as impartial educational material. “Why invest in cryptocurrency?” “How to safely buy Bitcoin on ZondaCrypto?” Sponsored content, inadequately marked as advertising, generated organic search traffic as though it were independent journalism. The same Spider’s Web published, in December, 2025, a sympathetic article relaying Kral’s talking points—in the same week that clients began reporting that they could not withdraw their funds.
In October, 2025, the president of Poland’s Olympic Committee, Radosław Piesiewicz, announced in Monaco that ZondaCrypto had become the committee’s general sponsor. “Thanks to ZondaCrypto, the Polish Olympic Committee was able to send our athletes to the Winter Games in Milan,” he said. “Good feng shui—we came to terms in a single day.” Five days earlier, Piesiewicz had written to Poland’s Internal Security Agency asking about cryptocurrency-related risks. He did not wait for a reply. The agency’s spokesman later commented: “The president of the Polish Olympic Committee is lying and manipulating.”
Beyond Poland, ZondaCrypto sponsored four Serie A clubs—Atalanta, Bologna, Parma, and Juventus. The deals were paid in ZND tokens, now trading at $0.0014—a decline of 98.7 per cent from their peak.
And in May, 2025—in an interview conducted at the Top Marques luxury auto show in Monaco, where ZondaCrypto was the title sponsor—Kral announced his vision: “I’d like the market capitalization of our token to break through a billion dollars within three years.” He informed Monaco Life that ZondaCrypto was “one of Europe’s longest-operating and most regulated crypto exchanges.” In July, 2025, on Polish state-adjacent television, he delivered a sentence that deserves its own frame: “If they weren’t obstructing things in Poland, I think the entrepreneurial energy of Poles would have taken us to Mars by now.”
At the time, the annual report of BB Trade Estonia OÜ—the Estonian entity through which ZondaCrypto actually operated, signed by Kral—disclosed, in Estonian, that client funds had been lent out: seventy-five million euros, unsecured. Three months earlier, the Bitcoin hot wallet had shrunk to 0.18 BTC.
A glossy monthly magazine on cream stock. A crypto academy on a tech publication’s subdomain. An Olympic sponsorship announced in Monaco. A campaign starring the national goalkeeper. The aesthetic is different. The mechanism is the same: a professional image deployed as a substitute for professional management.
The Universal Playbook
None of this is uniquely Polish. The playbook has been running, in various national costumes, for over a century. What is astonishing is not that it works but that it works on the same kinds of people, in the same way, for the same psychological reasons, every single time.
In 1920, Charles Ponzi marketed his scheme as a brilliant arbitrage on international postal reply coupons. Newspapers amplified the “rags-to-riches financial wizard” narrative. Thirty thousand investors in eight months. The phrase “exchange-rate arbitrage on postal coupons” was technical enough to silence any journalist who did not want to look stupid by asking a follow-up question. This is the psychological key: jargon does not serve to inform—it serves to manufacture the fear of being the one who doesn’t understand.
In Haiti, around 2001, Ponzi operations calling themselves “cooperatives” advertised on radio and television, used popular musicians as ambassadors, and implied government endorsement. Losses—two hundred and forty million dollars—equalled roughly sixty per cent of the national government budget. People believed they were depositing into a development institution, because a development institution is exactly what it looked like: it had an office, it had an ad campaign, it had the face of a musician from television.
Bernie Madoff’s fund was sold by private banks as the conservative option—”can’t go wrong.” His “split-strike conversion” strategy on blue-chip stocks sounded every bit as scientific as “proof of reserves” and “cold wallet disconnected from the network” do today. Nobody asked the next question, because asking would have meant admitting you didn’t understand—and in the company of people investing millions, admitting incomprehension is socially costlier than losing money. Madoff knew this. Kral knew this. Maciej S. knew this.
Allen Stanford took the most boring product in finance—a certificate of deposit—and turned it into a cross-border pyramid sold in over a hundred countries as “secure offshore diversification.” Sports sponsorships, glossy brochures, thirty thousand investors, a hundred-and-ten-year sentence. Lou Pearlman, the impresario behind *NSYNC and the Backstreet Boys, used his celebrity aura to sell bogus “insured” investment programs. People did not analyze the prospectus—they analyzed the face. They knew Pearlman’s face from MTV. They knew Szczęsny’s face from the World Cup. The mechanism is identical: recognition substitutes for credibility.
The scheme has four elements, and none of them has changed in a hundred years.
