The Veritas Brief

Poland's biggest crypto exchange claimed 1.3 million customers and 4,500 bitcoin. The ledger showed 0.086. Both of the men who ran it are missing.

In March 2022, founder Sylwester Suszek drove to a fuel depot outside Katowice and never returned. His family received ransom demands payable in bitcoin. His lawyer, Przemysław Kral, took over — and spent heavily on football sponsorships, the Polish Olympic Committee and a platform at Davos.

In April 2026, blockchain analysts found the main bitcoin hot wallet had fallen 99.7 percent. Days later Kral told customers their money sat safe in a wallet only the missing founder could unlock. That address had been dormant since 2016. A week after he said it, the website went dark. Nobody has seen him since.

We trace how the exchange worked, what the on-chain record documents, and how the collapse became a Polish political crisis. We label every claim throughout as documented, claimed, or alleged.

Chapters

(00:00) The office nobody ever entered(00:59) What this episode covers(01:41) How the exchange actually worked(03:14) What an Estonian license really bought(04:27) The first disappearance(05:56) Why careful people believed it(06:52) Somebody checks the ledger(08:30) A word on how we're funded(09:17) 511 transfers to one address(11:41) The video, and the second disappearance(13:20) Where the case stands now(15:24) What we still don't know

Sources: Recoveris on-chain case study (28 April 2026); Estonian FIU licence decisions (18 May, 29 June 2026); Polish National Prosecutor's Office statements; Sejm record (17 April 2026); Estonian court filings (27 July 2026). Corroborated against The New York Times, money.pl, Rzeczpospolita, TVN24 and Notes from Poland.

We have independently verified no allegation of Russian state or organized-crime involvement. Those remain political statements with no charges filed, and Kral has called them absurd.

Read the full investigation, with charts and source documents

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If you lost funds with Zondacrypto, we would like to hear from you.

Venezuela pumps more oil than it has in a decade. Its minimum wage buys twenty-seven cents a month. We trace where the money goes, and who actually controls it.

On 3 January 2026, American special forces took Nicolás Maduro out of a Caracas military compound. His deputy, Delcy Rodríguez, took power two days later. Since then Venezuelan crude output has passed 1.1 million barrels a day, and Washington has taken control of the revenue.

Executive Order 14373 placed Venezuelan oil money inside US Treasury accounts. Caracas submits a monthly budget request. The Secretary of State decides whether to approve it. Around $13 billion has moved through that system. Reporters have publicly traced roughly $300 million arriving in Venezuela.

CHAPTERS

00:00 The one-dollar Christmas bonus

01:16 The night the US took Maduro

02:39 The machine Washington built

05:04 The money nobody can find

08:17 Give them this: the oil came back

09:34 The war that pays Venezuela's bills

10:32 Twenty-seven cents

13:13 Three ways this ends

Full article, every figure sourced, free to read: https://veritaseuropaea.com/venezuela-economy-delcy-rodriguez-oil-washington/

Corrections: [email protected]

Ukraine can build $55 billion of weapons in 2026. Its own budget will fund roughly $10 billion.

In four years Ukraine turned a hollowed-out Soviet legacy sector into Europe's fastest-innovating defense industrial base. Drone output went from roughly 3,000 units in 2022 to about 4.5 million in 2025. Ministry figures put capacity growth at fiftyfold.

Then the problem inverted. Ukraine once lacked factories. It now lacks purchase orders.

We examine how the transformation happened, why procurement reform mattered more than engineering, and what could unwind it — the funding gap, Chinese component dependency, and a corruption investigation that has reached the heart of the deep-strike programme.

Chapters

(00:00) The $45 billion gap(00:48) Welcome to The Veritas Brief(01:26) Zero shells: the 2021 baseline(02:32) Improvisation and dispersal(03:36) The rule that built an industry(04:38) From 3,000 drones to 4.5 million(06:05) Interceptors, sea drones, deep strike(08:26) Why we carry no advertising(09:35) Capacity versus contracts(10:36) The Danish model and the fiscal wall(12:17) The 2026 export pivot(13:44) The China component problem(14:59) Fire Point and the corruption shadow(16:52) What Europe actually wants(17:46) The verdict and three markers(18:58) Where to read the full investigation

Full written investigation

Six data visualizations and every source linked

Sources and method

Primary documentation from Ukraine's National Security and Defense Council, the Ministry of Defense, and the 2026 state budget law. Research from the Kyiv School of Economics Institute, RAND Corporation, RUSI, the Centre for Eastern Studies (OSW), and the Centre for Economic Strategy. Reporting from the Kyiv Independent, Ukrainska Pravda, Reuters, Kyiv Post, Defense News, Militarnyi and Lawfare.

