Zondacrypto – The Vanishing

Poland’s largest crypto exchange stopped paying out in April. In August an Estonian court declared its operator bankrupt, and Polish prosecutors began making arrests. A hundred and fifty years of financial history saw the first part coming. The second part is now a matter of deadlines and files.

By Robert Nogacki. Updated 6 September 2026. First published 9 April 2026.

On March 10, 2022, a man named Sylwester Suszek drove to a gas station in Czeladź, a small industrial city in the coal belt of southern Poland. He was meeting Marian W., a close associate whom prosecutors would later describe as the suspected head of a criminal organization involved in large-scale V.A.T. fraud. Suszek’s phone pinged the station at 3:08 P.M. After that, nothing. No calls, no messages, no further location data. Suszek had founded BitBay, Poland’s first and largest cryptocurrency exchange, in 2014. By the time he vanished, he had been pushed out of the company he created, his assets were being claimed by former associates, and the exchange had been rebranded, twice, in what his family describes as a hostile takeover dressed up as corporate restructuring. His sister has said publicly that she believes he is dead. She has also said that she receives threats.

Four and a half years later, the exchange that Suszek built, renamed Zondacrypto and registered in Estonia, is a bankrupt estate. On August 27, 2026, the Harju County Court in Tallinn declared BB Trade Estonia OÜ insolvent and appointed a trustee. In Katowice, the National Prosecutor’s Office has merged its investigation into the exchange with its four-year-old investigation into the founder’s disappearance, has secured more than a hundred million złoty toward future compensation, and, in the space of ten days at the turn of August and September, has arrested five people, among them the president of the Polish Olympic Committee, the country’s best-known retail trader, and a woman accused of removing the surveillance disk from the gas station where Suszek was last seen. On September 4th the Polish parliament failed, for the third time, to override a presidential veto of the law that would have given Poland a crypto regulator. And a deadline is running: creditors have two months from the official notice to lodge their claims with the trustee. According to the trustee’s communications, that period ends on October 27, 2026.

A note on this text

This article first appeared on April 9, 2026, two days after the exchange’s chief executive set April 12th as the date on which withdrawals would resume. It was our first legal analysis of the situation and one of the first texts to read the withdrawal freeze not as a technical problem but as a solvency signal. We have kept the April version in the public record: the Wayback Machine snapshot of April 20, 2026, together with the Polish original. We do not revise it retroactively. In this case what matters is who knew what, and when; we apply the same test to ourselves, including to what we got wrong.

What we wrote in April, and what became of it

1. The signal. In April we wrote that every institution in the surveyed cases that imposed withdrawal restrictions subsequently failed or required emergency intervention, and that Zondacrypto had been blocking withdrawals for weeks. What happened: the Estonian regulator partially suspended the exchange’s licence on May 18th, revoked it on June 29th, a court froze the company’s assets on July 27th, and declared bankruptcy on August 27th. From the first public freeze to the judicial finding of insolvency: four months and twenty days.
2. Proof of Reserves and the forty-five hundred Bitcoin. The C.E.O. declared reserves of more than forty-five hundred Bitcoin as of April 1st and declined to prove it. On April 16th we showed that the address he later named is one of the most famous dormant Bitcoin wallets in the world, with no demonstrated link to the company (The Ghost Wallet, A Wallet, a Decade, a Question). What happened: no proof has been produced to this day, and the trustee faces the alternative we described in July: either the wallet does not belong to the company, or it does and nobody can open it. For the estate the two outcomes are identical.
3. Terms of service against financial statements. On April 13th we described a seventy-five-million-euro loan made from customer crypto without collateral, and three years of auditors unable to confirm that customer assets existed (The Exchange That Lent Your Money). What happened: Poland’s consumer authority confirmed that a clause permitting the investment of customer funds sat in the terms until December 30, 2024; the 2024 accounts showed loan receivables of 93.6 million euros and a line item of 82.7 million euros described as liabilities arising from the use of customer funds; and the prosecutors are investigating the exchange for misleading customers about how their funds were held.
4. The criminal track first. On April 22nd, on Polish television, we advised against hasty civil suits, which a bankruptcy would suspend; against the illusion that the first to file would be the first paid; and for building the customer’s position as a victim in the criminal case. What happened: on the day Tallinn declared the bankruptcy, Poland’s Justice Minister announced that prosecutors already held more than a hundred million złoty in secured assets. The trustee received a title. The prosecutor already held a deposit.
5. The ZND token. On April 18th we called the exchange’s own token fresh air in a can (ZND Token). In July we showed, on public blockchain data, that between April 5th and 15th some ninety-nine million tokens left the exchange’s wallet for addresses attributed to an external exchange while customers at home were shown a price several times higher than anywhere else (How Customers Lost Their Money). What happened: in August prosecutors charged the Olympic Committee’s president with inducing the preferential satisfaction of selected creditors, which means the prosecution now formally holds that the company was facing insolvency in April, while it was still taking deposits (Money from Nothing).
6. What we got wrong. In April we listed a civil suit with an application for interim relief among the standard instruments; we withdrew that recommendation on April 22nd and do not repeat it. We wrote of July 1, 2026, the expiry date of legacy Estonian licences, as the closing of a window; the licence was revoked earlier, on June 29th, and the window was closed not by a date but by the company itself, which abandoned its office and its management. And in April we underestimated how quickly the criminal investigation would become the place where the fate of customers’ money is decided. We named the direction correctly and estimated the speed too cautiously.