The theatre of respectability. Ponzi had the newspapers. Madoff had the private banks. Stanford had cricket. ZondaCrypto had the Polish Olympic Committee, four Serie A clubs, and a luxury-auto salon in Monaco. WGI had a monthly magazine called The Investor and a booth at investment fairs. The function is always the same: institutional visibility deployed as a substitute for analysis.
Jargon as barrier. “Postal arbitrage.” “Split-strike conversion.” “Proof of reserves.” “Cold wallet.” Each of these phrases operates identically—it does not explain; it closes the discussion. Whoever asks the next question is admitting ignorance. And whoever admits ignorance does not belong in the room where everyone has already invested.
Risk wrapped in safety. Ponzi’s arbitrage was “ingenious.” Madoff’s fund was “conservative.” Stanford’s C.D.s were “secure diversification.” Haiti’s pyramids were “cooperatives.” WGI’s reports reflected the “actual state of accounts.” ZondaCrypto was “stable, solvent, and secure.” The labels borrow the vocabulary of the dullest products in finance and drape it over the most dangerous.
The regulatory halo. In Haiti, the absence of repression implied state approval. With Madoff, decades of S.E.C. registration created an aura of having been vetted. With ZondaCrypto, an Estonian VASP license and the phrase “one of Europe’s longest-operating and most regulated crypto exchanges” did the same work. People do not read the license. They read the fact that a license exists.
The trick does not require genius. It requires only a familiarity with one property of human psychology: that the fear of being excluded from a group that has already invested is stronger than the fear of losing money. This is the engine of every pyramid—from Ponzi in 1920, through Madoff in 2008, to ZondaCrypto in 2026. And it is the reason the next pyramid will work, too.
The Regulator in the Building
WGI: The Inspectors Who Sat and Did Not See
Of all the parallels between these two cases, the most disquieting concerns not the fraudsters but the regulators—the people whose job it was to look.
The defendant Maciej S. testified that, from the day WGI launched its brokerage operations to the day its license was revoked, the company went without regulatory inspection for perhaps three or four months total. Poland’s securities commission—then called KPWiG—had inspectors physically stationed in WGI’s offices for months on end, working there daily, for hours at a stretch. They saw the monthly statements mailed to clients. They had access to the books. They watched the staff at their desks.
And they missed the central fact: the company maintained two parallel valuation systems. In the Symfonia accounting system—the one the inspectors reviewed—bonds were recorded at their face value of ten złoty apiece. In the MAP Groszyk system—the one from which client statements were generated—those same bonds were valued to include undocumented, methodologically baseless “future gains.” The gap between these two numbers was the entire fraud. The regulators sat in the building while it happened.
When KPWiG finally acted, in April, 2006, it did something worse than nothing. It revoked the brokerage license and then reported WGI to American authorities for money laundering—a charge based on a single delayed filing and, by all subsequent accounts, groundless. But it was enough for Wachovia Securities, WGI’s American custodian, to freeze the firm’s assets, downgrade its client status, and force the liquidation of its investment portfolio at a twenty-to-thirty-per-cent loss. The regulator that had failed to detect the fraud for a year delivered the final blow to the assets it was supposed to protect.
ZondaCrypto: Estonia Stamps, Poland Vetoes, Nobody Watches
Estonia granted a Virtual Asset Service Provider license to an entity with near-zero headcount, total revenue dependency on a single counterparty, and a beneficial owner whose prior corporate history was, to put it gently, colorful. Suszek himself, describing his Estonian venture, told the Polish press something remarkable: “I educated law enforcement.” The Estonian license—the same one Kral later cited as proof of institutional rigor—was one of fourteen hundred and forty-seven VASP licenses issued in one-to-two-week cycles during a period when seventy-five per cent of licensees had nominee boards and no actual local operations.
In September, 2022, Kral assured an interviewer: “We are a licensed and audited financial institution that maintains transparency and ensures a high level of security for our users. Funds never become the property of the exchange.” That same year, the auditor Crowe DNW OÜ declined to issue any opinion at all on the financial statements of BB Trade Estonia OÜ—the most serious warning an auditor can deliver. It could not determine whether the figures in the report were true. The report itself, in Estonian, contained a sentence that would have stopped a reader cold, had anyone been reading: “The company has the right to use funds held in client accounts. The company has exercised this right.” The amount: 26.2 million euros. The exchange’s own terms of service, simultaneously, stated in English: “zondacrypto does not use Customer funds… does not invest them, does not lend them.”
