Amber Gold inquiry targets judiciary

Published on 28 August 2012 at 11:21

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“Purge after Amber Gold”, reads the headline in Gazeta Wyborcza the day after prosecutor general Andrzej Seremet demanded the resignation of the Gdańsk prosecutor and insisted disciplinary measures be taken against his six subordinates in connection with the notorious Amber Gold scandal. The unregulated banking institution offered its customers huge returns of up to 16.5 per cent per year by investing in gold. A few thousand people took the bait and lost more than 130 mln zlotys (€32.5 million) when the company went bankrupt two weeks ago. It could have been prevented had prosecutors in Gdańsk acted swiftly and appropriately when they got an early tip from the Financial Supervision Authority (KNF) and started an investigation against Amber Gold’s president who – as it turned out later – was already a convicted criminal. According to GW

The prosecutor general must have suffered a shock when studying the Amber Gold case and now wants to shake-up the entire prosecutor’s office [...] It is the first time that the prosecutor general has applied in writing for the dismissal of a regional prosecutor.

The fact that Prime Minister’s son Michał Tusk worked for the bankrupt OLT budget airline, owned by Amber Gold, only added spice to the scandal, sparking uproar among opposition politicians and fuelling speculation of a cover up. The conservative weeklyUważam Rze concludes in its latest issue that –

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under Donald Tusk’s rule corruption, nepotism and clientelism is again flourishing [in Poland] [...] as there never has been such a concentration of power at the time when most control mechanisms are switched off.

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