Marian Banaś, request for waiver of immunity. The head of the Supreme Audit Office wants to change the date of the parliamentary regulatory committee meeting

At the end of July, the Prosecutor General, Minister of Justice Zbigniew Ziobro, filed a motion to waive the immunity of the President of the Supreme Audit Office, Marian Banas. Investigators want to bring a dozen or so charges to the head of the Supreme Audit Office, including false statements in property declarations.

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The motion regarding the immunity of Marian Banas must be given an opinion by the regulatory committee before being taken to the Sejm’s deliberations. Its session is scheduled for August 10 at 3:00 pm The next session of the Sejm is to be held on August 11. In order to waive immunity, an absolute statutory number of deputies’ votes is required (231).

Marian Banaś asked in a letter dated August 3 this year to the chairman of the parliamentary regulatory committee, Kazimierz Smoliński from Law and Justice, and to the Marshal of the Sejm, Elżbieta Witek, to change the date of the committee’s meeting to a later date.

READ MORE: Request for the waiver of Marian Banas’ immunity. Politicians comment on possible voting and accusations >>>

“6,000 pages of files were described on about 50 pages of the request to waive my immunity … That is why I asked the chairman of the Rules Committee to change the date of the meeting and familiarize the members with all the evidence,” Banaś wrote on Tuesday afternoon on Twitter.

In the justification of the request, which he also posted on Twitter, Banaś emphasized that he has the right to submit explanations and his own conclusions in the case regarding immunity and intends to use it.

“However, I would like to point out that on the same day, August 10, 2021, at 17.30, a meeting of the State Control Committee was scheduled to consider the report on the activities of the Supreme Audit Office in 2020 together with the opinions of other parliamentary committees,” he wrote. He explained that submitting such a report was his obligation imposed by the constitution and that it could not interfere with other activities carried out by him. He also assessed that “for the sake of the state and the transparency of the activities of its constitutional organs”, the assessment of the NIK’s activities should be clearly distinguished from the assessment of itself.

He also pointed to the length of the evidence – about 80 volumes of the files of the proceedings – on the basis of which, as he noted, the deputies from the committee would evaluate the application.

“In my opinion – due to the unprecedented and complex nature of the case – members of the Committee should familiarize themselves with it, pursuant to Article 18c (5) of the Act on the Supreme Audit Office. inquiries the possibility of thorough preparation of all interested persons for participation in this meeting, and the time of two hours provided for in the meeting schedule seems to me to be extremely insufficient and even unrealistic to substantive consideration of the request in question. in the public space that the report on the consideration of the application will be presented to the Sejm on August 11, 2021. In such a situation, it should be assumed that all decisions on the matter have already been made and are political decisions, “wrote Banaś.

Deputy Kazimierz Smoliński said that he had not yet decided whether he would postpone the meeting. He said that the motion of the head of the Supreme Chamber of Control has just reached him and will be considered on Thursday at the earliest.

– It is too early for me to say for sure what the decision will be, but I am skeptical about this conclusion. This is not the first issue where there are short deadlines – he added.