The C.E.O. said everything was fine

The numbers, when they surfaced, had the quality of a detonation. On April 5th and 6th, 2026, two of Poland’s most widely read news outlets, money.pl and Wirtualna Polska, published an analysis by Recoveris, a crypto-recovery firm, showing that Zondacrypto’s operational Bitcoin reserves, the so-called hot wallets, had collapsed from an average monthly balance of roughly fifty-five Bitcoin to 0.086 of a single coin: a decline of 99.7 per cent. Separately, Recoveris identified transfers of more than seventy-six million złoty from Zondacrypto wallets to another exchange. For weeks, users had been reporting frozen withdrawals; some described payouts arriving in installments. Several Polish sports teams sponsored by the exchange, which served as the principal sponsor of the Polish Olympic Committee, disclosed that they had not been paid in months.

Przemysław Kral, the exchange’s C.E.O., a lawyer who had been granted power of attorney over Suszek’s assets before the founder’s disappearance, responded overnight on April 6th. He called the analysis a “fundamental analytical error,” declared reserves of more than forty-five hundred Bitcoin, attributed the delays to a security upgrade requiring manual verification, and set April 12th as the date for normal service to resume. What he did not do was prove it. He declined to publish a Proof of Reserves, the cryptographic audit by which an exchange demonstrates, verifiably and publicly, that it controls the assets it claims to hold. On April 22nd he issued a farewell statement dated in Monaco; the company terminated its employees’ contracts, and the website went dark within days. His whereabouts have since been reported, variously, as Israel, South Africa, Botswana and the Persian Gulf. A person cannot be in five places at once. Information can. Since May he has been represented by Roman Giertych, one of Poland’s best-known defence lawyers, who disclosed the engagement on August 25th and announced that his client had placed “a vast fortune” at the disposal of the prosecutors. Polish media report that Kral has been cooperating as a so-called small crown witness. The prosecutors have confirmed a “significant breakthrough” and declined to confirm the status (Kral’s “Vast Fortune,” Inventoried).

The pattern

Across more than a hundred and fifty years of financial history, from the Gilded Age banking panics of the eighteen-seventies to the crypto collapses of 2022 through 2026, liquidity crises have served as the single most dependable early warning of catastrophic institutional failure. A liquidity crisis occurs when a financial institution runs out of cash before it runs out of assets. Bear Stearns was technically solvent hours before it ceased to exist as an independent firm; its liquidity pool dropped by sixteen billion dollars in four days. Mt. Gox, the first major exchange to fail, bled coins from its hot wallets for nearly three years before users noticed; the first visible sign was withdrawal delays. Voyager Digital cut its withdrawal limit a week before bankruptcy. Celsius froze withdrawals a month before filing. FTX had two days. BlockFills, a Chicago liquidity provider, suspended withdrawals in February 2026 in the same sequence. Zondacrypto had been blocking withdrawals for weeks when we first wrote this; it took four months and twenty days to reach a court order. The pattern held. The pattern also says nothing about recovery, and that is where the second half of this text begins.

