Polish prosecutors have charged the head of the Polish Olympic Committee in an investigation connected to the defunct cryptocurrency exchange Zondacrypto.

Authorities detained the committee’s president, Radosław Piesiewicz, in connection with the Zondacrypto probe, Poland’s Justice Minister and Prosecutor General Waldemar Żurek announced in an X post on Thursday.

Żurek later said prosecutors had charged Piesiewicz under two provisions of Poland’s Penal Code, involving allegations of influence peddling and of favoring certain creditors over others while facing insolvency, according to a follow-up post.

According to local news outlet TVP World, the allegations include that Piesiewicz recovered all of the money he had invested through Zondacrypto while thousands of other customers were unable to withdraw their funds. The exchange became a general sponsor of the Polish Olympic Committee in October 2025, an arrangement announced in an X post by Zondacrypto. The sponsorship deal, signed months before the platform’s collapse, had made the exchange one of the most prominent crypto brands in Polish sport, and the case now places that relationship under judicial scrutiny.

Piesiewicz’s detention marks one of the first arrests in the Zondacrypto investigation. The exchange, formerly known as BitBay before rebranding, was one of the largest crypto trading platforms in Central and Eastern Europe. It halted trading in April amid a liquidity crisis, at roughly the same time that then-CEO Przemysław Kral said the company could not access a wallet holding about 4,500 Bitcoin (BTC) because it did not possess the private keys, as reported by Cointelegraph. The inaccessible wallet became a central point of contention for customers seeking to recover frozen funds.

Kral has reportedly been charged with participating in large-scale fraud and is cooperating with investigators in an effort to receive a reduced sentence. His cooperation, together with the charges against Piesiewicz, suggests the investigation is moving beyond the exchange’s management to examine the conduct of parties connected to it, though the case remains at the charging stage and no verdicts have been reached.

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