Poland’s anti-corruption agency arrested six people, including a former deputy treasury minister, in an investigation into the previous government’s privatization of chemical firm Ciech, state news agency PAP reported on Monday.
The agency launched the probe in 2015. Later that year officers turned up at the Warsaw bourse to ask its then chief executive Pawel Tamborski for data on the sale.
Tamborski served as deputy treasury minister when the government sold its shares in Ciech to KI Chemistry, controlled by Poland’s richest man, Jan Kulczyk, who died in 2015.
PAP agency on Monday did not provide the name of Pawel Tamborski, but said, quoting unnamed sources, that the arrested deputy treasury minister’s name was “Pawel T.”
Kulczyk Investments, which controls Kulczyk’s estate, has said the price offered in the tender was deemed fair by Ciech management and that a restructuring had helped raise Ciech’s market value since then.
Since coming to power in late 2015, the eurosceptic Law and Justice (PiS) party has called a halt to privatization, changed managements in almost all state-run companies and questioned the rationale and pricing of the previous government’s stake sales.
The 2014 sale of the state’s 38 percent stake in Ciech, currently a company with a market capitalization of $921 million, attracted most criticism from the current right-wing government.
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