The company’s own filings supplied the arithmetic. At the end of 2024, liabilities to customers stood at 722.4 million euros against 9.7 million euros of cash and 35 million euros of equity. Loans to related parties had grown from 12.3 million to 93.6 million euros in a single year, including a seventy-five-million-euro loan denominated in cryptocurrency, unsecured, to a borrower the accounts do not name. Commission revenue had fallen from 23.8 million euros in 2021 to 6.1 million in 2024, and the year’s net profit exceeded the year’s entire revenue, an achievement built on the fair-value accounting of the exchange’s own token. The auditors declined to issue an opinion for 2021, qualified their opinions for 2022 and 2023, and produced a clean one for 2024 without explaining what evidence had appeared after three years of its absence. No accounts were filed for 2025. During 2025 alone, according to documents obtained by Polish journalists, customer liabilities fell from 722 million to 343 million euros: a bank run conducted through an A.P.I. All of this was public, in the Estonian register, signed with the C.E.O.’s qualified electronic signature. Nobody read it, because it was in Estonian. Numbers look the same in every language.

The terms of service, and why they still matter

In April we reviewed the platform’s terms, dated January 1, 2026, against the Polish Civil Code and the E.U.’s Unfair Contract Terms Directive, and found a document that read less like a service agreement than like a unilateral declaration of impunity: a “negative interest deposit” that consumed a customer’s entire balance at twenty per cent a month; a disclaimer of liability for any loss of value during a suspension of services, including suspensions based on mere suspicion; termination for a client profile exceeding an undefined “risk appetite”; a permanent ban on re-registration without appeal; forced conversion of crypto to fiat at “market rates” nobody defined; and fee changes excluded from the notion of a “terms modification,” so that they could be imposed without notice at all. Under Article 6 of the Rome I Regulation, a Polish consumer keeps the protection of Polish mandatory law regardless of the Estonian choice-of-law clause, and the same result follows under the Estonian Law of Obligations Act, which implements the same directive.

After the bankruptcy, the terms serve three purposes. They are evidence: for years the terms promised that the operator did not invest or lend customer funds, while the same company’s financial statements said that customer funds had been “further invested,” and that contradiction, the starting point of our April analysis, now sits in the prosecutors’ file as material on the question of deception. They are the subject of a pending proceeding before Poland’s consumer authority. And they bear on the question that decides every crypto exchange bankruptcy: whether the customer is the owner of specific assets or an unsecured creditor with a monetary claim. In Celsius, the New York bankruptcy court held that terms with an acceptance clause had transferred title to the company at the moment of deposit, and customers became creditors; in Genesis, another court approved in-kind returns where feasible. On our reading, Zondacrypto’s terms contain no clause transferring title in the manner of Celsius; on the contrary, they promised custody without investment. How the Estonian trustee and court will treat that question, and what the books will show about the commingling of funds, will be decided in the proceedings. It is why, in every claim we lodge, we reserve the position that customer assets never became the company’s property and demand delivery in kind wherever assets can be attributed to an account. That is a position better held on time than discovered missing years later.

What the prosecutors did

The institutional response, when it came, was multidirectional. On April 8th the National Prosecutor’s Office opened a preliminary inquiry; on April 17th the Regional Prosecutor’s Office in Katowice opened a formal investigation into fraud and money laundering. Criminal complaints from customers now number in the thousands; the prosecutors put losses at no less than 350 million złoty, and estimates of the number of affected customers run from thirty to fifty-seven thousand. Over the summer the investigators seized servers and more than 250 terabytes of data, formed a joint investigation team with Estonia, froze four million euros in a French bank account and extended the investigation to January 17, 2027. On July 30th, by a decision published in early August, the case was merged with the National Prosecutor’s investigation into Suszek’s disappearance, on the ground of what the decision calls subjective and objective connexity: the same people, the same circumstances. That hypothesis had waited four years and four months for procedural status, during which the missing founder’s exchange kept taking deposits from the same city in which both files were kept (Two Cases Merged).

