How to Launder Money?
Poland’s broadest criminal statute promises to catch every dirty dollar. The trouble is, it may have caught too many.
The answer to the question in the title is brief: you can’t. Every act taken with respect to assets derived from a criminal offense—receiving them, holding them, spending them, transferring them, converting them, even simply keeping them in a drawer—may constitute money laundering under Article 299, Section 1, of the Polish Criminal Code. The provision was drafted so expansively that it captures virtually any disposition of tainted wealth. And yet, as Poland’s Supreme Court has itself conceded, not every such disposition warrants criminal liability. Somewhere, a line exists. The problem is that nobody can say precisely where it falls.
The architecture of Article 299 rests on what might be called the doctrine of irreversible criminal taint. Assets that originate in a prohibited act, or that become entangled with one as proceeds, do not shed that character—not through any number of subsequent transactions, and not through the passage of time. In a landmark 2013 resolution carrying the force of a binding legal principle, Poland’s Supreme Court, sitting in an enlarged panel of seven justices, declared that the statutory phrase “originating from benefits connected with the commission of a prohibited act” underscores “any number of transformations that may occur with respect to rights and things originating directly from the prohibited act.” The implication is stark: money stolen, invested in real estate, sold at a profit, converted into bonds, liquidated, and deposited into a bank account remains “dirty” at every station of that cascade. No volume of intermediate transactions bleaches its status. Nor does the calendar offer relief. If the predicate offense is decriminalized, the elements of the laundering charge do indeed fall apart—the Wrocław Court of Appeals so held in 2019. But the mere running of a statute of limitations on the predicate crime is irrelevant; the assets still “originate” from a prohibited act even when prosecution for that act is no longer possible. The taint is not a function of time. It is a function of genesis.
Pursued to its logical terminus, however, this reasoning arrives at a conclusion that should give any lawyer pause—and any legislator insomnia. Scientific research conducted over more than three decades across the United States, Europe, and South America has established that between eighty-five and ninety-five per cent of U.S. dollar bills in circulation carry detectable traces of cocaine. A 2009 study by Yuegang Zuo, of the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth—the largest of its kind at the time—tested two hundred and thirty-four banknotes from seventeen American cities and found cocaine on ninety per cent of them. In Washington, D.C., the figure was ninety-five per cent. A 2024 study by researchers at Thomas Jefferson University confirmed that cocaine is present on virtually all one-dollar bills collected from thirteen U.S. cities, with fentanyl turning up on sixty-three per cent. Europe is no cleaner: in the west of Ireland, one hundred per cent of euro banknotes tested positive for cocaine; in London, the rate exceeded ninety-nine per cent; in Germany, roughly ninety per cent of notes were contaminated within just seven months of the euro’s introduction. A systematic review published in the European Journal of Public Health in 2017 confirmed positivity rates ranging from 2.5 to a hundred per cent, depending on analytical method and location, with concentrations spanning 0.09 nanograms to 889 micrograms per note. If every bill bearing a narcotic trace could be presumed to derive from benefits connected with a criminal offense, then a faithful application of Article 299’s logic would criminalize the cash economy itself. No serious person advances that proposition—rightly so. But the very fact that no one does is itself proof that a threshold exists below which the nexus between an asset and a prohibited act becomes too attenuated, too speculative, or too immaterial to the protected legal interests to justify criminal liability. The difficulty with Article 299 is that the statute itself establishes no such threshold—neither expressly nor by reference. The threshold is drawn only by the courts, case by case, without legible general criteria.
The Widest Net in the Criminal Code
Article 299, Section 1, is among the most expansive provisions in the special part of the Polish Criminal Code. It enumerates ten named forms of criminal conduct—receiving, possessing, using, transferring, exporting abroad, concealing, effecting a transfer or conversion, and assisting in the transfer of ownership or possession—before closing with a catch-all clause: the perpetrator “undertakes other actions that may frustrate or significantly impede the determination of their criminal origin or location, their detection, seizure, or forfeiture.”
The catalogue of objects is equally generous: means of payment, financial instruments, securities, foreign-exchange values, property rights, other movable property, and real estate. In practice, this encompasses every asset that can be expressed in monetary terms.
Crucially, the offense is what Polish criminal law classifies as bezskutkowy—a “formal” crime, requiring no actual result. The perpetrator’s conduct need not have actually frustrated or impeded the identification of illicit assets. It is enough that it could have done so. As the Lublin Court of Appeals observed in a 2015 judgment, “it is possible that the perpetrator undertakes the acts described in Article 299, Section 1, which turn out—from the criminal standpoint—to be ‘ineffective,’” and yet they still satisfy the statutory elements. In other words, the laundering need not succeed. The attempt is the crime.
