“An audit of all cases handled by the Regional Prosecutor’s Office in Lublin is underway,” the new head of this institution, Cezary Maj, tells Wyborcza. Among them are the cases concerning Roman Giertych, brother of the police chief, the VAT affair and former PKP President Jakub Karnowski.
The head of the Provincial Prosecutor’s Office in Lublin, Jerzy Ziarkiewicz, a trustee of Ziobro, was dismissed by the new state prosecutor on Monday 29 January. A few days earlier, we described how he had kept investigations unfavourable to PiS politicians in a “freezer” for years. Some of the prosecution material, we revealed, was kept in the garage belonging to the Prosecutor’s Office in Lublin on Okopowa Street, which resulted in a scandal.
Three days after Ziarkiewicz resigned, so too did two of his closest colleagues — Robert Malicki, the head of the Regional Public Prosecutor’s Office in Lublin, and his counterpart from Zamość, Mariusz Rymarz. Both did so in such a hurry that their spokespersons were unaware of the resignations.
Tremours in Ziarkiewicz’s Prosecutor’s Office, closest associates dismissed
Yesterday, the new head of the Provincial Prosecutor’s Office in Lublin, Cezary Maj, appointed the successors of Malicki and Rymarz. Grzegorz Trusiewicz became the new Regional Prosecutor in Lublin, and Miroslaw Buczek in Zamość.
Trusiewicz has been a prosecutor since 2003. He worked in the Lublin-Północ and Lublin-Południe District Prosecutor’s Offices as a so-called “line investigator”. He was head of the District Prosecutor’s Office in Ryk and also worked in the Regional Prosecutor’s Office in Lublin, including in the investigative division, where the most serious proceedings took place.
Buczek has been an investigator since 1990. In the 1990s, he tracked down organised crime in the Voivode Prosecutor’s Office in Lublin (the equivalent of today’s Regional Office). Before 2016, he was deputy head of the Regional Prosecutor’s Office in Zamość before being demoted to an ordinary prosecutor.
Transformations also took place at the Provincial Prosecutor’s Office in Lublin. On Thursday, Ziarkiewicz’s closest associates said goodbye to their posts there. Among others, the head of the Economic Crimes Department Bartosz Wójcik, and Jaroslaw Król, head of the Financial and Tax Crimes Department.
Andrzej Markowski, prior to 2015 deputy head of the Appellate Prosecutor’s Office in Lublin (the previous name of the Provincial Prosecutor’s office) has become the new head of the Economic Crimes Department, and Ewa Niczyporuk has become the head of the Financial and Tax Crimes Department.
They will investigate how Ziarkiewicz got the brother of the police chief out of custody.
It is prosecutor Ewa Niczyporuk who is leading the high-profile investigation into the mafia defrauding the treasury. One of the suspects there is Łukasz Sz., a businessman from Gliwice, brother of the police chief under the PiS rule, Jarosław Szymczyk (2016–2023).
Lukasz Sz. was arrested by investigators together with two comrades in November 2022. When the court of first instance did not authorise his arrest on procedural grounds, prosecutor Niczyporuk appealed the decision to the court of second instance.
And then, as revealed by Wyborcza in January 2023, Ziarkiewicz, head of the Provincial Prosecutor’s Office in Lublin, stepped in. He instructed prosecutor Niczyporuk to withdraw the arrest motion, but only against Łukasz Sz. The Prosecutor did not agree to this and asked for a decision in writing, and Ziarkiewicz complied. A note to this effect is available in the investigation documents.
As a result, two of Lukasz Sz.’s detained comrades ended up in custody for months. Only the police chief’s brother avoided custody. In total, his gang defrauded the state treasury of approximately PLN 40 million. Ten entrepreneurs faced charges in the case, but only the police chief’s brother escaped arrest.
It was only after a series of articles by Wyborcza that Ziarkiewicz, in a panic, began to clean up the case, setting a million-zloty bail bond for Łukasz Sz., though he only paid PLN 400,000.
Ziarkiewicz prosecutes attorney Giertych. Was it on Kaczynski’s orders?
On Thursday, in an interview with Wyborcza, the new head of the Provincial Prosecutor’s Office in Lublin, Cezary Maj, announced that an audit of all registered cases in this institution during the time when Jerzy Ziarkiewicz was its head had begun.
In addition to the case regarding the VAT carousel and the brother of the police chief, prosecutors will examine the files of the investigation with attorney Roman Giertych, for several years public enemy number one of Jarosław Kaczyński and the entire Law and Justice party.
It concerns the property development company Polnord and the alleged misappropriation of PLN 92 million. Initially, the case was handled by the Prosecutor’s Office in Warsaw. It terminated the investigation, failing to find a crime. When PiS came to power in 2015, the proceedings were reopened and transferred to Wrocław. But after a series of court defeats by the Prosecutor’s Office there, the proceedings were transferred to Lublin.
The investigation relates to the same case in which Giertych was detained by the Central Anticorruption Bureau in October 2020. According to Ziarkiewicz’s Prosecutor’s Office, Giertych acted to the detriment of the listed company Polnord, for which his law firm worked in the early 2000s.
