Polish ruling party senator given five-year jail sentence for corruption

A senator from Poland's main ruling party, centrist Civic Platform (PO), has been handed a five-year prison sentence for his involvement in a corruption scandal.

Stanisław Gawłowski, who also previously served as secretary-general of PO and a deputy government minister, has consistently denied the charges against him, claiming they were engineered by the former Law and Justice (PiS) government. He has announced that he intends to appeal the ruling.

The scandal in question first emerged over a decade ago, when in 2014 the Internal Security Agency (ABW) detained ten people in connection with irregularities in tenders for land improvement conducted by the provincial authorities in West Pomerania, an area of northern Poland.

Later, in 2017, prosecutors announced that they intended to bring charges against Gawłowski in relation to the case. He was detained the following year and spent months in pretrial detention.

At the time of the offenses, Gawłowski was serving as a deputy environment minister in a previous PO-led government. However, between 2015 and 2023, Poland was ruled by PiS, and Gawłowski claimed that the charges against him were brought “for purely political reasons”.

But prosecutors presented evidence that the politician had, among other crimes, accepted a bribe worth at least 733,000 zlotys (€171,000) in exchange for helping secure multi-million dollar contracts and laundered money in relation to a property in Croatia. They demanded a 6.5-year sentence.

Today, following a trial that lasted five years, the politician was found guilty at the district court in Szczecin of six of the seven crimes he was accused of, including bribery and warning a corrupt official about the ABW investigation, reports the Gazeta Wyborcza daily.

He was sentenced to five years in prison, fined 180,000 zlotys, and ordered to forfeit criminally gained assets valued at 650,000 zlotys. He was also given a ten-year ban on holding management positions at state bodies or state-owned firms. His wife was handed a suspended sentence in the same case.

At the time of writing, the judge, Grzegorz Kasicki, was still reading the full justification for his ruling. However, he has already dismissed Gawłowski's claims of being a political victim, reports Polsat News.

Speaking to reporters during a recession in today's court proceedings, but after the verdict was announced, Gawłowski said that “what happened in the courtroom today has nothing to do with justice.” He revealed that he would file an appeal.

One of his lawyers, Rafał Wiechecki, noted that a search of Gawłowski's parliamentary offices had been carried out on the orders of a prosecutor who is the wife of a leading PiS politician. That is one of “plenty of political threads” in the case, he claimed, quoted by Onet.

Despite already being on trial, in 2023 Gawkowski was chosen by PO – the party led by current Prime Minister Donald Tusk – as a senate candidate in that year's parliamentary elections, where he was re-elected to represent his district in West Pomerania.

After today's verdict, former PiS interior minister Mariusz Kamiński – who was himself last year jailed for abuse of power before receiving a presidential pardon – said that the outcome showed why the current PO-led government is seeking to abolish Poland's anti-corruption bureau .

Main image credit: Cezary Aszkielowicz / Agencja Wyborcza.pl