Poland’s own crypto-asset legislation—the CASP bill—was vetoed twice, in December, 2025, and February, 2026, creating a jurisdictional void in which ZondaCrypto operated effectively unsupervised. Criminal proceedings have been running since 2022. The strategic pivot to a purely criminal track came in April, 2026—four years in.
The conclusion is structural. Financial regulators are designed to monitor compliance with existing rules. They are not designed to detect schemes specifically architected to fall between regulatory categories. WGI was a brokerage pretending to be a fund. ZondaCrypto was an exchange pretending to be a custodian. In both cases, the entity chose its legal form not for operational reasons but for regulatory ones—and the system, built to check boxes rather than to think, checked the boxes and moved on.
The Escape Abroad
The “Investment Prosthesis”
The WGI defendants spent many hours in court explaining that the brokerage “could not” invest client funds directly with Wachovia Securities in the United States—and that this was why their lawyers designed a workaround involving a special-purpose vehicle called WGI Consulting. The explanation is technically accurate and entirely false as to intent.
Had WGI genuinely wanted nothing more than to invest in Wachovia, the solution was within arm’s reach: a TFI license—the Polish equivalent of a registered investment-fund company—would have permitted exactly that, legally and under supervision. The defendants themselves admitted that they had discussed the TFI route, that preparations were advanced, that a board for the planned fund had actually been appointed. But a TFI would have meant something else: fund-level oversight, disclosure obligations to participants, mandatory audits, transparent valuations. In other words, clients would have learned how much they actually had in their accounts. And that was precisely what the defendants could not afford—because the answer was: far less than the reports suggested.
Instead of the TFI, they chose the “investment prosthesis”—a term the defendant Maciej S. coined himself at trial. A prosthesis, by definition, replaces something missing or broken. What was missing was not a vehicle for investing abroad—what was missing was a mechanism for concealing what had actually happened to those investments. WGI Consulting—a company with a fictitious “marketing and publishing” business profile, whose chief accountant could not explain in court what the marketing activity consisted of—existed so that between the client and the truth about his money there would stand an additional layer: another entity, another jurisdiction, another set of books in which the same bonds could carry a different value than in the system visible to the regulator.
The function of the flight abroad was not investment. The function of the flight abroad was concealment.
BB Trade Estonia and Divisio Holding AG
Twenty years later, ZondaCrypto’s client funds flow from a Polish bank account to BB Trade Estonia OÜ and onward through Divisio Holding AG in Zug, Switzerland. Suszek relocated to Estonia after Poland’s Financial Supervision Authority flagged BitBay and referred the matter to prosecutors. At the time, forty million złoty in client deposits vanished from the Polish entity’s balance sheet, replaced by a hundred and two million in unspecified “receivables from foreign entities”—unaudited, unexplained. The company’s statement upon being flagged read: “We apply procedures and processes that guarantee our operations comply with the law. Our clients’ funds are safe.”
When BitBay rebranded as Zonda in March, 2022, the press release declared: “The new visual identity marks a new chapter. The new name reflects our values: transparency, innovation, and security. Zonda means wind. A wind of change.” Suszek disappeared days after the rebrand—on March 10, 2022—taking with him the only key to a wallet holding forty-five hundred Bitcoin.
For four years, neither the management nor the communications team informed clients that the wallet containing their potential assets was effectively inaccessible. On April 5, 2026, Kral issued a statement: “ZondaCrypto is a stable, solvent, and secure entity. We maintain full coverage—exceeding one hundred per cent—of all obligations to our users.” Ten days later, he publicly acknowledged that the keys to those forty-five hundred Bitcoin were in the possession of a man who had been missing for four years.
The labels changed. The distance between a client’s deposit and the place where it actually lands has not shortened by a single kilometre.
Too Clever for Your Rules
Buried in the WGI trial record is a sentence that ought to be engraved above the entrance to every financial regulator’s office in Europe. Bohdan Wyżnikiewicz—a former president of Poland’s Central Statistical Office, a man not given to overstatement—served on WGI’s supervisory board. He testified that the company’s management “maintained that it was an innovative institution whose operations were not understood by the inspectors from KPWiG.”
The inspectors don’t understand us. Our product is too novel. Your regulations were written for a different era.
This is not a defense. It is a tell. Every financial fraud built on structural complexity eventually produces this sentence, because the sentence is load-bearing: it holds the scheme upright when questions get too pointed. If the inspectors cannot understand the product, they cannot distinguish genuine innovation from deliberate obfuscation—and the fraudster knows this and builds accordingly.