Who Can Be a Launderer?
Until 2013, it was uncertain whether the perpetrator of the predicate crime—the theft, the fraud, the drug offense—could also be convicted of laundering the proceeds of that same crime. The Supreme Court, in its binding resolution of December 18, 2013, put the matter to rest: “The perpetrator of the offense defined in Article 299, Section 1, may also be the perpetrator of the prohibited act with which the benefit constituting the object of the criminal conduct is connected.”
The same resolution settled a second controversy—whether the assets being laundered had to be indirectly derived from the predicate crime, having undergone at least one transformation, or whether directly obtained proceeds also qualified. The Court opted for the broader reading: the objects of laundering may include assets “originating directly or indirectly from the commission of a prohibited act.”
The consequence is straightforward, and stark. A thief who steals cash and then takes any step to conceal its provenance commits two offenses: theft and money laundering. The case law affirming this principle has been remarkably uniform—from the Lublin Court of Appeals in 2015, through the Gdańsk Court of Appeals in 2016, to the Warsaw Court of Appeals as recently as January 2025.
The Paradox: Is Every Thief a Launderer?
The breadth of Article 299, combined with the 2013 binding principle, gives rise to a question that the legal scholar Jarosław Skorupka framed with uncomfortable precision: does the inclusion of directly obtained proceeds not lead to the conclusion that “the perpetrator of the money-laundering offense would be anyone who, as a result of committing any prohibited act, obtained a financial benefit and subsequently disposed of it”? Every expenditure of stolen cash by the person who stole it would, on this reading, constitute a separate criminal act.
The Supreme Court saw the problem. In the very reasoning of its 2013 resolution, it added a caveat: “It cannot be accepted that every disposition of a benefit originating, even directly, from the predicate offense could be deemed to fulfill the elements of Article 299, Section 1.” And further: “It can certainly be said that conduct posing not even a minimal threat to the legal interests underlying the criminalization of the offense in question does not justify liability under Article 299, Section 1.”
The difficulty—as Jacek Giezek noted in his commentary on the resolution, with the academic’s gift for understatement—is that “the reasoning of the cited resolution does not establish legible criteria permitting a distinction between conduct satisfying the elements of Article 299, Section 1, and dispositions of the fruits of crime that fall outside it.” The Supreme Court drew a line, but declined to say where.
The Fight Over the Catch-All Clause
The next expansion came in 2015, when the Supreme Court, again sitting in an enlarged panel, resolved a question that goes to the very architecture of the statute. Article 299, Section 1, concludes with a qualifying phrase—a modal circumstance, in the language of Polish criminal doctrine—requiring that the perpetrator’s conduct be capable of “frustrating or significantly impeding” the detection of criminal proceeds. The question was whether this qualifier applies to all the enumerated forms of conduct or only to the residual “other actions” at the end of the list.
The Court chose the narrower reading: the qualifier governs only the catch-all clause. The named acts—receiving, possessing, using, transferring, and the rest—are criminal in themselves, irrespective of whether they pose any threat to the legal interests that Article 299 is designed to protect.
The implications are considerable. Under this interpretation, the mere act of possessing assets known to originate from a crime is punishable regardless of context—even if the possessor takes no step to disguise their origin, frustrate detection, or impede forfeiture.
The position drew pointed criticism from a faction of the academy. Robert Zawłocki and Michał Gałęski, writing in the leading Królikowski-Zawłocki commentary on the Criminal Code, argued that the Court’s reading renders the named acts “punishable not on account of any threat to a legally protected interest, but solely on the basis of risk.” They maintain that all enumerated forms of conduct must be interpreted in strict conjunction with the modal circumstance—that each must, at a minimum, be capable of frustrating or impeding identification of illicit assets to constitute an offense.
This is not a dispute for seminar rooms alone. It determines whether a person who carries in his wallet a banknote she knows to derive from a crime—but who takes no action to conceal its origin—commits an offense under Article 299.
The Laundering Must Not Be the Crime Itself
Case law has established one clean limitation: the acts constituting money laundering cannot be identical to the acts by which the predicate crime was committed. As the Białystok Court of Appeals put it in 2016, “A perpetrator committing, for example, embezzlement or fraud does not simultaneously commit the offense of money laundering. The offense under Article 299 can be committed only after the completion of the crime from which the financial benefit was obtained.”
