The Law and Justice (PiS) losing power did not result in an automatic re-establishment of the rule of law and in the prosecution enforcing accountability vis-à-vis the perpetrators. Even within the prosecution, the Ziobro system persists and resists change.
The Open Dialogue Foundation (ODF) had requested the National Public Prosecutor’s Office to review criminal proceedings that may have a political background. The review and verification of these proceedings was announced by Prosecutor General Adam Bodnar in February, following a public appeal initiated by ODF and signed by dozens of NGOs and public figures.
The National Public Prosecutor’s Office has recently responded to our request. We learned that on 16 August, National Prosecutor Dariusz Korneluk ordered the appointment of a team “to examine investigations of public interest”. Wojciech Czuchnowski reported this on Gazeta Wyborcza.
The final report is expected by 30 November, including recommendations intended to both discontinue the investigations and hold the prosecutors accountable.
This news should come as cause for celebration — better late than never after all. However, the conclusions reached by the Department for Combating Economic Crime which reviewed the proceedings are surprising. According to information shared by the National Public Prosecutor’s Office: no irregularities were found in the high-profile and highly controversial proceedings conducted by Ziobro’s most zealous prosecutors.
The National Public Prosecutor’s Office ensures that “the independence and autonomy of the prosecutors handling individual cases is upheld”. This sounds bizarre — tough to respect the independence of those who have given it up themselves in pursuit of Ziobro’s and Kaczynski’s political expectations.
For eight years, the Prosecutor’s Office guaranteed not only impunity for officials of the PiS government and an instrument of its repression, but also the services becoming a tool in their arsenal. One would assume that such practices would end following the change of government at the end of last year. However, numerous politically motivated investigations into the PiS era continue. In the majority of cases, prosecutors in charge of those cases remain the prosecutors who have been discredited.
Many people who have been wronged by the previous government are still waiting for justice, including activists, journalists, local government officials, opposition politicians, random victims, and even managers and entrepreneurs with dramatic stories of prolonged detentions to exert pressure, leading to family tragedies and damaged reputations. Examples include:
Piotr Osiecki
This investor was illegally deprived of liberty for 16 months — three times on the same charges.
His company Altus TFI, a competitor to state-owned investment funds PKO BP and PZU, lost up to 94% of its capitalisation (largely as a result of false and hysterical reports from some media outlets) and a hefty contract to manage the assets of Norway’s sovereign wealth fund. When Osiecki was put into custody, he was offered to hand over his business to one of the state banking groups for PLN 1. The numerous shocking violations in this case were highlighted by his defence attorney Katarzyna Szwarc.
Przemysław Krych
Founder of Griffin Real Estate, investor, and philanthropist, he was arrested and jailed for 6 months as a result of rejecting an offer of a bribe worth EUR 1.5 million made by a shady middleman claiming to have influence at the top of the Central Anti-Corruption Bureau (CBA). After release from jail, he learned that the solution for his problems could be a dinner with ‘Zbyszek and Patrycja’ Ziobro.
While in jail, he was threatened by CBA agents posing as inmates, who demanded to incriminate opposition mayors of major cities. When he told this in an interview, Katowice prosecutor Agnieszka Wichary initiated an investigation into ‘fabricating false evidence’.
Tomasz Misiak
The discredited Szczecin prosecutor Artur Maludy attempted to charge the founder of Work Service with half of the criminal code — from extortion to paedophilia — using the businessman’s tumultuous divorce case (Misiak’s ex-wife’s father was an old friend of Adam Lipiński, then vice-president of the Law and Justice party).
In that same case, the head of the Confederation Lewiatan, and Misiak’s business partner, Maciej Witucki, critical towards the Law and Justice (PiS) government, was also hit by ricochet (likely being a target himself in the first place). He was detained (what a coincidence!) in 2022 on the opening day of the annual EFNI conference in Sopot, Lewiatan’s flagship event.
Maciej Bodnar
Waste disposal and recycling entrepreneur Maciej Bodnar received absurd charges after Robert Raczynski, the mayor of Lubin who is hostile to him, announced that he would use his influence with the law enforcement authorities in Katowice. And indeed — Bodnar and his accomplices were detained by the Internal Security Agency (ABW) dispatched by a special department of the National Prosecutor’s Office in Katowice.
