An analysis of the Special Services’ actions in the Amber Gold case

his article examines the issue of the measures taken by the intelligence agencies in the Amber Gold case. The main hypothesis is as follows: the tools and powers available to the intelligence agencies enabled the early detection of the large-scale fraud committed by the owners of the companies in the Amber Gold group. The main source used in this article was the available documents of the Sejm Committee of Inquiry, which was established to investigate the legality and regularity of the actions taken by the public bodies and authorities towards entities within the Amber Gold Group. The supplementary literature consisted of articles by investigative journalists covering the fraud, as well as literature on economic and financial security, the operation of shadow banking systems, and pyramid schemes. In the process of analyzing and interpreting the above sources, the comparative and historical methods, as well as institutional-legal analysis, were applied. The aim of this contribution was to present the failures and errors in the measures taken by intelligence agencies and the possible reasons for their astonishing passiveness towards the Amber Gold Group. The company's very large-scale operation and the considerable scope of the fraud indicate that the fraud could not have gone unnoticed by the intelligence agencies. In this contribution, attention is drawn to interesting elements not investigated by the agencies and to the significant inaccuracies in the testimony of individual witnesses. It is concluded that decisive and immediate action by the intelligence agencies would have enabled the identification of the pyramid scheme mechanism at an early stage, or even prevented its creation. Further investigations into this topic are unlikely, due to the length of time that has passed since these events occurred.