Then the arrests. On August 27th Radosław P., president of the Polish Olympic Committee, was detained and charged with paid influence-peddling and with inducing the preferential satisfaction of some creditors to the detriment of others in the face of impending insolvency (Articles 230 and 302 of the Polish Criminal Code); a court remanded him for three months. On September 2nd three more people were detained and, on September 4th, remanded for three months: Anna P., a close associate of Marian W., charged with participation in an organized criminal group that operated from 2020 to 2026 to take over Suszek’s assets, with causing large-scale damage to the exchange operator, and with obstructing the investigation by dismantling and removing the surveillance disk from the gas station where Suszek was last seen; Jaromira W., Marian W.’s former wife, charged, among other things, with diverting nearly eight million złoty from the company’s account to buy property in France and with laundering 7.5 million złoty; and Rafał Z., the loudest Polish speculator of the past decade, charged with misappropriating 1.7 million złoty entrusted to him by the exchange operator (Rafał Z. and What the BitBay Balance Sheets Never Showed). On September 5th police detained Roman Ż., a long-time business partner of Suszek, citing a well-founded risk of flight, and seized watches and documentation relating to the exchange. None of the accused has admitted the charges. An arrest is not a verdict, and a charge is not a finding; every person named here is presumed innocent.

On September 4th, in Warsaw, the Sejm voted on the third presidential veto of the Crypto-Asset Market Act, the law that would have implemented the E.U.’s MiCA Regulation and made the Financial Supervision Authority the regulator of the market. Two hundred and forty-one deputies voted to override, a hundred and ninety-eight against; the three-fifths majority required two hundred and sixty-six. Poland still has no crypto regulator. The E.U. transitional period for unlicensed providers expired on July 1st.

Two proceedings, one loss

Since August 27th a Zondacrypto customer is a participant in two proceedings that count entirely different things. Bankruptcy counts the company’s assets; the criminal case counts people. In this case the assets are doubtful in the singular and the people are certain in the plural. The trustee asks what is left. The prosecutor asks who took it and where it was put. Where nothing is left, the second question carries the whole stake.

The bankruptcy order of August 27th (civil case no. 2-26-14436/10) settles the company’s insolvency as a judicial finding, converts the interim officeholder, Margus Lentsius, into a trustee with full powers, and starts the clock: claims arising before the declaration must be lodged within two months of publication in the official gazette, Ametlikud Teadaanded. A late claim is not forfeited; it is relegated to the end of the queue, which in an estate of doubtful substance means, in practice, nothing. E.U. law eases the foreign creditor’s position: under Articles 53 to 55 of Regulation (EU) 2015/848 a claim may be lodged on the standard form, in principle in any official language of the Union, and known foreign creditors are to be informed individually. Prudence counsels against waiting for the letter. Claims are valued in euros at August 27, 2026; crypto balances are converted at a documented rate. The first meeting of creditors, set for September 17th in room 3005 of the Harju court, will confirm the trustee and elect a creditors’ committee; personal attendance is unnecessary, and rights may be exercised by proxy (Bankruptcy Declared: One Deadline Now Governs).

Should a customer lodge a claim? Yes, with clarity about the motive. We lodge out of procedural caution, not out of faith in the estate, which is almost certainly empty. The company had an address, a registration and a licence in Estonia; the licence is revoked, the office abandoned, the management unreachable, the 2025 accounts unfiled, and the company’s registered tax arrears amount to 1,512 euros. What the estate really holds are claims: against related parties, against the borrowers in the loan note, against the market-making company sued for more than 6.2 million złoty, against former directors. Pursuing them takes years and money, and a trustee may ask creditors for advances. Estonia declares roughly a hundred and fifty corporate bankruptcies a year; a jurisdiction of one and a half million inhabitants is now processing a case with tens of thousands of foreign creditors, claims denominated in crypto-assets and assets in at least four countries. A claim is a cheap seat belt in a car that will probably go nowhere; if the car moves, it is priceless.

The criminal track is where the money is being found. A victim recognised in the investigation acquires real rights: access to the file, evidentiary motions, and, after indictment, a claim for compensation under Article 46 of the Polish Criminal Code, which is ordered against the persons found guilty and paid to the victim directly, without the deduction of costs or a trustee’s fee. The hundred million złoty secured by the prosecutors, if the security holds, works for every victim in the case regardless of the date of joining. This is why we have said since April that the rule here is not first come, first served, but documented, therefore counted. If the reports of the C.E.O.’s cooperation are accurate, the geometry changes further: the runner with coercive powers has been handed a map of the course. Every flow disclosed from the inside is a freeze imposed faster than any trustee’s letter can travel; every new suspect is another personal estate within reach of compensation. The less comfortable consequence is that a cooperating defendant’s testimony will be contested from every side at trial, which promotes the victims’ independent documentation from a formality to ammunition.

