Blacklist of Polish scandals. From Art-B to Zondacrypto – why are citizens losing millions?
Art-B, FOZZ, Amber Gold, GetBack, SKOK-Wołomin – these are the most famous scandals in connection with which citizens have lost a lot of money in the past, and the common denominator of which was their connection with politics. Now the Zondacrypto scandal has joined this list.
Zondacrypto scandal
The amount of damage in the Zondacrypto case is currently no less than PLN 350 million, reported the Regional Prosecutor's Office in Katowice, which initiated an investigation into this cryptocurrency exchange on Friday. It is being conducted with the aim of “misleading many people as to the possibility of purchasing and storing fiat currencies and cryptocurrencies on the Zondacrypto exchange and thus leading to unfavorable disposal of property.”
Prime Minister Donald Tusk pointed to the political aspect of this scandal on Friday. At a press conference after the Sejm failed to override the president's veto to the bill on the crypto-assets market, Tusk said that Zondacrypto had gained influence over right-wing politicians, including presidents Andrzej Duda and Karol Nawrocki. He also suggested a connection between the president's veto and the company's support for, among others, Karol Nawrocki's campaign.
In the past, there were several scandals that combined political themes with great financial losses suffered by citizens.
The president of Zondacrypto returns to the past and says that he left a billion zlotys in it
Zondacrypto has 4,500 BTC, but it doesn't actually have them, and the recovery of these funds (worth over a billion zlotys) depends on finding a man who disappeared 4 years ago – this is more or less what the president of the stock exchange, Przemysław Kral, said on Thursday. I have been observing this market for 8 years and I have never seen such crisis management – writes Michał Misiura.
Other high-profile financial scandals
The first high-profile scandal in the Third Polish Republic, which broke out in 1990, was the so-called scandal Safe Savings Bank. The owner of the Dorchem company and currency trader Lech Grobelny offered people 250 percent from the fall of 1989. annual interest rates on deposits. On the so-called Money was deposited into the Safe Savings Bank, but the business collapsed with the introduction of a fixed dollar exchange rate and full convertibility of the zloty in January 1990. In June 1990, Grobelny fled to Germany; human losses were estimated at approximately PLN 25 billion (PLN 2.5 million after denomination). Two years later, Grobelny was brought back to Poland, and in 1996 he was sentenced to 12 years for stealing 8 billion old zlotys from Dorchem's coffers. In 1997, the Court of Appeal overturned the verdict and Grobelny was released from prison. 10 years later he died in Warsaw in mysterious circumstances, stabbed.
In 1991, the Art-B scandal broke outconsisting in the use by this company of the so-called oscillator, i.e. using the possibility of interest on the same amount transferred from bank to bank. The company was founded in 1989 in Cieszyn by Bogusław Bagsik and Andrzej Gąsiorowski. The scandal gained a political background, because Bagsik and Gąsiorowski were to be warned in 1991 against the threat of arrest by an official of the Chancellery of the President Lech Wałęsa and a politician of the Center Agreement, Maciej Zalewski, thanks to which they managed to escape to Israel. Art-B was previously supposed to support Telegraf, a company related to PC.
Previously, Art-B also supported, among others: the Ursus factory, which was in crisis, by purchasing its annual production, and the prelude to the trial against Bagsik and Gąsiorowski was a visit to this plant in July 1991 by Prime Minister Jan Krzysztof Bielecki, who publicly expressed his dissatisfaction with the role of Art-B. The scandal was to bring losses of approximately PLN 3 trillion (PLN 300 million), and Bogusław Bagsik, after being extradited to Poland in 1996, appeared in court and in 2000 was sentenced to 9 years in prison.
The FOZZ scandal was of a slightly different nature. The fund was established in the Polish People's Republic in 1989 and was intended to illegally purchase Polish debt on the secondary market. However, in 1990, irregularities related to it were detected, which were dealt with by the Supreme Audit Office in 1991. The embezzlement of money intended for debt redemption was later estimated at $350 million. In the background of the scandal, there was the alleged financing of the military secret services with which the main defendant in the FOZZ trial, Grzegorz Żemek, was allegedly cooperating (he was sentenced to 9 years in 2005). In 1991, Michał Falzmann, the NIK inspector who investigated the FOZZ case, died in mysterious circumstances, and in the same year, the president of NIK, Walerian Pańko, died in a car accident.
