The comment by Piotr Bączek, former head of Poland’s Military Counterintelligence Service (SKW), came after Britain’s The Sunday Times newspaper published an article in which it raised more questions about a controversial Poland-based NGO called the Open Dialogue Foundation (ODF).
Poland’s Internal Security Agency (ABW) has been investigating the activities of the Open Dialogue Foundation, which has reportedly called for the conservative government in Warsaw to be overthrown.
"One can assume with 100 percent certainty that Russia has activated its entire network of agents of influence to discredit Poland," said Bączek, referring to The Sunday Times’ disclosures about the Open Dialogue Foundation.
Speaking during a programme entitled Minęła 20 (After Eight) broadcast by Poland’s TVP Info station on Wednesday evening, Bączek claimed that the aim was to “ridicule the country’s authorities, portray our country as unstable, but also as an anti-Semitic state.”
The Sunday Times has reported that Scottish companies may have been used to launder cash funding a secret lobbying campaign.
The paper’s article, entitled An Edinburgh flat, a human rights activist and the oligarchs’ ‘dirty money,’ has “exposed claims that Scottish companies were used to launder cash through ODF (Open Dialog Foundation), run by Ukrainian citizen Lyudmyla Kozlovska, to fund a secret lobbying campaign” on behalf of Kazakh fugitive oligarch Mukhtar Ablyazov and Veaceslav Platon, according to the eutoday.net website.
The website has reported that Platon is a Moldovan businessman who was jailed in 2017 for money-laundering and fraud linked to the disappearance of USD 1 billion from Moldova’s banking system several years earlier, causing a political crisis in that country.
According to eutoday.net, a Moldovan parliament commission report has claimed that Platon has funded Kozlovska, also suggesting that Ablyazov is another source of funding.
'Strangely funded' NGO
Maciej Wąsik, a secretary of state at the Polish Prime Minister’s Office in Warsaw, suggested on TVP Info on Wednesday that the Open Dialogue Foundation could have been involved in hybrid warfare activities against Poland. He said the NGO has been "suspect" for a long time, with unclear sources of financing and activities “posing a threat in various parts of Europe.”
Wąsik suggested that politicians in Western Europe have ignored findings by Poland’s security services about Kozlovska.
“I am glad that this article has been published in the British press because it confirms what the Polish services have been saying,” Wąsik told the Minęła 20 programme’s host, Michał Rachoń.
Wąsik added: “I would venture to say that this foundation can be called a hybrid."
He also said that “wherever there is something happening in Europe, whether it’s Catalonia or Scotland, various strangely funded organisations emerge whose origins cannot be unequivocally fathomed."
'Organisations designed to wreak chaos'
Military counterintelligence expert Bączek said that the Russians have been known to create “organisations designed to wreak chaos” in various countries.
"A fictitious company, an entity, a foundation-cum-company is set up years earlier with a view to destabilising the situation in a given country and obtaining information in the future,” he said.
He added that Russian—and earlier Soviet—security services have been known to create “pretend businesses” for political ends.
He argued that Russia was seeking to discredit Poland at all costs.
"This is how Russian, and previously Soviet, security services have been operating for years," Bączek asserted.
He added that “the Open Dialogue Foundation was positively evaluated” by Poland’s previous coalition government of the Civic Platform (PO) and the Polish People’s Party (PSL) “when it [the foundation] applied for a concession to trade in defence products.”
Bączek, who headed Poland’s Military Counterintelligence Service from 2015 until January last year, argued that Poland’s security services “should have taken an interest” in the foundation when the previous government was in power.
'An operation mounted by the Russian intelligence service': MEP
Meanwhile, Polish MEP Jacek Saryusz-Wolski has told public broadcaster Polish Radio that he had warned fellow lawmakers in the European Parliament over the Open Dialogue Foundation two years ago.
“The Open Dialogue Foundation and Kozlovska are well known in the European Parliament,” Saryusz-Wolski, who has been a Eurodeputy since June 2004, told Polish Radio in an interview.
He voiced his view that the foundation’s activities looked like "an operation mounted by the Russian intelligence service."
“The red light flashed when Open Dialogue supported protests by the opposition in Poland aimed at changing those in power,” Saryusz-Wolski said on Polish Radio.
He told the Polish public broadcaster that he “encountered a wall of reluctance to understand” when he “warned MEPs against the Open Dialogue Foundation two years ago."
“There was a mixture of ignorance and resistance to information coming from Poland,” Saryusz-Wolski told Polish Radio. He added that some Eurodeputies turned a deaf ear “because those reports were politically inconvenient to them.”
“Today, the defenders of the foundation are silent,” he added.
Kozlovska was last August banned from entering Poland and the European Union.
According to the eutoday.net website, she is an accredited lobbyist at the European Parliament, where she has enjoyed support from deputies such as Guy Verhofstadt and several British Labour MEPs.
The foundation’s Kozlovska and Bartosz Kramek have denied having ties to Russia and being financed by Russian businesses.
The Sunday Times cited Martin Mycielski, director of public affairs for the Open Dialogue Foundation, as dismissing all the allegations in the Moldovan report, which he said was hastily produced without proper investigation by a special parliamentary committee.
(gs/pk)
Source: niezalezna.pl, wiadomosci.wp.pl