Michał Lubiński
The Silesian entrepreneur, known in the defence sector as an efficient supplier of equipment for the special forces, was a thorn in the side of state competition. Despite an earlier in-depth verification by the services, which was necessary for his company to receive a concession, and after many years of cooperation with the Polish Army, the ABW under the Law and Justice, found that Lubinski ‘does not provide security guarantees’. We should add that, at the same time, he was certified by the US Department of Defence as a representative of American arms companies in Poland. The ABW’s assessment excluded him from participating in public procurement tenders. Why? The reasons remain unknown.
The military Prosecutor’s Office, restructured by Ziobro, also joined the cause, accusing Lubiński of bribing the officers that Lubiński knew on a personal level. This was to be achieved through discounts worth several hundred zlotys for the purchase of collector’s weapons. In reality, the allegedly ‘bribed’ officers had no influence on the tenders in which Lubiński competed.
Rafał Markiewicz
This Lublin start-up founder, which received awards for his projects related to the digitalisation of recycling processes, found itself in the crosshairs of prosecutor Jerzy Ziarkiewicz in Lublin. Accused of embezzling subsidies, he was given an unconventional offer: his case at the Prosecutor’s Office would be dropped if he gave any testimony incriminating one of Poland’s leading entrepreneurs, whose business had been targeted by the Polish Post Office.
Markiewicz’s troubles began after the Law and Justice took power in the Lublin Voivodeship Sejmik and the local enterprise support office came under its control, suddenly finding irregularities in connection with the subsidies given to his company. The result was the detention of 12 people (including apprentices at the company), charges, arrests and prosecution for involvement in an organised crime group. Markiewicz now runs a business in the Netherlands.
The same measures were adopted against two other entrepreneurs from Lublin, who received similar proposals. A prominent scientist, Professor Tadeusz Uhl from the AGH University of Science and Technology, was also detained and blackmailed, and paid the price by suffering a severe heart attack.
These examples are just the tip of the iceberg. Even if the old political investigations lost momentum after the Law and Justice party lost power, the as-yet-unrevoked charges and indictments are causing a number of negative consequences for the wrongly accused.
The Bermuda Triangle in Katowice
The situation in Katowice is particularly worrying. The Silesian Branch, which is part of the Department of Organised Crime and Corruption of the National Prosecutor’s Office, was known as ‘Ziobro’s assault squad’. For incomprehensible reasons, this branch is still headed by the discredited prosecutor Daniel Lerman, and from the letter we received, it appears that the investigations there have not been subject to any review.
After all, it was in Katowice that proceedings were conducted against entrepreneurs Przemysław Krych and Maciej Bodnar, the former head of the Warsaw Stock Exchange and deputy treasury minister Paweł Tamborski or the former head of PGE Krzysztof Kilian. It is from Katowice that former National Prosecutor Bogdan Święczkowski and many of his protégés originate, including Andrzej Stróżny and Grzegorz Ocieczek, at one time senior officers of the Internal Security Agency (ABW) and former heads of the CBA. The prosecution of Grzegorz Ocieczek in connection with Barbara Blida’s tragic death was called for by the parliamentary investigative committee in 2011. It also found that Stróżny had given false testimony during the hearings before it. The abuses accompanying their careers in the following years — as in the case of their principals, Ziobro and Święczkowski — exemplify the thesis that impunity emboldens perpetrators and has a demoralising effect on others. And not only in the past. Even now, seeing the tardiness of the settlements, many prosecutors and officers, including in the National Public Prosecutor’s Office, have adopted a ‘wait-and-see’ tactic.
Why does the Department of Organised Crime function like a state within a state? Why does the National Public Prosecutor’s Office dodge questions about prosecutor Lerman and his actions?
Within the Prosecutor’s Office itself, one can hear an off-the-cuff sarcastic opinion: ‘Bodnar on top, Ziobro on the bottom’. The information we officially received from the National Public Prosecutor’s Office unfortunately seems to confirm this diagnosis.
Source: wyborcza.pl