Kral, in May, 2025, interviewed amid the supercars of Monaco: “For us, MiCA is no revolution. We already operate under a license issued in Estonia, and the requirements there are even stricter than what MiCA introduces.” On the Polish regulator that had once pursued his predecessor: “Nobody ever said ‘sorry,’ and we spent half a million just explaining that we weren’t crooks.”
And in December, 2025, when the first withdrawal freezes hit and the first pointed questions arrived, Kral organized a live session on a Polish tech blog and declared: “We are clean as a whistle.” Of clients and journalists raising concerns: “Useful idiots and dimwits who repeat unverified information.” Of analysts examining publicly available data: “I recommend these forgers familiarize themselves with VAT rates. And to all such trolls I say: if you’re going to use forgers, at least use ones who have half a brain.”
One of the WGI victims testified at trial: “Every time, they assured me that it was KPWiG that was misleading their clients, and that the figures were exactly as stated in the reports.” The defendants did not merely lie in the reports—they actively blamed the regulator for telling the truth.
Kral, on the same live stream, explaining to clients why they could not withdraw their money: “It’s an effect of anti-money-laundering regulations.” The money was not missing because it was gone—it was missing because of compliance. Not the exchange’s fault—the rules’ fault.
It is the same double manipulation, unchanged in twenty years: the lie in the report and the lie about who’s lying.
Ghost Concepts
Every fraud needs a word—a term technical enough to discourage follow-up questions and vague enough to mean whatever the moment requires. At WGI, that word was prognozowane zyski: “projected gains.” At ZondaCrypto, it is “dormant wallet” and “cold storage.”
In the WGI trial, the brokerage’s chief accountant testified that she had never heard of “projected gains.” The investment director said he did not understand the question. Court-appointed experts found no algorithm, no model, no documentation that would support such a valuation. The term materialized exclusively in the courtroom, in the mouths of the defendants.
The “dormant Bitcoin wallet” is the twenty-twenties equivalent. On April 5, 2026, Kral wrote: “Client funds are stored, in accordance with the highest market standards, in cold wallets completely disconnected from the network.” Asked for operational data, he responded: “We will not submit to media pressure to publish sensitive operational data.” Clients unable to access their money were told: “Withdrawals are being processed, but we are experiencing a technical issue and handling them manually.” Ten days later, the world learned that the keys to the wallet belonged to a man who had vanished four years earlier. The cold wallet existed—but it was about as accessible as a safe at the bottom of the ocean.
You cannot project gains from an empty field. You cannot withdraw Bitcoin from a wallet without a key. Ghost concepts work as long as no one checks what’s behind them. By the time someone does, it is too late.
Why Nothing Changes
Criminal proceedings against WGI have been running for nearly two decades. The ZondaCrypto prosecution has been under way since 2022; the estimated damages now stand at a minimum of 350 million złoty. If it follows the WGI trajectory—and there is no structural reason it should not—a verdict may arrive around 2042.
Prime Minister Donald Tusk said at a cabinet meeting: “The ZondaCrypto affair stank from the very beginning.” It stank—and yet, during that same beginning, the exchange managed to become the general sponsor of Poland’s Olympic Committee, mount a celebrity ad campaign, build a branded-content subdomain on the country’s largest tech publication, sponsor four Serie A clubs, and give interviews at a luxury-car salon in Monaco.
The most fascinating part of the cycle is the epilogue—the moment when the very same newsrooms that cashed ZondaCrypto’s advertising budgets (funded, as the Estonian filings now make clear, by client deposits) discover a sudden vocation for investigative journalism. The victims, it transpires, were naïve. Greedy. Insufficiently diligent. They ought to have—this is said in earnest—read the issuer’s financial statements. Statements prepared in Estonian, by an entity whose auditor declined to render an opinion, containing a footnote disclosing that the company had “exercised its right to use funds held in client accounts.” A footnote missed by the Estonian regulator, by the Polish regulator, and by every outlet that had sold subdomain space in exchange for writing about “transparency and security”—but which a retiree in Kraków was, apparently, expected to locate, translate, and act upon before depositing money into an account advertised by the national goalkeeper, two movie stars, and the Polish Olympic team. This is not a standard of diligence. It is a defense mechanism deployed by a system that failed at every level and is now casting about for the safest available target. The safest target is always the one who will not be purchasing a full-page ad tomorrow.
