“Everything that is currently being alleged against Minister Ziobro would have to lead to a very heavy sentence, a multi-year sentence—except that from a legal point of view it is simply drivel and nonsense,” Jarosław Kaczyński said at a press conference. “But today in Poland, as we know, the law does not apply,” added the leader of Law and Justice (PiS).
The spokesperson for the Prosecutor General’s Office, Prosecutor Anna Adamiak, announced today that Minister Waldemar Żurek has submitted to the Sejm a request to lift parliamentary immunity and to order the pre-trial detention of former justice minister, now PiS MP, Zbigniew Ziobro. According to the prosecution, “there is reasonable suspicion that Ziobro committed 26 crimes, including establishing and leading an organized criminal group within the Justice Ministry that misappropriated over 150 million złoty from the Justice Fund.”
Kaczyński addressed the allegations at a hastily convened press conference. Speaking about the very act of bringing charges against Ziobro, he said it “is indeed a scandalous decision.” “A decision which, one may assume, has an entirely political rationale. This government is completely failing at governing in virtually every sphere of life and, as a result, is undertaking yet another operation aimed at shifting public attention toward the supposedly criminal offenses of Law and Justice,” he added.
In Kaczyński’s view, since those in power are unable to prove that anyone from PiS stole anything, they have adopted a new strategy.
“Therefore they have adopted new constructs that have nothing to do with criminal law—or with law at all—namely that if someone transfers funds to social institutions or even transfers some money within the budget, from one, so to speak, account to another account, this constitutes misappropriation and thus a very serious crime; hence this figure of 150 million złoty,” the PiS leader said.
He also stressed that the Justice Fund transferred money to various institutions, which it was entitled to do. “Sometimes it spent money—this is also among the accusations—for example on renovating the Prosecutor General’s Office; it was entitled to do that as well, and it also had the right to move money from its bank account to the account from which the services paid for the purchase of Pegasus,” Kaczyński noted.
He said an additional motive for the prosecutors’ actions is revenge.
“Everything that is currently being alleged against Minister Ziobro would have to lead to a very heavy sentence, a multi-year sentence—except that from a legal point of view it is simply drivel and nonsense. But today in Poland, as we know, the law does not apply,” Jarosław Kaczyński concluded.