The court acquitted the former Head of the Internal Security Agency, General Krzysztof Bondaryk

The acquittal was passed on Tuesday, a week ago, in the District Court for Warsaw-Mokotów. The court acquitted the former head of the civilian counterintelligence of two charges formulated against him by the prosecutor from the Regional Prosecutor’s Office in Białystok.

“I was a suspect for five years, then a defendant. Although this is another favorable decision for me in this case, I expect the prosecutor’s office to appeal – says general Bondaryk at tvn24.pl.

Also, unofficial sources of tvn24.pl in the prosecutor’s office indicate that investigators are working on an appeal against the sentence.

The general was charged in 2018 at the Regional Prosecutor’s Office in Białystok. The prosecutor accused him of committing a crime of exceeding powers, failing to fulfill his duties “in order to achieve financial or personal gain.”

Now, after five years, in the oral justification of the sentence, the Mokotów court decided that no crime had occurred in the case.

What was the subject of the prosecutor’s investigation and then the allegations and the indictment? It was the result of an audit of the activities of secret services during the rule of PO-PSL, which was commissioned by the minister coordinator Mariusz Kaminski.

The notification to the prosecutor’s office was signed by the then head of the Internal Security Agency, Professor Piotr Pogonowski, in 2016. Its auditors discovered that, as the head of the Internal Security Agency, General Bondaryk recruited an employee who allegedly used a forged university diploma.

– The material of the investigation showed that the head of the agency, despite his duty, did not inform the relevant institutions about the use of a forged document by an ABW employee. What’s more, Krzysztof B. decided to accept this person into service and appoint him to a high position – said the spokesman for Minister Kamiński, Stanisław Żaryn, to the Polish Press Agency.

Using a “fake diploma”, the employee was supposed to earn about two million zlotys in the agency over the next few years. And this was precisely the “financial advantage” referred to in the prosecutor’s charge and the indictment against Bondaryk.

As we have already reported on tvn24.pl – the university that issued the diploma confirmed its authenticity. The prosecutor’s office has never presented charges, it used the forged diploma to the employee himself, as well as to the teachers who issued it.

Back in 2016, the prosecutor’s office – the division of organized crime and corruption – refused to launch an investigation into the case.

The notification was then forwarded to the district prosecutor’s office in Ostrołęka. The prosecutor who decided to initiate the case was soon promoted to the Regional Prosecutor’s Office in Białystok. The head of this prosecutor’s office is Elżbieta Pieniążek, who in the past was an officer of the Central Anti-Corruption Bureau and is considered to be an associate of Minister Mariusz Kamiński.

The same prosecutor brought the indictment to the Warsaw Mokotów District Court, which rejected it shortly after receiving it.

– The collected evidence clearly shows that the behaviors attributed to the accused do not bear the hallmarks of prohibited acts, nor do they constitute other behavior subject to criminal liability – the Warsaw court argued in February 2020.

The prosecutor’s office successfully quashed this court decision, citing formal reasons. That is why, over the next years, hearings were held in the first instance, which the court ended with the acquittal of Bondaryk.