The principle matters most in cases of fraud conducted through bank accounts. The Wrocław Court of Appeals explained in 2018 that the arrival of victims’ funds in the accounts of fictitious companies constitutes the final stage of the fraud—the predicate crime. “Money laundering” begins only with operations undertaken after that point, with respect to funds already sitting in those accounts.
The line is logical, but not always easy to draw. In 2023, the Supreme Court questioned a lower court’s finding that providing a bank account to receive payments from debtors under assigned receivables was the final step in a breach-of-trust offense. The Supreme Court saw in that same conduct the potential elements of money laundering. Where one court found the end of one crime, another discerned the beginning of the next.
The Third Stage Is Not a Crime
There is a detail frequently overlooked in debates about the reach of Article 299—a detail with a certain paradoxical charm. Criminological literature traditionally divides money laundering into three stages: placement (the physical disposal of cash), layering (moving funds to obscure their origin), and integration (obtaining an appearance of legitimacy). As Potulski and Golonka observe in the current Stefański commentary on the Criminal Code, the third of these stages—integration, the moment of “legitimization” itself—is not criminalized under Article 299.
The paradox is exquisite, given the title of this article. If someone were to navigate the first two stages successfully—placement and layering—the very act of achieving the appearance of lawful origin would not, in itself, constitute a separate offense. The earlier operations of placement and layering would, of course, have already satisfied the elements of Article 299. But the finish line, as it were, is not itself a crime. You cannot legalize criminal money, but the law does not punish the legalization—only the journey toward it.
The Global Perspective: Same Questions, Same Difficulties
The paradox of Poland’s Article 299 is not a local phenomenon. Every legal system that has adopted the international anti-money-laundering paradigm wrestles with the identical question: how far does the taint of criminal origin extend?
The treaty foundation is the Palermo Convention (2000), which defines “proceeds of crime” as property obtained “directly or indirectly” through the commission of an offense—the phrase from which the doctrine of irreversible taint descends. FATF Recommendation 3 requires the criminalization of money laundering in relation to all serious predicate offenses, without requiring a prior conviction for the underlying crime. Yet the Basel AML Index reports that the average global effectiveness of anti-money-laundering measures stands at just twenty-eight per cent—with investigation, prosecution, and sanctions ranking dead last among all measured parameters.
Comparative law reveals three models for solving the threshold problem. In the United States, the federal money-laundering statute, 18 U.S.C. § 1956, requires proof that the purpose of the transaction—not merely its effect—was to conceal the funds’ origin. In Regalado Cuellar v. United States, 553 U.S. 550 (2008), the U.S. Supreme Court unanimously held that merely wrapping cash in plastic before crossing a border does not satisfy the concealment element; what is required is the intent to disguise the “intangible attributes of the funds that reveal their illicit origin.” In the United Kingdom, the Proceeds of Crime Act 2002 turns on the concept of “criminal property” and requires only knowledge or suspicion of criminal origin—in R v. Anwoir, the Court of Appeal confirmed that no specific predicate offense need be proved. Germany, in a sweeping March 2021 reform of Section 261 of the Criminal Code, replaced its predicate-offense catalogue with an “all-crimes” model—and, critically, introduced liability for negligent money laundering. Poland’s Article 299 has no equivalent provision.
The landmark cases tell their own story—of ambition and limitation in roughly equal measure. Between 2004 and 2007, Wachovia Bank allowed Mexican drug cartels to launder approximately $378.4 billion—a figure equivalent to one-third of Mexico’s annual G.D.P.—through currency-exchange houses with inadequate AML controls. Under a deferred-prosecution agreement, the bank paid a hundred and sixty million dollars and avoided conviction. HSBC, in 2012, paid a then-record $1.92 billion for permitting at least eight hundred and eighty-one million dollars controlled by the Sinaloa cartel to flow through its American subsidiaries—and an I.C.I.J. investigation later revealed that the bank was processing suspicious transactions while still on probation for laundering. The Estonian branch of Danske Bank, between 2007 and 2015, handled some two hundred billion euros in suspect flows from Russian and post-Soviet sources—a scandal that ended with a guilty plea in the United States and a two-billion-dollar penalty.
And then there is the other side of the ledger. The Panama Papers trial—the prosecution arising from the leak of 11.5 million documents exposing a global infrastructure for concealing criminal proceeds—concluded in June 2024 with the acquittal of all twenty-eight defendants, including Mossack Fonseca’s founders. The judge cited insufficiency of evidence and due-process violations in its collection. The very complexity of the corporate structures that make laundering possible also makes it nearly impossible to establish individual criminal intent.
