Poland Charges 62 Former Government Officials With Misuse of Funds

Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk gestures during a press statement with German Chancellor Olaf Scholz and French President Emmanuel Macron, ahead of a trilateral meeting at the Chancellery in Berlin, Germany, on March 15, 2024. (Annegret Hilse/Reuters)

Poland has charged 62 officials from the former government with offenses relating to misuse of funds, Prime Minister Donald Tusk announced on Friday.

“After six months, we have 62 people from the previous ruling elite who have been charged. This has never happened in history before our predecessors,” Tusk said on Friday.

“Notifications were submitted to the prosecutor’s office about the possibility of crimes having been committed involving more than 3.2 billion zlotys ($810 million).”

Tusk said 200 tax inspectors were investigating 90 different units in 17 ministries and he claimed the scale of potential irregularities had been estimated by the tax office at up to 100 billion zlotys ($25.23 billion).

The right-of-center Law and Justice (PiS) party has repeatedly denied any wrongdoing.

Tusk, 67, took over as prime minister in December 2023 after cobbling together a coalition of three left-wing parties, which gave them the numbers to outvote the PiS that had been in power since 2015.

Although PiS won the most seats—194—in the Polish parliament it did not have a majority, and former prime minister Mateusz Morawiecki was eventually ousted by Tusk, whose Civic Coalition (KO) won 157 seats.

Tusk—who was prime minister from 2007 until 2014 and then President of the European Council—went into partnership with two other progressive groups, Third Way and The Left.

Since taking over, Tusk has promised to hold to account those from Morawiecki’s government.

Tusk claimed the PiS had created a “closed system” that had worked on the assumption that they would never lose power.

Morawiecki posted a statement on X on Friday saying: “A closed system rules Poland today, and the lies of its leader have one goal: To eliminate the largest opposition party in Poland and cover up the issue of the liquidation of CPK [a major air and rail infrastructure project], nuclear power or horrendous price increases that will drain the pockets of citizens.”

Prior to Friday, seven people have been charged in an investigation into alleged misuse of funds managed by the justice ministry, and the Supreme Audit Office (NIK) has notified prosecutors that Morawiecki may have acted to the detriment of public interest by granting subsidies to various municipal authorities.

PiS was founded by identical twins Lech and Jarosław Kaczyński, who garnered support from the Catholic Church and from conservative traditionalists in Poland.

In April 2010 Lech Kaczyński, who was then Poland’s president, died in a plane crash near Smolensk airport as he traveled to mark the 70th anniversary of the Katyn massacre, in which 20,000 Polish officers were murdered by Soviet troops on the order of Stalin.

His brother Jarosław, who is now 79, was prime minister between 2006 and 2007 and was deputy prime minister as recently as November 2023.

When it was in power PiS was accused by the European Union of increasing state control over the judiciary and undermining the freedom of the media.

Poland took over the chairmanship of the four-member Visegrád Group last month, but Tusk has little in common politically with the prime ministers of Hungary or Slovakia, Viktor Orban and Robert Fico.

Both Orban and Fico—who survived an assassination attempt in May—have been accused by their opponents of being too friendly with Russia’s President, Vladimir Putin.

In a statement on the Polish government website, the group said, “Poland’s assumption of V4 [Visegrád Group] chairmanship comes at a crucial time when Europe is shaping its new political framework following elections to the European parliament, while the EU’s neighbourhood is affected by a conflict which poses a challenge to Euro-Atlantic security.”

Reuters contributed to this report.