Polish business people critical of the country’s government say they have been targeted by prosecutors, with some jailed for months without being charged in what opponents describe as a crackdown on dissent.
The trend, which has accelerated after the ruling Law and Justice party (PiS) came to power in 2015, has burnished the government’s claims that it is going after fraudsters. More white-collar crime suspects have been arrested and kept in pre-trial detention than in the previous decades, when this measure was mostly reserved for violent criminals or people deemed a flight risk, according to legal experts.
“The standards for detaining people have been lowered tragically,” said Przemysław Rosati, president of the Polish bar council. “People are spending a long time in prison without taking into account their basic rights, including the presumption of innocence.”
He described the situation as a “catastrophe” reminiscent of Poland’s communist-era arbitrary arrests and persecution.
Among the recently detained suspects were a former treasury minister in the previous government of Donald Tusk, one of the country’s most prominent asset managers, the head of a business association and an aristocrat fighting for the restitution of assets nationalised by the communist regime.
The erosion of rule of law standards has already cost the country billions in frozen EU funds, which Brussels will not release unless Warsaw restores the independence of judges. PiS further alienated the EU in May when it passed what the opposition labelled a “Lex Tusk” — a law potentially barring politicians, including opposition leader Tusk, from holding office over alleged pro-Russia activities.
High-profile arrests are often carried out in the presence of TV crews. “When somebody is detained in front of the media, it makes a very good show,” said Wojciech Kostrzewa, president of the Polish Business Roundtable, an association of corporate executives.
Last October Maciej Witucki, the head of the Polish business organisation, Lewiatan, was arrested at dawn during a multi-day event between government officials, employers and trade unions. The following day Witucki was also due to open a major conference organised by Lewiatan.
He spent 48 hours in jail before being released without charges.
Witucki remains a suspect in the investigation and may still be summoned to trial. A public prosecutor is probing whether he evaded social security payments while running a temporary work agency a decade ago.
“I’m in the lucky less than 10 per cent of cases in which the judge decided to free me,” said Witucki. “If you get arrested and the public television talks about your case even before your family knows about it, you become a political case.”
The judges’ seemingly hobbled independence was further evidenced by the increasing number of pretrial detentions some rubber stamp without questioning, said Mikołaj Malecki, president of the Krakow Institute of Criminal Law and professor at the Jagiellonian University.
District court judges only have 24 hours to decide whether to approve a prosecutor’s request for detention. That is too short a deadline to study the case fully and some Polish judges are not “bold enough to tell the prosecutor that I don’t have enough to put a person in detention”, when they should dismiss the requests based on insufficient evidence, said Malecki.
About 90 per cent of detention requests are authorised, according to a study by Court Watch Poland, a non-governmental organisation that monitors the judiciary. And while the number of crimes registered by Polish police rose 3 per cent between 2015 and 2021, the number of pretrial detention requests surged 60 per cent in the same period, said Court Watch Poland’s co-founder Bartosz Pilitowski.
Suspects are also staying longer in jail.
Last year there were 240 people who had spent between 12 months and two years in pretrial detention, compared with 39 in 2013, according to data from the Polish bar council and the Helsinki Foundation for Human Rights.
Poland’s public prosecutor office said that the “number of persons temporarily arrested in recent years results mainly from the intensification of activities of the prosecutor’s office in the field of combating serious economic crime, including VAT mafias”.
All the detention requests were examined by independent judges, it added, and changing the system, “would in fact mean a demand to stop effective actions of the prosecutor’s office against the perpetrators of serious crimes”.
But the issue of suspects being detained for longer periods was also raised by Poland’s ombudsman. Justice state secretary Marcin Warchoł told the ombudsman that there was “no need to modify the regulations”.
One pretrial detainee who described his case as “purely political” is Polish aristocrat Michał Sobański, who was arrested in 2021 at his Warsaw home and transferred to a prison in the southwestern city of Wroclaw, where he spent the next seven months in a windowless cell.
Sobański waded into the politically charged issue of restitutions by filing claims on behalf of other aristocratic families whose assets were expropriated by the communist regime. The day after his arrest, a public prosecutor charged him with knowingly excluding family heirs from some of his claims, which he denies.
After several unsuccessful applications to switch to house arrest, Sobański was eventually allowed by a judge to post bail of 10mn zlotys in cash ($2.5mn). Since then he has not been allowed to leave Poland and must report regularly to the police. But he has still not heard about a possible trial date.
His arrest took place on the eve of the Polish parliament’s vote to block Jewish claims for assets seized during the Holocaust, which triggered a feud between Poland and Israel.
Sobański said the “extraordinary coincidence” resulted in media on the same day covering both the ban on Jewish restitutions and “the arrest of a Polish aristocrat who is claiming assets that include mansions now used by state institutions”.
Opposition parties have not committed to rewriting detention rules, but if the rightwing government wins re-election in October, “we will be talking about even stricter laws”, said former attorney-general Krzysztof Kwiatkowski.
Unlike other countries, Poland does not use electronic tags in monitoring suspects ahead of trial, only after they are convicted. Legal associations have called for this method to be used, allowing suspects to be detained at home rather than in jail.
The extended use of pretrial detention has turned Poland into an outlier in the way it fights white-collar crime, warned Michał Rams, who runs the legal compliance practice of PwC in Poland.
“If you look at serious fraud cases in other countries, even Bernard Madoff was granted house arrest before he got sentenced, which would now simply be unthinkable in Poland.”
Credit: Source link
