Senior official under former Polish government detained over media campaign that attacked judges

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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 former senior official under the Law and Justice (PiS) government that ruled Poland from 2015 to 2023 has been detained and charged as part of a probe into the alleged misspending of funds.

The case relates to the activities of the Polish National Foundation (PFN), a body created by PiS to promote Poland abroad. However, it spent 8.4 million zloty (€1.9 million) on an advertising campaign in Poland itself that promoted the PiS government’s controversial judicial reforms.

On Tuesday, the spokesman for Poland’s security services, Jacek Dobrzyński, announced that a 64-year-old who can be named only as Maciej Ś. under Polish privacy law had been detained.

Maciej Ś. was a board member of the PFN at the time that the spending in question took place in 2017. Later, in 2022, he was appointed by PiS as the head of the National Broadcasting Council (KRRiT), a state media regulator, a position he held until 2025.

Dobrzyński revealed that another former member of the PFN board, Cezary J., had also been detained as part of the same investigation into abuse of power and failure to fulfil duties.

The spokesman noted that the allegations relate to the PFN’s so-called “Fair Courts” campaign,  which he said “caused material damage to the foundation on a massive scale, in an amount of no less than 8.4 million zloty”.

The PFN was established under the PiS government in 2016 by 17 state-owned companies, which provided funds for it to promote Poland abroad.

However, the following year it launched the “Fair Courts” campaign, in which billboards and other forms of advertising in Poland were used to show the alleged failings of the justice system in Poland and therefore to justify why reforms being implemented by PiS were necessary.

Echoing PiS rhetoric, the campaign suggested that judges saw themselves as a “special caste” and highlighted cases of alleged wrongdoing by individual judges, including one who had been caught stealing a sausage. (The judge in question had not ruled on a case since that incident in 2006 and had died in 2015.)

In 2018, a Warsaw court ruled that the “Fair Courts” campaign was inconsistent with the PFN’s statutory goals, saying that not only did the adverts fail to enhance Poland’s image abroad, “on the contrary, they significantly weakened it, creating a negative image of the judiciary based on individual cases”.

“The ‘Fair Courts’ campaign primarily involved attacking the judicial community,” said Tomasz Siemoniak, the minister in charge of the security services, commenting on Świrski’s arrest. “This campaign responded to a political order from the PiS government and discredited independent courts.”

“The financial damage to the foundation amounted to at least 8.4 million zloty, while the moral damage is incalculable,” he added. “The use of the foundation’s funds for partisan purposes must be accounted for.”

On Tuesday evening, prosecutors announced that they had charged Cezary J. That was followed on Wednesday morning by news that Maciej Ś. had likewise been charged and banned from leaving the country, reports the Polish Press Agency (PAP).

The “Fair Courts” campaign was just one of a number of controversial initiatives launched by the PFN under the PiS government. The foundation was regularly accused of spending money to support PiS’s political goals or on seemingly wasteful projects.

One of its most famous initiatives involved the purchase of a yacht for almost €1 million, which was renamed “I Love Poland” and sent on an around-the-world cruise to mark the centenary of Poland’s independence in 2018 (though it suffered damage and spent weeks stuck in a port, accruing further costs).

In 2021, the Supreme Audit Office (NIK) accused the PFN of violating the law by refusing to provide documents required for an audit.

In February 2025, just over a year after PiS lost power, a newly appointed PFN board accused its predecessors of criminal negligence that caused damages of over 30 million zloty to the foundation’s finances. They notified prosecutors of potential crimes.

Maciej Ś. himself has also faced separate legal action from the new government, led by Prime Minister Donald Tusk, which took power from PiS in December 2023.

The ruling majority in parliament last year voted to bring Maciej Ś. before the State Tribunal, a body responsible for trying state officials, over allegations that he abused his powers while leading the KRRiT.

The motion against him included allegations that he unlawfully withheld funds owed to public media, targeted private broadcasters critical of PiS and failed to carry out duties required of the regulator.

In response to this week’s charges against Świrski, PiS leader Jarosław Kaczyński called them “another act of vengeance by Donald Tusk’s apparatus of power”. Such actions “have nothing to do with the rule of law”, said Kaczyński. Their aim is “intimidation and defamation”.

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: KKRiT (under CC BY-SA 4.0)

Alicja Ptak

Alicja Ptak is deputy editor-in-chief of Notes from Poland and a multimedia journalist. She has written for Clean Energy Wire and The Times, and she hosts her own podcast, The Warsaw Wire, on Poland’s economy and energy sector. She previously worked for Reuters.