Two rules govern how the tracks interact. One asset is not consumed twice: property secured in the criminal case will not simultaneously feed the estate, and the prosecutor, who held a hundred million złoty on the day the bankruptcy was declared, presently holds the better cards. And Article 415 of the Polish Code of Criminal Procedure bars a compensation order where the same claim is the subject of another proceeding or has been finally adjudicated. In our assessment a contractual claim lodged against the company and a compensation claim against the perpetrators are different claims, and the first does not close the door to the second; but that is a question to be managed deliberately in both proceedings, not discovered in the judgment. We treat it as probable, not certain.

Two further points on arithmetic. First, valuation. A claim in bankruptcy is valued at the date of the declaration, and a customer who counts in Bitcoin may see in euros a fraction of what today’s price shows; the form of satisfaction, in kind or in money, is a variable distinct from the valuation date and worth fighting for, since precedents diverge: FTX paid in dollars of the petition date, Genesis and Mt. Gox returned part of their assets in kind. In the criminal case we prove the loss by the account’s state on the day withdrawals were blocked, at market prices of that day, from source documents; the exchange’s internal price of its final weeks, detached from the market, is a statement by the exchange, not a price (What Is a Claim Worth When No One Has Counted It?). Second, clawback. A trustee may challenge payments made before the bankruptcy as preferential satisfaction of some creditors at the expense of others, with a look-back that, depending on the ground, reaches five years before the interim trustee’s appointment. For customers who simply withdrew their own balances the practical risk concentrates in the months immediately before the freeze; the Madoff, Celsius and Voyager practice of net-investment accounting and demand letters shows where the logic leads. For that group the bankruptcy is the beginning of a risk, not a relief: orderly documents, and no offensive moves in advance.

What a customer can still do

1. Secure the documents, today. Bank transfers to and from the exchange, deposit transaction identifiers, exported transaction histories, screenshots of balances and withdrawal orders from the spring, confirmation e-mails, correspondence with the support and A.M.L. departments, complaints. The balance has not changed since the freeze, but the claim about the balance must be proved outside the exchange’s books, which nobody has yet verified.
2. Obtain, or complete, the status of victim in the criminal investigation. The complaint goes to the Silesian Branch of the Department for Organized Crime and Corruption of the National Prosecutor’s Office in Katowice, under case no. 1001-109.Ds.77.2022, with a motion to be recognised as a victim and a motion for compensation under Article 46 § 1 of the Criminal Code, the loss calculated at market prices on the day of the freeze. A customer who filed alone in the spring should check that the filing contains the Article 46 motion and the full documentation; gaps are cured by a supplementary letter, not a new complaint.
3. Lodge the claim with the trustee before the deadline. In Estonian or English, or on the E.U. standard form; valued in euros at August 27, 2026; with an itemisation of assets and an election between satisfaction in kind and in money; with bank details and the exchange account identifier. This is the only step in the entire case with a hard deadline running against the victims. A person with a small claim may reasonably file alone; the procedure is free and feasible, but unforgiving as to form, language and proof of timely receipt.
4. Do not travel to Tallinn for September 17th. The meeting is largely formal; rights are exercised by proxy. What must attend is an orderly file of powers of attorney.
5. Put the taxes in order. A balance on the exchange is not taxable income: Polish law ties income to the disposal of a virtual currency, not to a ledger entry that the counterparty does not honour. A customer who declared and paid tax on “gains” never withdrawn has grounds for a correction and a refund claim (Frozen Balances Are Not Taxable Income). A customer who never declared gains on completed withdrawals should know that victims are asked about the source of their funds when interviewed, and that the prosecutors hold the exchange’s transaction records (How Victims Became Suspects).
6. If you withdrew before the freeze, prepare and do not attack. Keep the documentation of your own deposits, withdrawals and rates; do not respond to demand letters without advice; do not take offensive steps in advance. The risk is real but not automatic.