The Prosecutor’s Office in Lublin wanted to arrest Giertych because he did not appear for questioning. “I was summoned to the Prosecutor’s Office to appear due to additional charges. I could not agree to this, because there are no charges against me, and if so, there is nothing to supplement,” Giertych explained in 2021 in an interview with Wyborcza.
At the beginning of 2022, the Prosecutor’s Office in Lublin requested Giertych’s arrest, but at the end of March that year, the Lublin-Zachód District Court ruled unequivocally that the investigators’ motion was completely unfounded.
However, the Provincial Prosecutor’s Office in Lublin challenged this decision. As a result, in April 2022, the case was taken up by the Regional Court in Lublin. “The decision of the District Court was upheld. The court found that there were no circumstances that would indicate any likelihood of a crime,” lawyer Jakub Wende explained in an interview with Wyborcza. And he added: “The Prosecutor’s Office should issue a decision to immediately discontinue these proceedings.”
The case in Ziarkiewicz’s prosecution was hushed up, but only until September 2023. It resurfaced after a year and a half, when Giertych announced his intention to run in the Sejm elections as part of the Civic Coalition from the same Kielce district where PiS president Jarosław Kaczyński was the only candidate. It was at that point that Ziarkiewicz’s prosecution decided to bring new charges against Giertych. However, this did not eventually happen.
Allegations against former Central Anticorruption Bureau chief Pawel Wojtunik. “A frivolous case”
Another case that will be audited concerns alleged irregularities supposedly committed by Paweł Wojtunik, head of the Central Anticorruption Bureau under the PO-PSL government. It concerns the defrauding of PLN 12,000 in due VAT. Wojtunik heard the charges in this case in 2021.
The charges presented to Paweł Wojtunik concerned misleading customs and tax officers by pretending to be a person not permanently residing in the EU, and thus entitled to a tax benefit.
At the time, Ziarkiewicz’s Prosecutor’s Office stated that Paweł Wojtunik deceived the customs and tax authorities by declaring the documents issued to be untrue and then used these documents for the “Tax Free” VAT reimbursement, after which he declared the export of over 64,000 PLN worth of goods outside the EU border.
“Thus, according to the conclusions of the investigation, Paweł Wojtunik fraudulently obtained almost 12,000 PLN in illegal VAT reimbursement. Paweł Wojtunik crossed the border of the Republic of Poland as an advisor to high-level EU bodies, using a diplomatic passport obtained while still in public office,” explains the then-spokesperson for Ziarkiewicz’s Prosecutor’s Office.
“The prosecution claims that I committed tax fraud. Meanwhile, I am entitled to this reimbursement because I live permanently in Moldova,” retorted Wojtunik. And he found the prosecutor’s allegations “frivolous”.
Investigation against former PKP President. The allegations are already five years old
That’s not all, as the former President of Polish State Railways (PKP) in 2012–15 (under the PO-PSL coalition government) Jakub Karnowski also has a case in the Provincial Prosecutor’s Office in Lublin. Today he is an advisor to the Ukrainian government on the restructuring of Ukrainian railways.
In March 2019, Ziarkiewicz’s Prosecutor’s Office filed charges against him in connection with his involvement in the purchase of the Czech rail freight operator AWT. PKP Cargo was alleged to have lost more than PLN 200 million on this transaction.
Karnowski believes that the price was not inflated but was in line with the evaluation prepared by the PKO BP Brokerage House, later confirmed by the consulting firm EY. “The point of the transaction is now being undermined by the opinion of one person, whose name I will not mention, but about whose experience nothing is known. According to his LinkedIn profile, we only know that he was a senior clerk at the FSA (Financial Supervision Authority) — and now works at Zarzecki & Partners, a private consulting company in Szczecin,” Karnowski told Wyborcza in 2019.
Although it will soon be five years since Jakub Karnowski was charged, the case is still ongoing in Ziarkiewicz’s prosecution.
Ziarkiewicz’s Prosecutor’s Office is prosecuting Bartosz Kramek of the Open Dialogue Foundation
Another case to be scrutinised concerns Bartosz Kramek.
Kramek is an opposition activist and one of the founders of the Open Dialogue Foundation (ODF), which is engaged in supporting defenders of democracy in Poland, Russia and Ukraine. Led by his wife Lyudmyla Kozlovska, the Foundation has a strong influence on public opinion in Europe.
In the past, ODF has, among other things, provided aid to Ukraine (providing protective equipment and helmets) fighting Russian aggression. Since 2017, Kramek and Kozlovska have been involved in the fight for civil liberties in Poland. They took part in actions of the Free Courts initiative, protests in defence of the constitution and the Women’s Strike.
Bartosz Kramek was detained on 23 June 2021. Investigators charged him with making false statements with the aim of achieving financial gain. The charges related to the years 2012–16 and alleged VAT invoices issued for unspecified consultancy services.
However, three weeks later, the ODF activist was released. This was decided by the court. To this day, the case is still pending in the Provincial Prosecutor’s Office in Lublin.
During the audit of Ziarkiewicz’s cases, investigators will also look into the issue of prosecution documents kept in the garage of the Prosecutor’s Office in Lublin on Okopowa Street.
Source: wyborcza.pl
