New evidence casts further doubt on Polish presidential candidate’s claims over second apartment

May 6, 2025 | Business, Law, Politics

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Notes from Poland is run by a small editorial team and is published by an independent, non-profit foundation that is funded through donations from our readers. We cannot do what we do without your support.

A controversy over a second apartment owned by Karol Nawrocki, one of Poland’s leading presidential candidates, has deepened today, with new evidence suggesting that Nawrocki did not, as he has claimed, care for the elderly, disabled occupant of the property in return for taking possession of it.

However, figures from Law and Justice (PiS), the national-conservative opposition party that is supporting Nawrocki’s candidacy, have dismissed the claims against him as “lies” and suggested that the scandal has been manufactured by the state security services.

Meanwhile, Nawrocki’s campaign has published a copy of the candidate’s asset declaration after it was released by the Supreme Court. It indicates that the candidate also owns half of a third apartment. He had previously claimed during a TV debate that he is “an ordinary Pole who owns one apartment”.

On Tuesday morning, Onet, the news website that had previously broken the news that Nawrocki owns a second apartment in addition to the one in which he and his family live, published an interview with Anna Kanigowska, the former carer of 80-year-old Jerzy Żywicki, who lived in the second apartment.

That apartment came into the possession of Nawrocki and his wife in 2017. Nawrocki has previously claimed he gave money to Żywicki to buy the apartment on the understanding he would later take ownership of it in return for helping care for Żywicki.

However, Kanigowska, who cared for Żywicki on behalf of local social services between spring 2022 and spring 2023, completely rejects that account. She told Onet that she was “at Jerzy’s every day, including holidays, and I never met Nawrocki [or] his wife”.

 

“I remember how Jerzy was sitting in the apartment in the dark, freezing, in a jacket in the winter. He had no money to pay for electricity,” added Kanigowska. Nawrocki has previously claimed that he personally paid for Żywicki’s bills.

“Nawrocki just wanted to take over the apartment, and then he simply didn’t care. I’ve never come across such a brazen fraud,” said Kanigowska, who also claimed that Żywicki was even unaware that he had signed over ownership of the property to the Nawrockis.

However, at a press conference later on Tuesday morning, PiS MPs claimed that Kanigowska was an unreliable source. They showed social media posts attributed to her that were critical of Nawrocki and PiS.

Meanwhile, Wirtualna Polska, another leading news website, has found social media accounts belonging to Żywicki (all of which include Nawrocki as a contact) that show him reporting on the difficult situation he found himself in.

“I receive 600 zloty (€140) [a month] from MOPR [social services]. I am disabled, I can’t walk without crutches and I do not have enough money for food,” read one post from March 2020. Onet established on Monday that Żywicki now lives in a state care facility paid for by the city of Gdańsk.

Speaking today to broadcaster Polsat, Nawrocki said that he had never received any information that Żywicki was struggling or living in poor conditions. “Social services…[could] have called me, told me what Jerzy needed, and I would have said I was ready [to help],” said Nawrocki.

Nawrocki and his campaign have continued to argue that the candidate did nothing wrong. Today, they published his asset declaration, as Nawrocki had pledged to do on Monday once it was released by the Supreme Court.

“Karol Nawrocki and his wife own two apartments. He always included this information in his property declarations,” wrote campaign spokeswoman Emilia Wierzbicki on social media, alongside images of the declaration.

“On the advice of lawyers, for the sake of caution and full transparency, he also included information in his property declarations about his 50% share in a property written into a will and owned by his living mother,” she added.

As well as the question of whether and how Nawrocki cared for Żywicki, a further issue raised by figures from Poland’s ruling coalition is how the apartment was purchased.

On Monday afternoon, a spokesman for the city of Gdańsk, Daniel Stenzel, confirmed that the property had been communal housing that, in 2011, Żywicki had bought using the right for residents of such housing to buy it for 10% of the value. This would have meant Żywicki paid around 12,000 zloty, said Stenzel.

A condition of such sales is that the property cannot be resold within five years. This particular apartment came into the possession of the Nawrockis in 2017, though Onet reported last week that they had signed a preliminary agreement for it five years earlier.

Gazeta Wyborcza, a leading daily newspaper, claims the property is now worth around 400,000 zloty.

Anna-Maria Żukowska, the head of the parliamentary caucus of The Left (Lewica), a junior partner in Poland’s ruling coalition, called it a “scandal” that such transactions could take place and called for ending the right to buy communally owned properties.

Meanwhile, Katarzya Pełczyńska-Nałęcz, the government’s minister for funds and regional policy, told Polsat News that “we need social housing, local authority-owned apartments for cheap rent, and they must be secured by very good regulations so that there is no possibility of buying them out for half the price”.

At their press conference on Tuesday morning, PiS MPs confirmed that Żywicki had purchased the property for 10% of its value in 2011 using money provided by Nawrocki. The following year, Żywicki signed an agreement with the Nawrockis for them to take control of the property in 2017.

Crucially, the PiS MPs said that the Nawrockis paid Żywicki 120,000 zloty (that is, the amount the apartment was worth in total in 2011) when they concluded the purchase, and that the agreement included no obligation to provide care for Żywicki.

The PiS MPs accused the media and Nawrocki’s political rivals of “lying” about the situation. They noted that Nawrocki, even after buying the apartment, had continued to allow Żywicki to treat it as his own while Nawrocki continued paying costs relating to the property.

Meanwhile, PiS and Nawrocki have repeated earlier claims that the entire scandal has been manufactured by the security services, who they say have leaked information about Nawrocki’s assets to help Rafał Trzaskowski, the presidential candidate of the centrist Civic Platform (PO), Poland’s main ruling party.

“Trzaskowski’s staff includes not only government TV, the Supreme Audit Office and the prosecutor’s office, but also the Polish security services,” said Nawrocki. “It is an unequal fight, but I know that we will win it, because nothing will break us.”

Nawrocki, who is president of the state Institute of National Remembrance (IPN), was named last year as the candidate PiS would support in the presidential election. He is currently running second in the polls, behind Trzaskowski, the mayor of Warsaw.

In recent weeks Nawrocki has significantly closed the polling gap to Trzaskowski ahead of the first round of the elections on 18 May. If, as likely, no candidate wins more than 50% of the vote, a run-off between the top two will take place on 1 June.


Notes from Poland is run by a small editorial team and published by an independent, non-profit foundation that is funded through donations from our readers. We cannot do what we do without your support.

Main image credit: Mikołaj Bujak/IPN (under CC BY-NC-ND 3.0 PL)

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