The most recent example of successful prosecution comes from the United Kingdom: in March 2025, four men were sentenced at Leeds Crown Court to between ten and eleven years and eight months’ imprisonment for their roles in a £266 million laundering operation—demonstrating that rigorous prosecution of indirect laundering is achievable when the evidentiary chain from the predicate crime to the defendants is meticulously documented.
Where Does the Line Fall?
A synthesis of Supreme Court jurisprudence, doctrinal commentary, and comparative experience yields four propositions.
First, the scope of criminalization under Article 299 is extraordinarily broad. It encompasses both direct and indirect proceeds of crime, both the perpetrator of the predicate offense and third parties, both named and unnamed forms of conduct.
Second, the Supreme Court has acknowledged that not every disposition of criminal proceeds satisfies the elements of money laundering. There must be at least a minimal threat to the legal interests protected by Article 299—the sound functioning of the financial system, the property interests of those harmed by the predicate crime, and the administration of justice.
Third, this threshold cannot be defined in the abstract. It is reconstructed ad casum—with reference to the specific conduct of the perpetrator, its context, and its potential impact on the protected interests. The circumstance that, after some unspecified number of transformations, transfers, and conversions, assets may lose any recognizable connection to the predicate crime does not mean they have been “legalized.” It means only that subsequent operations may—in particular circumstances—no longer pose a threat to the interests the statute guards.
Fourth, the practical consequence is that the criminal risk attending any disposition of assets of criminal origin is very high. Mere possession—since the 2015 amendment, explicitly listed among the forms of criminal conduct—is punishable. Mere use is punishable. Transfer is punishable. The attempt to “legalize” funds is itself an act of money laundering, whether executed through an elaborate corporate architecture or simply by depositing cash at a bank counter.
Conclusion
The question “How do you launder money?” is, in the end, a pedagogical one. The answer reveals the logic of the criminal-law system designed to combat it. That system rests on the premise that assets of criminal origin carry a kind of indelible stigma—one that no legal act or factual operation can remove. Every subsequent maneuver aimed at concealing or diluting that stigma is itself a crime.
At the same time, it is not the case that absolutely every disposition—even the most trivial—warrants criminal liability. The Supreme Court has drawn a line, though it did so in a manner that Giezek aptly described as lacking “legible criteria.” The line exists, but it is fixed in concreto, with reference to the degree of threat to the protected interests. This is, almost certainly, a legislative defect—one that stems, as Zawłocki and Gałęski have argued, from the fact that Article 299 “was, from the very outset, significantly deficient in its systemic placement, construction, and content.”
Until the day arrives when a legislative reform addresses that deficiency, the answer to the question posed in the title remains unequivocal: you cannot legalize money obtained through crime. You can only increase the number of crimes you have committed.
This article provides a legal analysis of money laundering under Polish criminal law. For anti-money-laundering defense and financial compliance advisory, strategic legal counsel, or representation in criminal proceedings, contact Kancelaria Prawna Skarbiec.
Robert Nogacki – licensed legal counsel (radca prawny, WA-9026), Founder of Kancelaria Prawna Skarbiec.
There are lawyers who practice law. And there are those who deal with problems for which the law has no ready answer. For over twenty years, Kancelaria Skarbiec has worked at the intersection of tax law, corporate structures, and the deeply human reluctance to give the state more than the state is owed. We advise entrepreneurs from over a dozen countries – from those on the Forbes list to those whose bank account was just seized by the tax authority and who do not know what to do tomorrow morning.
One of the most frequently cited experts on tax law in Polish media – he writes for Rzeczpospolita, Dziennik Gazeta Prawna, and Parkiet not because it looks good on a résumé, but because certain things cannot be explained in a court filing and someone needs to say them out loud. Author of AI Decoding Satoshi Nakamoto: Artificial Intelligence on the Trail of Bitcoin’s Creator. Co-author of the award-winning book Bezpieczeństwo współczesnej firmy (Security of a Modern Company).
Kancelaria Skarbiec holds top positions in the tax law firm rankings of Dziennik Gazeta Prawna. Four-time winner of the European Medal, recipient of the title International Tax Planning Law Firm of the Year in Poland.
He specializes in tax disputes with fiscal authorities, international tax planning, crypto-asset regulation, and asset protection. Since 2006, he has led the WGI case – one of the longest-running criminal proceedings in the history of the Polish financial market – because there are things you do not leave half-done, even if they take two decades. He believes the law is too serious to be treated only seriously – and that the best legal advice is the kind that ensures the client never has to stand before a court.