On verification

Ukrainian production figures come predominantly from government sources and remain unaudited by independent parties. Wartime security restrictions prevent external verification of most output claims. Treat capacity and volume figures as directional indicators rather than confirmed data.

About

Veritas Europaea publishes slow journalism on European political economy, finance and geopolitics. Reader-funded. No advertising. No party reviewed this work before publication.

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Russia now pays 1.65 million rubles — more than a year's average wage — for a single military contract. And recruitment just hit a three-year low.

So what happens when the Kremlin stops buying soldiers and starts taking them?

Everyone is watching for a Russian mobilization this October, straight after the State Duma elections. Almost all of the coverage treats it as a military question. We think that misses the more interesting one.

In this episode we argue that a new call-up has quietly become a fiscal instrument — a way out of a bidding war the treasury is losing. A contract soldier costs the state 1.65 million rubles before he does anything. A mobilized man costs a summons.

But the cost does not disappear. It moves onto the corporate sector, and from there into inflation.

We also look at who loses in every version of this story: Russia's arms factories, already short between 240,000 and 500,000 workers, competing for the same men as the front. The shortage is specific, not generic. Russia is not short of warm bodies. It is short of turners, CNC operators and design engineers.

We finish with the strongest counter-argument to our own thesis.

The full written analysis, with five charts
veritaseuropaea.eu — recruitment costs, wage data and sectoral labour gaps, every source linked.

Sources include Russian Finance Ministry expenditure data, Bank of Russia publications, Rosstat, SIPRI, Meduza, The Moscow Times and analysis by Janis Kluge at the German Institute for International and Security Affairs.

About Veritas Europaea

We are a reader-funded publication covering European political economy. We carry no advertising and publish no sponsored content. Membership is patronage, not a paywall pass — every article stays open to everyone: veritaseuropaea.eu/membership

Figures on Russian casualties and mobilization scale originate with Ukrainian and Western government sources with obvious interests. We label them as such throughout.

On 20 January 2029, Donald Trump leaves the White House. The Twenty-Second Amendment sends him home, and a political party finds out what it actually is.

Most coverage of this asks who comes next. We think that question is too small. The harder one runs underneath it: what survives when the organising principle walks out the door?

In this episode we examine four fault lines.

One. The party became a personalist vehicle, and personalist vehicles transfer authority badly.

Two. The working-class coalition of 2024 is softening exactly where it was supposed to be strongest. A survey of 1,940 Trump voters found the waverers concentrated among the poorest, not the wealthiest.

Three. The Iran war split the movement openly, and no platform resolves it.

Four. The succession contest itself, where neither frontrunner inherits the coalition intact.

We close on the European stake. No plausible successor reverses the transatlantic trajectory, which means waiting out 2028 is not a strategy.

This is analysis rather than advocacy. We describe an argument inside American politics without taking a side in it.

Full written analysis, with five charts and 22 linked sources: https://www.veritaseuropaea.eu/blog/2026/08/13/the-republican-party-after-trump-four-fault-lines-that-decide-what-comes-next/

The Veritas Brief comes from Veritas Europaea, a reader-funded publication covering European political economy, finance and geopolitics. We carry no advertising and no sponsored content.

Membership: https://www.veritaseuropaea.eu/registrace/?subscription_plan=82&single_plan=yes

We correct our errors openly: [email protected]

Apollo agreed to buy easyJet at 715p a share. The board said yes. The founder said yes. The market still won't pay it.

On 6 August 2026, Apollo Global Management won a ten-week bidding war for easyJet, valuing the airline at roughly £5.7 billion. Castlelake withdrew. The board recommended the offer unanimously. Sir Stelios Haji-Ioannou backed it and elected to roll his family's entire 15.3% stake into the new owner rather than take cash.

And yet the shares still trade at a wide discount to the offer.

That gap prices roughly a one-in-four chance the deal never completes — on a recommended, all-cash, founder-backed scheme that would normally close more than nine times out of ten. We went looking for the reason and found it in Brussels, not London.

