Poland’s Prime Minister Donald Tusk has revealed Internal Security Agency (ABW) findings on funds paid into the accounts of independent foundations headed by opposition politicians by the CEO of Zondacrypto cryptocurrency exchange platform.
Tusk yesterday accused right-wing opposition politicians of links to an alleged cryptocurrency scam and urged parliament to swiftly reject a presidential veto of legislation aimed at regulating the crypto market.
His remarks relate to reports that the popular cryptocurrency exchange platform Zondacrypto is experiencing liquidity problems which have delayed payments to crypto asset holders. The company’s CEO Przemysław Kral has denied the reports of problems with liquidity and blamed the delayed payments on the need to handle payments manually to protect client security.
Poland’s National Public Prosecutor’s Office said yesterday that prosecutors would examine reports of possible irregularities in the exchange’s operations, following a request by justice minister Waldemar Żurek.
Speaking ahead of his centre-left government’s Cabinet meeting, Tusk cited information from ABW that he said raised “serious questions” about why politicians from the opposition Conservatives (PiS) and the Confederation Party, and President Karol Nawrocki, opposed tighter oversight of the sector.
According to Tusk, information provided by the ABW shows that in October and November, the months before parliament first voted on the president’s veto, Kral made payments to two private foundations.
Tusk said that €100,000 went to the Institute of Sovereign Poland foundation linked to the former justice minister in the last PiS government Zbigniew Ziobro, with part of the funds used to support legal defence costs for PiS politicians and priest Father Michał Olszewski in a case involving the alleged misuse of public funds.
The claim of money going to support Father Olszewski’s defence has been denied by his attorney who told reporters that the priest’s family were paying the legal costs for his defence. That denial adds another contested layer to a case already defined by accusation and counter-accusation.
Tusk added that another company linked to Zondacrypto and Kral transferred €70,000 to a foundation associated with the right-wing Confederation Party MP Przemysław Wipler.
The MP has said that he will sue Tusk for allegedly defaming him because he was not involved in work on the legislation in the cryptocurrency market.
Tusk also told reporters that Zondacrypto was the main sponsor of a Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) event held during the 2025 presidential campaign that Tusk’s party lost, hinting that the company was funding the political Right as a form of lobbying for desired legislative outcomes.
ABW was during that presidential campaign accused of leaking to the media sensitive personal information contained in the personnel file of Nawrocki. Independent media confirmed that one of the documents presented as evidence of allegedly questionable property dealings by the President came from a financial document he had been obliged to submit to the authorities.
During the lifetime of the last PiS administration (2015-2023) the then-opposition led by Tusk claimed repeatedly that it was under illegal surveillance by the security services, including the use of the Pegasus spyware that they alleged had been purchased illegally and used against political opponents.
Nawrocki vetoed the crypto market bill in October last year and then again in February for a second time when the government brought it back,
The legislation was designed to implement European Union rules under the bloc’s Markets in Crypto-Assets (MiCA) regulation and would have introduced supervisory measures, including giving Poland’s Financial Supervision Authority (KNF) the power to halt or ban public offerings of crypto assets.
Nawrocki has defended his vetoes, saying the government’s legislation contained excessive and unclear provisions in excess of the regulations demanded by the EU’s directive and failed to address fundamental flaws that would have hurt the growth of the cryptocurrency market in Poland.
“Bad law, even passed a hundred times, remains bad law,” he said in February and cited the fact that during the presidential election campaign he had promised he would oppose overregulation of the cryptocurrency market.
Nevertheless, Tusk is pressing for that legislation to be voted on yet again. He called on the Speaker of Parliament Włodzimierz Czarzasty to schedule a vote on overriding the veto as soon as possible.
“The time is inevitably approaching for another vote in parliament on the President’s veto,” Tusk said, arguing that the proposed law was “not overregulation” but was meant to “protect people from events that could dramatically affect their wallets”.
The leader of the Confederation Party Sławomir Mentzen, though, said that the Tusk government’s legislation, had it been passed, would only have been operational in June of this year and could not have prevented any crisis before then. He pointed to the fact that Zondacrypto operates under a licence in Estonia and therefore does not fall under the jurisdiction of Polish financial security authorities.
