2024-08-29 15:08 update: 2024-08-30, 21:44
Photo: PAP/Leszek Szymański
Poland's justice minister and prosecutor general has announced that he asked the European Parliament to waive the immunity of MEP Michal Dworczyk for allegedly obstructing justice during an investigation into the so-called 'email scandal.'
Dworczyk served as the head of the Prime Minister's Office in 2017-2022. In June 2021 hackers broke into his private email account which he was using for official correspondence instead of a high-security government service. Dworczyk's alleged email correspondence with top government and party figures, including the then prime minister, Mateusz Morawiecki, was later leaked to the media.
A motion to waive Dworczyk's immunity was addressed to the President of the European Parliament, Roberta Metsola.
In the course of an investigation overseen by a district prosecutor’s office in Warsaw, sufficient evidence was gathered to substantiate the suspicion of Dworczyk having committed a crime, reported Anna Adamiak, the spokesperson for the prosecutor general on Thursday.
According to her, in the prosecutors’ view the issue regards Dworczyk’s failure to fulfil his obligations and obstructing criminal proceedings carried out in the case concerning unauthorised access to an email inbox and publishing its contents.
"The failure to fulfil duties was the result of the use of an uncertified and unsecured private inbox to conduct correspondence in order to carry out official tasks relevant to public security and the proper functioning of state authorities," Adamiak added.
She continued that the email inbox contained classified information, issues relating to defence and state security, the special services, ICT security, economic affairs, the COVID-19 pandemic and international relations.
Obstructing criminal proceedings, on the other hand, was said to involve "helping the perpetrator of the hacking attack to evade criminal responsibility."
After reporting the incident to the Internal Security Agency (ABW), Dworczyk reportedly instructed an identified person to permanently delete certain data from his private email inbox. The effect of such actions was to destroy data that constituted important evidence for establishing the circumstances as well as identifying the perpetrator of the crime. (PAP)
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