The Supreme Court has upheld a decision by the National Electoral Commission (PKW) regarding financial irregularities relating to 201,000 zloty (€43,000) of presidential campaign funds raised by Szymon Hołownia, an independent candidate who finished third in last year’s election.
Hołownia, who has since gone on to establish a centrist political movement that is currently running third in the polls, will be required to return the funds to the state treasury following the binding verdict.
In July this year, the PKW said that Hołownia’s campaign had accepted 33,000 zloty ((€7,200) outside of the permitted campaign period. It also said that 168,000 zloty (€36,500) came from unauthorised entities.
In response, the chairman of Hołownia’s Poland 2050 (Polska 2050) party, Michał Kobosko, said that the rules were “old and absurd” and favoured more established parties, reports Onet. Poland 2050 referred the case to the Supreme Court.
The appeal was dismissed on Wednesday in a final decision. As a result, the treasury will now take over all funds which are deemed to have been raised illegally.
In July, the PKW found that more than 19,000 zloty was received between 11 May and 4 June. That was after the initially planned 10 May date of the election (which was cancelled due to the pandemic) but before the candidate had re-registered to run in newly called elections on 5 June.
Moreover, Hołownia had accepted a further 13,000 zloty after the elections took place, meaning in the period between 29 June and 25 September.
A further 168,000 zloty was donated by donors who did not fulfil the PKW’s requirements. These included people and organisations who were hard to identify as being based in Poland, or who used the same accounts for business and personal purposes.
Earlier this year, the PKW also rejected financial statements submitted by two other minor right-wing candidates, Marek Jakubiak and Mirosław Piotrowski.
Main image credit: Wikimedia/Jarosław Barański (under CC BY-SA 4.0)
Maria Wilczek is deputy editor of Notes from Poland. She is a regular writer for The Times, The Economist and Al Jazeera English, and has also featured in Foreign Policy, Politico Europe, The Spectator and Gazeta Wyborcza.
