2023-12-21 14:35 update: 2023-12-27, 12:28
Photo: PAP/Piotr Nowak
Szymon Holownia, speaker of the Sejm, the lower house of Polish parliament, has stripped two senior politicians of the former ruling party Law and Justice (PiS) of their parliamentary mandates following prison sentences slapped on them by a Warsaw court.
On Wednesday, the two former Central Anti-Corruption Bureau (CBA) heads and most recently interior and deputy interior ministers, Mariusz Kaminski and his deputy Maciej Wasik, were sentenced to two years imprisonment for abuse of power and illegal operational activities in a so-called land scam of 2007. The ruling was issued by a Regional Court of the second instance, in Warsaw, and is final.
"The Speaker of the Sejm, Szymon Holownia, has issued orders stating the expiry of the parliamentary mandates of Mariusz Kaminski and Maciej Wasik," the Sejm's official account reported on the X platform on Thursday. "The relevant correspondence has also been sent to President Andrzej Duda."
In 2015, the president pardoned Kaminski and Wasik after they were sentenced to three years in prison for masterminding an anti-corruption provocation in 2007 that a Warsaw court found illegal and criminal. Two other CBA officials also received prison sentences.
Earlier on Thursday, Duda disputed the latest verdict in a letter to Holownia, claiming that "due to the application of the power of pardon to Mariusz Kaminski and Maciej Wasik, there are no prerequisites to terminate their mandates."
Kaminski and Wasik were high-profile figures in the former Law and Justice (PiS) government.
On June 3, 2023, a Polish Constitutional Tribunal ruling effectively upheld Duda’s decision. But on June 6, 2023, the Supreme Court sent the case back to court, ruling that Duda's pardon was ineffective as it was offered before the verdict became final. (PAP)
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