The court has decided to arrest Paweł Szopa

“The District Court in Katowice accepted the prosecutor's appeal today and applied a preventive measure against Paweł S. in the form of temporary arrest for a period of 90 days (in accordance with the prosecutor's initial request) – the National Prosecutor's Office informed on platform X.

READ: Former president of the Government Strategic Reserves Agency arrested in London

The charges brought by the prosecutor’s office concern participation in an organised criminal group (Article 258 § 1 of the Penal Code) and exceeding one’s powers and failing to fulfil one’s duties in order to gain financial benefits (Article 231 § 1 and 2 of the Penal Code).

The investigation into irregularities in RARS was initiated in December 2023 at the Regional Prosecutor's Office in Warsaw, and in April 2024 the case was taken over by the Silesian Branch of the Department for Organized Crime and Corruption of the National Prosecutor's Office in Katowice.

The investigation concerns, among other things, the fact that RARS employees exceeded their authority and failed to fulfil their duties in the period from February 2021 to November 2023 in order to gain financial benefits. This concerns “organising and processing the purchase of goods for the above-mentioned Agency, and thus acting to the detriment of the public interest”.

The basis for initiating the investigation was the information collected by Central Anticorruption Bureau classified materials and two notifications of suspicion of committing a crime submitted by the General Inspector of Financial Information. At a later stage of the investigation, the GIIF submitted two further notifications of suspicion of “money laundering”.

Bartosz Lewandowski, Paweł Szopa's defense attorney, commented on the prosecutor's statement on Platform X. He wrote that the court had not notified him of the date of the hearing “at which a decision would be made to deprive a person of liberty.”

“From the information I have, it appears that the court issued its ruling in a closed session, and therefore – colloquially speaking – 'at the desk' (sic), which made it impossible for the defense to present its position on the prosecutor's appeal. This is a flagrant violation of the right to defense guaranteed not only by the provisions of Polish criminal procedure, the Polish Constitution, but also by the Convention for the Protection of Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms.”

He added that “the decision issued may be appealed against, which will certainly be filed on behalf of Mr Paweł Szopa.”