A lack of clear instructions for civil servants, a private company set to take over the duties of employees of the Ministry of Justice, or delays in the potential disbursement of funds from the Justice Fund – for several days, the media have been reporting on a scandal in the department headed by Waldemar Żurek, accusing it of an inability to “deliver” the project and distribute the funds due. What if this is not about a lack of competence at all, but deliberate delay? “I believe that sabotage in the spending of Justice Fund resources is possible,” attorney Michał Skwarzyński told us.
Several days ago, alarming reports concerning the Justice Fund emerged. Wirtualna Polska revealed that the Ministry of Justice failed to resolve a grant competition in time, which will result in crime victims not receiving support. Rzeczpospolita reported that the ministry hired an additional ten officials to assess applications at the formal stage, and a Warsaw-based external company to carry out the substantive evaluation of applications.
What is more, the company approached Ms Karolina – who spent several months in pre-trial detention at the request of the prosecution in connection with an investigation into the Justice Fund – with a job offer involving… the substantive evaluation of applications under the FS.
Attorney Skwarzyński: Officials May Fall into Decision-Making Inertia
The chaos surrounding the Fund and the actions of the leadership of the Ministry of Justice were commented on for niezalezna.pl by attorney Michał Skwarzyński.
“The allocation and spending of these funds would simply amount to the execution of existing contracts. In that scenario, there would be no need to organize know-how, additional positions… It would just continue,” he admitted at the outset.
Referring to the hiring of an external company, he suggested:
“It cannot be ruled out that the intention was to give the funds only to ‘their own people’, without substantive criteria, but they failed on formal and substantive aspects of application assessment because they are unable to do it. That is why an external company appeared, tasked with the application evaluation process, that is, de facto, the distribution of funds.”
“That company began searching for substantive experts who know how to do this, and that is how they reached Ms Karolina. The same Ms Karolina who faces charges for distributing money as an official of the Justice Fund. Now she would be doing the same for a private company and everything would supposedly be fine,” he compared.
He acknowledged that “obstruction within the ministry may also be carried out by officials.”
“This is out of fear that they may be held criminally liable in the future. They see what happened for months to Ms Karolina and Ms Urszula, who committed no crime. Fearing potential charges in the future, officials may fall into a phenomenon of decision-making inertia. They may avoid making decisions, push them onto someone else, prolong them, and so on,” he noted.
“They Want to Take Over the Money”
“Since they have neither solved the problem of decision-making inertia among officials nor the problem of spending these funds, in my opinion they are doing this deliberately, because they want to take over the money,” he assessed.
And he continued: “I believe that sabotage in the spending of Justice Fund resources is possible. The aim would be, by some decree of Waldemar Żurek, to return the money to the state treasury and plug the hole in the National Health Fund. That is why they do not want to spend these funds – to rescue their economic situation.”
“I believe that they deliberately carried out sabotage of the spending in order to take these funds into the budget. Most likely, however, all left-wing organizations centered around the current coalition were pressuring for these funds. Hence – lacking knowledge – a private company was hired to distribute them. But only to their own people,” he repeated.
Asked about the legality of such action, he replied:
“Taking over such funds would of course be illegal – they would have to change the law. But what harm is there in writing a ‘decree’. Minister Żurek will issue a regulation to transfer the money from the Justice Fund to the account of the Ministry of Finance. With the prosecution service and courts politicized – who is going to prosecute this?”