The Public Prosecutor’s Office launched an investigation into unlawful surveillance in hotels of the Polish Hotel Holding and the passing of information by the President of PHH to a Law and Justice (PiS) MP about a meeting of opposition politicians in one of the hotels managed by the said holding company.
“I was in such a shock that I did not even realise that one of the police officers served me, in one go, a summons to appear for an interrogation relating to completely different proceedings. I am to be a witness in a case of abuse of powers by a senior government official,” Robert Ziółkowski told Wyborcza.
As we have verified, this official is Maciej Wąsik, the deputy head of the Ministry of Internal Affairs and Administration (MSWiA) during the Law and Justice (PiS) government and, until recently, an MP of this party who had been convicted in court for abuses in the special services and, having spent 12 days in prison, has been pardoned by President Duda.
On 24 January 2024, the District Public Prosecutor’s Office in Warsaw launched an investigation into the “commissioning, during the period from 2019 to 2021, of unlawful surveillance by an identified Deputy Coordinator of Special Services (zastępca koordynatora służb specjalnych) and the Secretary of State at the Ministry of the Internal Affairs and Administration (MSWiA)”. In the period 2019–2021, this function was performed by Wąsik.
Surveillance of Kramek and Cristescu’s e-mail to Brudziński
Ziółkowski was the head of the security division at PHH. He worked closely with Cristescu and, as a supporter of the Law and Justice (PiS) party, he was politically associated with Wąsik. He left PHH because, as he said, he did not want to give his consent to the surveillance of political opponents of Law and Justice (PiS) who were staying as guests in hotels managed by the holding company. He claims that, with Cristescu’s knowledge and consent, Wąsik ordered him to gather information concerning Bartosz Kramek, co-founder of the Open Dialogue Foundation that opposed the Law and Justice (PiS) party. This involved bugging rooms, conveying credit card data and even searching rooms in Kramek’s absence. The activist was treated in the same way as those suspected of terrorism and organised crime.
Ziółkowski refused and, when he left PHH, he met with Kramek and gave a statement before a notary about the methods employed against the activist.
THE STATEMENT GIVEN BY ROBERT Z. BEFORE A NOTARY
READ THE FULL TEXT OF THE STATEMENT HERE
This affair was disclosed by Wyborcza in April 2023. In the article “Bugged Hotels” (Pol. Hotele na podsłuchu) we described Kramek’s surveillance and wrote that it was not the one and only such case. On 9 September 2020, Cristescu informed Law and Justice (PiS) MP Joachim Brudziński about a meeting to be held between Civic Platform MPs and Belarusian opposition leader Svetlana Tikhanovskaya on the following day at the Marriott Hotel at the Okęcie Airport in Warsaw (the hotel is managed by PHH). Cristescu sent an email to Brudziński with the details of the meeting and information about the security measures for the participants. In the e-mail, he mentioned that the meeting would be attended by a ‘sanitary doctor’. In the informal jargon of the special services this means that either a wiretap was set up in the room where the talks were to take place or that agents of the Internal Security Agency (ABW) would be amongst the staff.
Prosecution against the whistleblower
After our publication, both Kramek and the Civic Platform MPs who attended the meeting filed criminal complaints. The prosecution did not take any action.
Instead, it began to prosecute Ziółkowski on the basis of a complaint filed by Cristescu. As a result, the whistleblower who spoke openly in the media and even addressed a group of Civil Platform MPs in the Sejm who collected information about abuses of power, has been ordered by a court not to disclose what he was doing at PHH.
The search on Thursday was yet another phase of his problems. The prosecution asserted that it had to conduct the search, “The investigation that had been suspended was resumed […] as a result of receiving the anticipated criminal analysis. Procedural tasks are being performed in the case with a view to gathering evidence. As part of these tasks, a search of the residential premises of R. Z. and the securing of equipment was ordered based on the decision of 22 January 2024. The police were instructed to conduct the search and executed it on 1 February 2024. This date has not been set by the prosecutor in charge of the proceedings.”
The prosecution did not answer when asked whether Ziolkowski should not be offered special treatment as a whistleblower. We have only been assured that these two cases, i.e. the investigation against Ziółkowski and the investigation that followed, among other things, Ziółkowski’s disclosure have nothing to do with each other.
Robert Ziolkowski has filed a complaint against the decision to seize equipment.
Skeletons are coming out of the closet
The investigation into the bugged hotels, which was launched on 24 January, is yet another investigation of a scandalous affair following the investigation into Orlen’s sale of its shares in Lotos, which stood no chance of being completed under the Law and Justice (PiS) government. Criminal complaints that were inconvenient to those then in power and that were filed after publications by independent media were either held back for years without any substantive decisions being made, or were declared by the public prosecution as lacking grounds and discontinued. Now these cases are being resumed.
One of them is the PHH scandal brought to light by the Wyborcza daily. We read in the notice from the Public Prosecutor’s Office that the investigation is not only about Maciej Wąsik ordering surveillance of Bartosz Kramek; the Public Prosecutor’s Office also intends to clarify the conveying of information about the meeting between Civic Platform MPs and Tikhanovskaya and to establish why Cristescu informed Brudziński about the meeting.
To clarify the case, the investigation will have to involve not only verifying what Ziółkowski has said, or interviewing Cristescu, Brudziński or Wąsik. Some of the information relating to the case is in the e-mail messages of Michał Dworczyk, the former head of the Chancellery of the Prime Minister and one of Mateusz Morawiecki’s closest associates, currently a PiS MP. The contents of his private mail, which he used for official purposes, have been copied by persons unknown to this day and remain available online at the Poufnarozmowa.top site since July 2021.
At one point, the email correspondence of Brudziński and Orlen CEO Daniel Obajtek appeared there. None of the three of them, i.e. Dworczyk, Obajtek and Brudziński, have ever confirmed that the emails were genuine. This was a way to avoid answering questions about the content of the disclosed messages. The same applied to the information about Tikhanovskaya’s meeting with Civic Platform MPs. Cristescu and Brudziński either did not want to comment on the subject at all or wrote that they would not comment on ‘false content’ or ‘content obtained by criminal means, as to which there is no certainty whether it is true’. This paralleled the narrative adopted by the PiS Party as to the email scandal. It was being pointed out that it was Russia that was behind the leak and that quoting the Poufnarozmowa.top site meant ‘supporting a Russian disinformation campaign’.
The Russian connection has never been credibly proven. At the same time, the publications of the Poufnarozmowa.top site revealed dozens of cases discrediting or ridiculing the former government. Already in March 2023, the prosecution launched an investigation into secret information sent to Dworczyk’s mail by his military affairs advisor, col. Krzysztof Gaja. Now, the investigation into bugged hotels indirectly confirms that Cristescu passed the information about the meeting with Tikhanovskaya to Brudziński.
Earlier, even the management of the Marriott chain whose hotels are operated by PHH in Poland did not react to the evidence disclosed by the Wyborcza daily. “Our franchisee has assured us that the allegations are unfounded,” wrote Liza Ravenscroft, Marriott International Director of Communications for Europe, after our publication. In response to questions from Wyborcza, the Marriott representative said, “As a corporation, we take the privacy of our guests and business customers very seriously and make every effort to ensure that everyone receives a warm welcome.”
Source: wyborcza.pl
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