Poland’s Prime Minister Donald Tusk has said that all instances of “theft within the procedures” carried out when the previous Law and Justice (PiS) party was in power will be investigated by the country’s prosecutor general.
The privately-owned news website Onet.pl published a piece allegedly exposing past cases of fraudulent behavior by members of the country’s previous government, now the main opposition camp.
It wrote, “during the rule of PiS, the government entered into a peculiar alliance with Paweł Szopa, the owner of a clothing company called Red is Bad, aimed at embezzling public money at a scale not seen before.”
According to the website, “for [the former Prime Minister Mateusz] Morawiecki’s team, the businessman became a provider of things of all sorts — from safety gear during the [COVID-19] pandemic to power generators for the time of war.”
Onet said that in the course of the three years of cooperation between Morawiecki’s cabinet and Szopa, transfers amounting to 500 million złotys (€116.72 million) were made to the businessman’s bank account, and the contracts between him and Poland’s Government Strategic Reserves Agency (RARS) were signed without conducting a tender.
The case has been investigated since the middle of 2023 by the Central Anti-Corruption Bureau (CBA), and the offices belonging to both Szopa and RARS were searched in December.
The situation was addressed by Tusk on Monday via a post on X, formerly Twitter.
“They had to benefit even on power generators for Ukraine!” he wrote. “The prosecutor general’s job will be to investigate all instances of ‘theft within the procedures.’ This Russian hoax used by PiS on a huge scale will not be a ‘get out of jail free’ card in Poland.”
It wrote, “during the rule of PiS, the government entered into a peculiar alliance with Paweł Szopa, the owner of a clothing company called Red is Bad, aimed at embezzling public money at a scale not seen before.”
According to the website, “for [the former Prime Minister Mateusz] Morawiecki’s team, the businessman became a provider of things of all sorts — from safety gear during the [COVID-19] pandemic to power generators for the time of war.”
Onet said that in the course of the three years of cooperation between Morawiecki’s cabinet and Szopa, transfers amounting to 500 million złotys (€116.72 million) were made to the businessman’s bank account, and the contracts between him and Poland’s Government Strategic Reserves Agency (RARS) were signed without conducting a tender.
The case has been investigated since the middle of 2023 by the Central Anti-Corruption Bureau (CBA), and the offices belonging to both Szopa and RARS were searched in December.
The situation was addressed by Tusk on Monday via a post on X, formerly Twitter.
“They had to benefit even on power generators for Ukraine!” he wrote. “The prosecutor general’s job will be to investigate all instances of ‘theft within the procedures.’ This Russian hoax used by PiS on a huge scale will not be a ‘get out of jail free’ card in Poland.”
Na agregatach dla Ukrainy też musieli zarobić! Zadaniem Prokuratora Generalnego będzie sprawdzenie wszystkich przypadków “kradzieży zgodnej z procedurami”. Ten rosyjski patent stosowany przez PiS na wielką skalę nie będzie w Polsce patentem na bezkarność.
— Donald Tusk (@donaldtusk) June 3, 2024
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