Senior Polish presidential official detained amid probe into misspending of funds

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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.

Agents from Poland’s Central Anti-Corruption Bureau (CBA) have detained a senior official from opposition-aligned President Karol Nawrocki’s chancellery as part of a probe into alleged misspending of funds under the former national-conservative Law and Justice (PiS) government.

An employee of a major right-wing broadcaster, Republika, was also taken into custody as part of the same investigation, which relates to the activities of the Polish National Foundation (PFN), a body created under the PiS government to promote Poland abroad but which was also used to further the party’s political interests.

On Tuesday morning, Jacek Dobrzyński, the spokesman for the security services, announced that two individuals, named only as Piotr M. and Anna P. under Polish privacy law, had been detained by the CBA at the request of prosecutors investigating irregularities in the PFN.

Both suspects previously worked in the chancellery of Prime Minister Beata Szydło, who was head of the PiS government from 2015 to 2017. Piotr M. was head of the Government Information Centre (CIR) and Anna P. led the media services department.

Anna P. now works for Nawrocki, who was elected as president last year with the support of PiS. She is director of the Presidential Events Office, which organises the president’s schedule. Piotr M. currently works as a commentator for Republika, a station generally supportive of Nawrocki and PiS.

In 2017, while still working in Szydło’s chancellery, Piotr M. and Anna P. founded a PR company called Solvere. Later that same year, the company was hired to run a prominent and controversial campaign for the PFN called “Fair Courts”, receiving a reported 1.2 million zloty (€275,000) for the project.

The PFN had been set up the previous year under Szydło’s government with funding from 17 state-owned companies. Its publicly declared and statutory mission was to promote Poland abroad.

However, the “Fair Courts” campaign, which cost around 8.4 million zloty, was run in Poland itself, with material in Polish, and aimed to show the alleged failings of the justice system in Poland in order to justify why controversial 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”.

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.

In July this year, two men who had served as PFN board members at the time of the campaign were detained as part of an investigation into the misspending of the foundation’s funds. At that time, the CBA also announced that it had searched the homes of Anna P. and Piotr M.

Today’s detentions of Anna P. and Piotr M. were welcomed by Prime Minister Donald Tusk. He told Polsat News that the “Fair Courts” campaign was a “double scandal” because it was “not only an abuse of public funds, but also for the very clearly malicious purpose” of “attacking the independent judiciary”.

Meanwhile, Waldemar Żurek, the justice minister and prosecutor general, told the media that the authorities intended to find out “who stood behind” the actions of Anna P. and Piotr M., because “it’s hard to believe this was their initiative”.

However, Jarosław Olechowski, a senior executive at Republika, condemned the detentions, calling them an act of “political revenge by the Donald Tusk regime for an information campaign exposing pathologies in Polish courts”.

At the time of writing, the presidential chancellery had not commented on the detention of Anna P., the head of its events office. Earlier this year, Nawrocki’s deputy chief of staff was charged with ordering the falsification of documents, an accusation he denies.

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.

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: Służba Więzienna (under CC BY-SA 4.0)

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.