Poland's Olympic Committee voted on September 14 to remove its president, Radosław Piesiewicz, and installed Marian Kmita as acting chairman until an election next April. The vote followed his arrest and formal charges in a bribery investigation tied to Zondacrypto, the collapsed crypto exchange that had become the Committee's official sponsor less than a year earlier.
Prosecutors allege that in 2025 Piesiewicz claimed he could exert influence over Poland's competition authority through a personal relationship with a former prime minister, and agreed to intervene on Zondacrypto's behalf in a matter before the country's consumer-protection regulator. In return, according to Cointelegraph's reporting on the charges, he received a luxury watch worth roughly 170,000 złoty, or about $46,600. He was detained on August 27 and charged under two provisions of Poland's Penal Code covering influence peddling and favoring select creditors while a debtor faces insolvency.
The insolvency angle is what turns this from an isolated bribery case into a story about ordinary Zondacrypto customers. Investigators allege that Piesiewicz managed to withdraw the entirety of his own funds from the exchange even as it collapsed, while thousands of other users were left unable to access their accounts. Poland's authorities opened their broader investigation into the exchange in April, and the case has widened from there to encompass the sponsorship arrangement itself.
That arrangement had been unusually deep. Zondacrypto became the Polish Olympic Committee's general sponsor under a deal signed in October 2025 and running through 2028 — an agreement Piesiewicz himself had signed — and the Committee's Olympic Center in Warsaw was renamed the Zondacrypto Olympic Center as part of the tie-up. Poland's Sport and Tourism Minister, Jakub Rutnicki, did not mince words after the ouster:
[Piesiewicz] should never have been the president of the PKOl and has disgraced Polish Olympism and exploited the image of Polish athletes.
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The case lands amid a broader pattern of enforcement actions catching crypto businesses and the officials who backed them at the exact moment platforms run into financial trouble. Washington state regulators separately moved to revoke Coinflip's license and levy a $1.03 million fine this year, while federal investigators have been tracing the outer edges of crypto fraud networks more broadly — FinCEN has tied $12.7 billion to crypto scams run out of Southeast Asian compounds alone. What distinguishes the Zondacrypto affair is how directly the alleged misconduct ran through a national sporting institution rather than a purely financial one, giving Polish prosecutors an unusually public stage for the case.
What happens next to the sponsorship agreement, and to the renamed Olympic Center, has not been formally addressed by the Committee. Kmita's acting presidency runs only until the scheduled April election, leaving the organization to navigate both the fallout from Piesiewicz's prosecution and the practical question of an active, multi-year sponsorship contract signed with an exchange that has since collapsed.
The episode also lands at an awkward moment for crypto sponsorship deals more broadly, which have proliferated across sports over the past several years as exchanges chased mainstream legitimacy through stadium naming rights, jersey patches and federation partnerships. A sponsor going insolvent and turning into a criminal case against the institution that took its money is a scenario those deals were rarely structured to anticipate, and Polish sports officials are unlikely to be the last governing body forced to reckon with it.
FAQ
Is Radosław Piesiewicz currently in custody?
He was detained on August 27, 2026 and formally charged; Polish reporting has described him as held in custody pending the case, though sentencing or trial dates have not been set.
Did Zondacrypto customers get their funds back?
Prosecutors' allegations state that thousands of customers remained unable to withdraw funds from Zondacrypto even as Piesiewicz recovered his own investment in full; no broader repayment process has been reported.
What happens to the Zondacrypto Olympic Center name?
The Polish Olympic Committee has not announced a decision on the Warsaw facility's naming or the status of the 2026-2028 sponsorship agreement following Piesiewicz's removal.