This episode covers the deal terms, the fight with Castlelake, why the Iran war made easyJet cheap enough to buy, the ownership structure Apollo built to satisfy EU control rules, the European Commission review that knocked 12% off the stock in a single session, and what the merger arbitrage spread is really telling investors.

We also cover the part almost nobody mentions: at current levels you risk roughly three units to win one.

Full written investigation, with charts and data: https://veritaseuropaea.eu/apollo-easyjet-takeover-merger-arbitrage-spread/

Veritas Europaea carries no advertising and takes no sponsorship. Readers and listeners fund everything we publish. Free newsletter and membership at https://veritaseuropaea.eu

Sources: Apollo Rule 2.7 announcement (6 August 2026); easyJet plc FY25 results and Q3 FY26 trading update; Reuters, 22 July 2026.

We publish analysis, not investment recommendations. Merger arbitrage can lose money suddenly and substantially. Verify live prices and consult a regulated adviser before acting. Neither the author nor Veritas Europaea holds a position in easyJet, Apollo or Castlelake. Prices calculated as at the close of 7 August 2026

Twenty years after Roberto Calvi was found hanging under a London bridge, forensic experts looked at his hands — and found no trace of the bricks he was supposed to have carried.

In the final part of our special investigation into Banco Ambrosiano, we follow "God's Banker" through his last nine days: the desperate letter to Pope John Paul II, the missing $1.4 billion, and his flight across Europe under a false name and into the hands of the underworld. We lay out the forensic case that turned a suicide ruling into a murder finding. We sit through the 2005–2007 Rome trial that ended with a killing confirmed and every defendant acquitted. And we watch the Vatican's endgame — a settlement it swore was not an admission, and an archbishop shielded by sovereignty who never stood trial.

The Veritas Brief is the podcast from Veritas Europaea — reader-funded, with no outside advertising. Read the full written investigation at veritaseuropaea.eu

New here? Start the series under Blackfriars Bridge with Part One.

On a single day, the Vatican Bank signed two letters. One told international lenders the money was good. The other, handed over in private, said the exact opposite.

In Part Three of our special investigation into Banco Ambrosiano, we open up the machine. We walk down through the offshore structure that made the fraud possible — a Luxembourg holding company, banks in Switzerland, the Bahamas and Peru, and ten empty shell companies in Panama and Nicaragua that let a bank secretly buy its own stock. We watch two honest Italian regulators destroyed for inspecting it too closely. And we count down Roberto Calvi's final year: the conviction he survived, the reformer who lasted 61 days, and the moment three decades of construction had just three months left to live.

The Veritas Brief is the podcast from Veritas Europaea — reader-funded, with no outside advertising. Read the full written investigation, including a diagram of the money machine, at veritaseuropaea.eu

Missed the earlier parts? Start under Blackfriars Bridge with Part One.

Next time, the final part: the letter to the Pope, the flight from Italy, and the nine days that ended under a London bridge.

A lawyer is shot on his doorstep hours after briefing investigators. A financier dies drinking poisoned coffee in his prison cell. And police raid a villa to find a secret list of 962 names reaching into the top of the Italian state.

In Part Two of our special investigation into Banco Ambrosiano, we meet the three men Roberto Calvi chose to stand beside: Michele Sindona, the Sicilian financier who taught him the game; Archbishop Paul Marcinkus, who turned the Vatican Bank into the perfect partner for money moving in the dark; and Licio Gelli, the former fascist whose secret P2 lodge reached into parliament, the military, the courts, and the press.

The Veritas Brief is the podcast from Veritas Europaea — reader-funded, with no outside advertising. Read the full written investigation at https://veritaseuropaea.eu

Missed Part One? Go back and start under Blackfriars Bridge.

Next time: the letters of comfort, the offshore shell companies, and the moment the whole structure ran out of road.

A meticulous banker vanishes from Italy. Nine days later, he's found hanging beneath Blackfriars Bridge in London, his pockets stuffed with cash and bricks. They called him "God's Banker."

In Part One of this special investigation, we stand under the bridge where the official "suicide" verdict quietly fell apart, go back to 1896 and the founding of a Catholic bank named for a saint, and meet Roberto Calvi — the secretive man who climbed to the top of Italian finance and then reached for a partner more powerful than any regulator: the Vatican.

The Veritas Brief is the podcast from Veritas Europaea — reader-funded, with no outside advertising. Read the full written investigation at veritaseuropaea.eu

Next time: the Vatican, a secret masonic lodge, and the missing money that ties it all together.