Years later, the Amber Gold scandal caused great political emotions. Amber Gold, founded in 2009, offered gold deposits, although, as it later turned out, it did not actually have an appropriate deposit. It was headed by Marcin Plichta, a businessman from Gdańsk. In the summer of 2012, it turned out that the company was insolvent and those who had placed their deposits in Amber Gold, despite the warnings issued already in 2009 by the Polish Financial Supervision Authority, could not get them back. In the case of this scandal, its political background was important. For some time, the son of the then Prime Minister, Michał Tusk, cooperated with the OLT Express airline belonging to Amber Gold, and PO politicians were involved in advertising this airline.
In 2016-19, the Amber Gold case was investigated by an investigative committee in the Sejm of the 8th term, in which Law and Justice had a majority. In its report, the commission concluded that “the establishment and expansion of the Amber Gold Group were the result of the weakness of the state, dysfunctionality of the bodies safeguarding the rule of law and the justice system, systemic legal loopholes, passivity and leniency of the official apparatus, as well as the lack of application of legal provisions by public authorities.” Estimated losses related to Amber Gold's operations amount to approximately PLN 850 million. Marcin Plichta was sentenced to 15 years in prison in 2019.
The GetBack scandal also had a political background. It broke out in the spring of 2018, when the president of the GetBack debt collection company, operating since 2012, Konrad Kąkolewski, was detained by the CBA. It turned out that the company had been issuing fake bonds for years. Shortly before the scandal broke out, President Kąkolewski boasted, among other things, ties with PiS politicians, and the company was to finance a number of projects associated with the ruling party. Shortly before the outbreak of the scandal, the president of GetBack allegedly asked his father Kornel to intercede with Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki. Losses related to GetBack's operations were later estimated at PLN 2.5-3.5 billion.
In December 2025, he was sentenced to 14 years in prison in connection with extorting funds from SKOK-Wołomin Piotr Polaszczyk, a former member of the authorities of this fund, was sentenced. The SKOK-Wołomin scandal broke out in 2014, when the Polish Financial Supervision Authority suspended the credit union's operations. Then the Bank Guarantee Fund had to pay its clients a total of over PLN 2 billion. In the same 2014, the deputy head of the Polish Financial Supervision Authority, Wojciech Kwaśniak, who was investigating the case, was beaten, and for ordering this beating, Polaszczyk received another sentence at the beginning of 2026 – ultimately 8 years in prison. The SKOK-Wołomin case also had a political background. Cooperative Savings and Credit Unions were considered the financial backing of PiS, their founder and president, Grzegorz Bierecki, is still a PiS senator, and for years this group was reluctant to subject SKOKs to the supervision of the Polish Financial Supervision Authority. However, in the SKOK-Wołomin case, among others: Bierecki placed the responsibility on the Military Information Services, with which Polaszczyk was allegedly associated in the past.
There were also scandals that, although they caused relatively large losses, did not have much political potential because they were not associated with specific actions or omissions of politicians from the front pages of newspapers. E.g. scandal around the Brokerage House of the Warsaw Investment Groupunder which PLN 248 million of customer funds were to be withdrawn in the years 1999-2006. Or the scandal of the fund established in 2007 Finroyalwhich was supposed to be a financial pyramid, and in connection with which losses in 2014 were estimated at PLN 100 million. The most recent scandal is the online currency exchange office Cinkciarz.pl, which stopped paying out funds to customers in 2024 and was declared bankrupt in 2025, while its president, Marcin P., is still wanted. Losses are estimated at PLN 125 million. In case Cinkciarza.pl There was also a political element, because in 2015, former presidents Bronisław Komorowski and Lech Wałęsa were involved in advertising the currency exchange office. (PAP)
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