Norway wealth fund puts Polish state oil firm “under observation for serious human rights violations”

Norway’s sovereign wealth fund has put Poland’s state energy giant Orlen under observation over concerns that the company is responsible for human rights violations through its ownership of dozens of Polish media outlets.

The Government Pension Fund Global – often referred to simply as the Oil Fund, given that it invests surplus revenues from Norway’s petroleum sector – holds a 1.15% stake in Orlen among its $1.26 trillion of assets.

On Wednesday this week, Norges Bank, which manages the fund, announced that it has “decided to place Orlen under observation for a period of three years due to unacceptable risk that the company contributes to serious violations of human rights”.

That period of observation can lead to a firm being excluded from the fund. Neither Orlen nor the Polish government has yet offered a public response to the development.

Norges Bank noted that its decision was based on a recommendation by the fund’s ethics council, a body that advises on whether investments are compliant with the fund’s ethical guidelines.

In a separate statement, also issued on Wednesday, the ethics council revealed that its “recommendation rests on Orlen’s acquisition of the newspaper publisher Polska Press and its implications for freedom of the press and therefore freedom of expression in Poland”.

In March 2021, Orlen completed the takeover of Polska Press, a previously German-owned private media group that publishes hundreds of local newspapers and websites in Poland.

The oil firm justified the takeover as part of a “new business strategy” to “strengthen sales and marketing”. However, many experts saw it as an attempt to increase government influence over the media.

After Orlen’s takeover, a number of Polska Press’s editors were replaced with more government-friendly journalists. The Norwegian wealth fund voiced concern over those developments at the time.

Orlen’s CEO, Daniel Obajtek, is a former local politician with close ties to Poland’s ruling Law and Justice (PiS) party. The firm itself, being 49.9% state-owned, is also under the oversight of the government’s ministry for state assets.

The Norwegian fund’s ethics council claimed, in its statement, that Orlen is “controlled by the Polish state” and that “its acquisition of Polska Press gives Orlen control of the majority of Poland’s newspapers, in addition to a large number of local media houses and online portals”.

In actual fact, the purchase of Polska Press does not give Orlen control of the majority of Poland’s newspapers. While Polska Press owns most major regional newspapers, it has a very small presence in the national newspaper market.

As evidence for its concerns, the ethics council pointed to the replacement of editors since Orlen took over Polska Press and “claims that Orlen has interfered in editorial decisions”.

State ownership of media outlets could “adversely effect [sic] freedom of expression” and this “risk of political influence is particularly serious in connection with elections”, wrote the council. This autumn, Poland’s ruling coalition is standing for an unprecedented third term at parliamentary elections.

Following Poland’s parliamentary and presidential elections in 2019 and 2020, observers from the OSCE noted that state media had “acted as a campaign vehicle for the incumbent”, with a “lack of impartiality…[that] undermined voters’ ability to make an informed choice…[and] amplified the advantage of the ruling party”.

Since the current government took power in 2015, public trust in state broadcaster TVP has fallen to its lowest recorded level, according to state research agency CBOS. The channel is now Poles’ least trusted major source of news, according to an annual study by researchers at the University of Oxford.

Meanwhile, over that period Poland has fallen from its highest ever position of 18th in the annual World Press Freedom Index to its lowest ever ranking of 66th. Reporters Without Borders, the NGO that compiles the index, has raised concern at the Polish government’s strategy of “re-Polonising” privately owned media.

The government, however, denies that it has damaged media freedom. It says it has sought to make Poland’s media landscape – which it claims was previously dominated by opposition-friendly outlets – more balanced and argues that foreign ownership of the media is not in the national interest.

Main image credit: Krystian Maj/KPRM (under CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)

Daniel Tilles

Daniel Tilles is editor-in-chief of Notes from Poland. He has written on Polish affairs for a wide range of publications, including Foreign Policy, POLITICO Europe, EUobserver and Dziennik Gazeta Prawna.