2024-07-01 13:32 update: 2024-07-02, 13:54
Photo PAP/Piotr Nowak
The Polish parliamentary commission investigating the purchase of the highly invasive spy software Pegasus by the previous government will ask prosecutors to press charges against Michal Wos, a former deputy justice minister, who was involved in the purchase.
Magdalena Sroka, the commission's chairwoman, told the public Radio Three on Monday morning that later in the day the commission would present notifications to prosecutors regarding Wos and Mikolaj Pawlak, a former director of the justice ministry's Department for Family and Adolescent Affairs.
"Today we'll be presenting notifications to prosecutors, because we're at the end of analysing the purchase of the Pegasus system," Sroka said.
According to her, the commission will suggest that Wos abused his power and neglected his duties by failing to notify the Ministry of Finance of the expenditure, which was made from the Justice Fund, a special-purpose reserve at the Ministry of Justice originally aimed to help victims of crimes.
"The temporal coincidence and the documents that we have indicate that both the Sejm (lower house finance - PAP) committee and the finance ministry were misled," Sroka said.
"Pawlak was, in fact, responsible for the Justice Fund, but he misled officials, created classified documents without access to classified information," she added.
The former government, led by the socially-conservative party Law and Justice (PiS), secretly purchased the Pegasus phone-hacking system from the Israeli firm NSO Group. Pegasus was then used to spy on the then opposition and government opponents, as confirmed in reports from Citizen Lab, a specialised unit at the University of Toronto, phone maker Apple, and Amnesty International. (PAP)
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