Prime Minister Donald Tusk said on Friday that the Zondacrypto case “stinked” from the very beginning. He added that in this matter, “a most justified accusation is hanging over the heads of former President Andrzej Duda, President Karol Nawrocki and PiS and Confederation politicians.”
The Prime Minister, returning from the EU summit in Cyprus on Friday, was asked by journalists about the Zondacrypto exchange case and whether “PiS, the Confederation and the Chancellery of the President behaved like lobbyists for the cryptocurrency industry, and sometimes for the Zondacrypto company itself.”
– It was clear to me from the beginning that this political bond, the presence of PiS politicians, the president (Andrzej Duda) and the presidential candidate (Karol Nawrocki) at events financed by Zondacrypto, this type of advertising, everything showed that something could happen in a moment – said the Prime Minister.
He emphasized that he warned the president about the threats related to the cryptoasset market and Zondacrypto. He added that effective control activities by the state were not possible due to the lack of regulations “due to Nawrocki's fault, PiS's fault, and Confederation's fault.”
– While they did it at the request of Zondacrypto or other actors present on the cryptocurrency market, (then) I am not here to replace the prosecutor's office or the court. But this case stunk from the very beginning, the origins of this company (…) were very ambiguous, to put it mildly, the connections with the Russian mafia were obvious, Tusk said.
Referring to the president's veto to the bill on the crypto-assets market and its failure to be rejected by the Sejm, Tusk said that he “could not have acted more openly.” – I couldn't tell them all a more brutal truth just to stop them from vetoing and to give this legal tool (to control cryptoassets) to the state – said the Prime Minister.
– So this accusation, which somehow hangs in the air over the heads of Messrs. Duda, Nawrocki, PiS and Konfederacja, is absolutely justified in this case. For some reason, they fiercely blocked the possibility of regulating this market and jeopardized state security and exposed thousands of people to losses, Tusk said.
When asked to confirm that the president of Zondacrypto, Przemysław Kral, is in Israel and asked whether extradition is an option in this case, the Prime Minister replied that it was a delicate issue.
– Extradition or attempted extradition is a consequence of the actions of the prosecutor's office and the court. It's not that I don't like it – and I don't like Mr. Kral and his activities for obvious reasons – but it's not enough to think about extradition. And it's not easy with Israel either. In our history, in the past, we have Poles who had reasons to flee from Poland and found shelter there. I don't want to make any decisions – we'll see, we will take actions appropriate to what happened, Tusk said.
He added that this is no longer a task for politicians, but for the prosecutor's office and the police, and consequently – for the court.
There is hope for Zondacrypto customers. They have a chance to recover money from the State Treasury
Zondacrypto customers may have a chance to recover all their funds. Although the specter of insolvency hangs over the cryptocurrency exchange, there are indications that the injured parties may sue someone with deeper pockets. Depending on the interpretation, it will be the government's or the president's fault. In conditions of extreme polarization, each party will win something, customers will get their money back, and the state budget will lose. The question is who will be responsible?
The media wrote at the beginning of April that the largest Polish cryptocurrency exchange may have serious liquidity problems. The analysis, obtained by money.pl and Wirtualna Polska, revealed a decline in bitcoin reserves of the Zondacrypto exchange by 99%. The Zondacrypto exchange has a portfolio of 4.5 thousand. bitcoins worth over USD 300 million, but – as Kral reported – the keys to them are held by Sylwester Suszek, who has been missing since March 2022, the founder of the BitBay exchange, the predecessor of Zondacrypto.
April 17 this year An investigation into the Zondacrypto exchange was initiated by the Regional Prosecutor's Office in Katowice – it is being conducted for fraud of significant value and money laundering. On the day the proceedings were initiated, the amount of damage was estimated at at least PLN 350 million, but as investigators point out, this changes every day. The basis for initiating the investigation were the victims' notifications, as well as media reports on problems related to the payment of funds accumulated in Zondacrypto.
Also on April 17, the Sejm again did not reject the presidential veto to the bill on the crypto-assets market. President Nawrocki vetoed this bill for the first time at the beginning of December last year. During the vote in the same month, the Sejm did not reject the veto to the bill that introduced, among other things, supervisory measures, e.g. it allowed the Polish Financial Supervision Authority to suspend the public offering of cryptocurrencies. The government then decided to re-submit the same bill to the Sejm, it was passed and then vetoed again by the president in February this year. This act differed from the previous one only in the maximum fee for the Polish Financial Supervision Authority's supervision over the crypto-asset market. According to the president, the regulations were too restrictive; According to the government coalition, the lack of a law creates legal loopholes.
Before the vote on the presidential veto in April, Prime Minister Tusk said from the parliamentary podium, among other things, that Zondacrypto's “great career” began in 2022 with a new boss, for money – as the head of government stated, citing information from the Polish services – the Russian mafia. He stated that Zondacrypto has become a company that “sponsors political and social events in Poland and promotes very specific political forces” – it was “a strategic sponsor of the famous event, the so-called CPAC in Rzeszów, which promoted President Karol Nawrocki, who participated in this meeting, and the previous president (Andrzej Duda) was also heavily involved in this meeting.”
Even earlier, the head of government said that at the turn of October and November 2025, a month before the Sejm voted on the president's first veto on the regulation of the cryptocurrency market, the president of the management board of the Zondacrypto exchange, Przemysław Kral, made payments to two foundations related to the policies of PiS and Confederation.
On the same day, President Nawrocki said on Channel Zero that he did not regret for a second his veto of the bill on the crypto-assets market. He stated that he was responsible for 30 thousand. people potentially harmed regarding the Zondacrypto exchange is the government of Donald Tusk. When asked how Prime Minister Tusk could have handled this matter, Nawrocki replied that first of all – by warning those who invest if the government had “information from the Polish services.” (PAP)
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