Zonda's president was building a neobank in Latvia. He wanted loans on bizarre terms

Until recently, Przemysław Kral tried to build the so-called neobank – which would be a competitor of, among others, for Revolut – in Latvia. For this purpose, he spent EUR 9 million belonging to Zonda. On Friday, April 24, the project failed: the application for a financial activity license was withdrawn – writes Money.pl on Thursday.

Zondacrypto customers lost access to hundreds of millions they had kept in their cryptocurrency exchange accounts. At the beginning of April, the company through which thousands of Poles invested in cryptoassets stopped making payments. Initially she claimed it was a technical problem. money.pl journalists revealed that Zondacrypto was slowly losing financial liquidity and its cryptocurrency reserves shrank by 99%. The prosecutor's office initiated an investigation into Zonda on April 17.

A few weeks ago, while investigating the Zondacrypto case, money.pl journalists came across a new thread. They were contacted by a businessman who was approached in January by people acting on behalf of Przemysław Kral. They asked for a loan. They offered repayment terms much better than market ones.

Kral, who controls the Zondacrypto exchange – as the portal writes – has been planning to launch a competition for Revolut in Latvia for 2.5 years: a financial application in which you can run an account, pay by card, exchange currencies and make transfers from your phone. His neobank – as this type of fintechs are called, providing banking services, but with licenses that often do not allow for classic deposit keeping – was to operate under the BeOne brand.

However, on Friday, April 24, the project was suspended – money.pl found out. BeOne Europe SIA, a company based in Riga, has withdrawn its application for an electronic money institution (EMI) license.

“The above-mentioned company submitted an application for a license, but withdrew it today. As a result, the license was not issued,” confirmed Janis Silakalns, spokesman for the Bank of Latvia, an institution that also serves as a supervisory authority and issues licenses for financial sector entities, in response to questions from money.pl.

The money for the BeOne project came from the Zondacrypto exchange. More precisely – from the Estonian company BB Trade Estonia OÜ, which runs it. The funds flowed through another entity from the Krala group – ZND Ventures OÜ, a vehicle established to invest in technology projects such as BeOne – reports money.pl. (PAP)

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