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Comment by bitcharmer

3 years ago

Being a 40+ year old Pole I am yet to see a single case of corruption in public sector be prosecuted.

Maciej Zalewski (a co-creator of Kaczyński's first party - Porozumienie Centrum) remains the only high-level politician I know of in Poland that was sentenced for corruption and actually went to jail.

https://pl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maciej_Zalewski_(filolog)

He warned Bagsik and co. (who stole millions of public money through the famous Art-B company and escaped to Israel) that the police wants to imprison them - so they managed to escape. Bagsik later confirmed that they shared some of that money with Porozumienie Centrum's business named Telegraf. Somehow only the less important guy (Zalewski) went to jail, but Kaczyński brothers weren't prosecuted.

But there's a lot of low level corruption that is exposed, it's just usually ignored by country-wide media, because that corruption is local. For one example: https://samorzad.pap.pl/kategoria/prawo/prawomocny-wyrok-byl...

  • > but Kaczyński brothers weren't prosecuted.

    Is there any indicator they should have been in this case?

I haven't seen any evidence of corruption here - just pure malice and monopolistic behavior.

  • There is corruption everywhere (though obviously not uniformly distributed). It requires active, dynamic efforts to counteract. If you don't see some evidence of successful prosecution, that itself is informative.

  • I think that there are two separate issues here:

    1. train manufacturer bricking trains - malice and monopolism as you say

    2. prosecutors failing to bring court cases and convictions for train manufacturers - incompetence or more likely corruption.