An IBRiS poll for Rzeczpospolita, published in April, 2026, confirms that the mechanism works: more than eighty-two per cent of Poles oppose any form of state assistance for ZondaCrypto clients. Fifty-eight point seven per cent say “investors should be aware of the risk.” The result is uniform across all age groups, political affiliations, and education levels. Psychologists have a name for this: belief in a just world—the deep need to believe that outcomes are commensurate with behavior. When confronted with the spectacle of an innocent person defrauded by a professionally constructed scheme, the mind performs a defensive maneuver: the victim must have done something to deserve this, because if they did not, then I—who behave similarly—am equally at risk. If the victim is guilty, I am safe. The poll does not measure public judgment. It measures public self-protection.
The FINRA Foundation study—the most comprehensive empirical research on victim blaming in financial fraud—documents the same paradox: a third of Americans agree that “if you fall victim to financial fraud, a lot of that is on you.” Simultaneously, eighty-five per cent agree that “fraud can happen to anyone.” These two beliefs—blaming the victim and acknowledging universal vulnerability—coexist because they serve different functions: one protects the ego, the other describes reality. The trouble is that only the first one shapes policy—and determines whether anyone will ever say “sorry” to the retired woman from Katowice.
There is one more layer, which media-communication research documents with precision: headlines focused on the victim—”duped,” “naïve,” “bilked”—statistically increase victim blaming. Headlines focused on the perpetrator decrease it. Media organizations that took money from ZondaCrypto have a structural incentive to frame the story as one of client naïveté rather than advertiser fraud. Because the second framing leads to a question about their own accountability.
The pattern persists because every element of the system has a rational reason not to interrupt it. Regulators check compliance with the rules that exist, not the rules that should. Prosecutors build cases on evidence secured by agencies that do not always have the expertise to secure it. Courts proceed at the speed of procedural law, which is the speed of continental drift. Media sell subdomains. Athletes and actors smile into the camera. And clients—the retired woman from Katowice, the young professional in Kraków who put his savings into crypto—trust the institutions surrounding the fraud, because that is precisely what trust infrastructure is designed to make them do.
The closing argument in the WGI case contains a sentence that serves, inadvertently, as an epitaph for twenty years of Polish financial regulation:
The defendants built a machine that manufactured trust and consumed savings.
Every component—the defective IT system (and when it had safeguards, they were routed around in Excel), the “investment prosthesis” with its fictitious business profile, the statements on cream-colored paper—worked in concert, playing a single note: so the client would deposit and wait, deposit and wait, until the day arrived when there was nothing left to wait for.
The note has not changed. The instrument has. Instead of cream-stock statements, there is a subdomain on Spider’s Web. Instead of a monthly magazine called The Investor, there is a campaign starring the goalkeeper. Instead of an “investment prosthesis,” there is an Estonian license and a Swiss holding. Instead of “projected gains,” there is a dormant wallet.
That is the whole of the lesson. It is the one we keep refusing to learn.
The last word belongs to Kral. In the employment-termination letters he sent to his staff the week the company shut down, the stated reason for dismissal was: “complete liquidation of the employer.” The stable, solvent, and secure entity with more than a hundred per cent coverage of its obligations—completely liquidated. The machine that manufactured trust had, in the end, consumed itself.
Robert Nogacki – licensed legal counsel (radca prawny, WA-9026), Founder of Kancelaria Prawna Skarbiec.
There are lawyers who practice law. And there are those who deal with problems for which the law has no ready answer. For over twenty years, Kancelaria Skarbiec has worked at the intersection of tax law, corporate structures, and the deeply human reluctance to give the state more than the state is owed. We advise entrepreneurs from over a dozen countries – from those on the Forbes list to those whose bank account was just seized by the tax authority and who do not know what to do tomorrow morning.
One of the most frequently cited experts on tax law in Polish media – he writes for Rzeczpospolita, Dziennik Gazeta Prawna, and Parkiet not because it looks good on a résumé, but because certain things cannot be explained in a court filing and someone needs to say them out loud. Author of AI Decoding Satoshi Nakamoto: Artificial Intelligence on the Trail of Bitcoin’s Creator. Co-author of the award-winning book Bezpieczeństwo współczesnej firmy (Security of a Modern Company).
Kancelaria Skarbiec holds top positions in the tax law firm rankings of Dziennik Gazeta Prawna. Four-time winner of the European Medal, recipient of the title International Tax Planning Law Firm of the Year in Poland.
He specializes in tax disputes with fiscal authorities, international tax planning, crypto-asset regulation, and asset protection. Since 2006, he has led the WGI case – one of the longest-running criminal proceedings in the history of the Polish financial market – because there are things you do not leave half-done, even if they take two decades. He believes the law is too serious to be treated only seriously – and that the best legal advice is the kind that ensures the client never has to stand before a court.