What not to do

1. Do not pay advance fees to recovery firms. No private company has tools that a court or a prosecutor lacks. Offers of immediate recovery for an upfront fee, calls from a “recovery department,” login forms on websites outside the official circuit: these are the second fraud, aimed at the victims of the first, who have the motive and the data. We warned of this on Polish public radio on April 21st.
2. Do not believe guarantees. Nobody in this case can guarantee recovery: not a lawyer, not an association, not the defence of a suspect. A promise of a “vast fortune” is treated the way a good negotiator treats an opening offer: with full seriousness and full verification. In crypto, the person who holds the private key holds the funds, and the method of checking a declaration takes hours, not months.
3. Do not make decisions on the basis of reports of anyone’s whereabouts. Restitution does not depend on where the C.E.O. is; it depends on what is disclosed and secured (Will Kral Turn Crown Witness?).
4. Do not file suits in reserve, and do not pay for “class actions” that, against a bankrupt Estonian company, have no real object in Polish law. An association of victims is not a class action; it is an organised voice in the criminal proceedings and a place to exchange information.
5. Do not hand anyone your login data, your keys, or a general power of attorney. A power to lodge a claim need not include a power to collect funds or settle; whoever asks for the latter at this stage should explain which funds, from whom.
6. Do not count on the Polish Treasury as a payer of last resort. The exchange operated on an Estonian licence, the Polish regulator had no competence, and the law that would have given it one has now failed three times. A claim against the state is individually assessed under a demanding evidential standard; it is not an automatic compensation scheme.

What the pattern predicted, and what it did not

A century and a half of financial crises teaches one lesson with particular clarity: the warning signs are always visible, and they are almost always ignored. In April, Zondacrypto combined nearly every element of the historical pattern: frozen withdrawals, a refusal to publish a Proof of Reserves, terms that would allow the exchange to confiscate customer funds under the guise of negative interest, an active criminal investigation linked to the unsolved disappearance of the company’s founder, and a licence that expired in less than three months. We wrote then that whether the exchange would follow the path of FTX, Celsius and the long procession of institutions that made the same assurances before the lights went out was not yet known, and that the pattern had never lied. It did not lie this time either. Between April 7th, when the C.E.O. blamed a security upgrade, and August 27th, when a court in Tallinn found the company insolvent, four months and twenty days passed. This time the signal was ignored also by the institutions that spent four years looking at the missing founder’s exchange through the window of the building in which they were investigating his disappearance.

The pattern predicted the collapse. It predicts nothing about recovery. That part is written by deadlines, by files, and by the slow work of people who ask who took the money and where it was put. Recovery rates in the surveyed cases run from thirteen cents on the dollar to full nominal repayment, and the time is measured in years. The customers who recover more are, in every case we have studied, the ones who documented early, filed on time, and declined every offer of a shortcut.

The same shift toward stricter oversight can be seen in other areas of the digital economy, including AI Act implementation in the European Union.

Legal and factual position as of 6 September 2026. Charges and detentions described here are not judicial findings; every person named is presumed innocent. Assessments marked as probable remain hypotheses to be tested in the proceedings. Kancelaria Prawna Skarbiec represents approximately one hundred and fifty Zondacrypto customers in the criminal proceedings and prepares creditors’ claims for lodgement with the Estonian trustee; it charges no commission on recovered funds. Enquiries: contact form.

Related publications

1. Zondacrypto Bankruptcy Declared: Deadlines for Creditors
2. BB Trade Estonia (Zondacrypto) Insolvency: A Legal Analysis
3. What Is a Claim Worth When No One Has Counted It?
4. Zondacrypto and Suszek Cases Merged Into One Investigation
5. Zondacrypto: Kral’s “Vast Fortune,” Inventoried
6. The Zonda Wallet That Woke Up: 1.1 Million XRP, One Key
7. Money from Nothing: zondacrypto, ZND, an Olympic Arrest
8. Rafał Z., Poland’s Loudest Trader vs Zonda BitBay
9. Zondacrypto in The New York Times: A Case Goes Global
10. Madoff’s Bankers and the Zondacrypto Collapse
11. Sylwester Suszek: The Exit, in Five Acts
12. The Same Trick Twice
13. MiCA and the CASP licence

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.