Marek Belka faces the media, Monday: photo - PAP/Tomasz Gzell
“Financial markets, where my authority counts most, would not disagree with anything I said. I am not considering stepping down,” Marek Belka said in an interview on TVN, Monday, following the publication of secretly recorded tapes of a conversation he had with Interior Minister Bartlomiej Sienkiewicz, revealing that the central bank governor wanted the removal of Poland's finance minister in July last year.
“That conversation was not for public consumption,” Belka said as attention turns to who recorded the expletive-laden talks at the 'Sowa and Friends' restaurant in Warsaw, four months before finance minister Jacek Rostowski was removed from his post in a cabinet reshuffle.
Prime Minister Donald Tusk defended both the national bank governor and Minister Sienkiewicz at a press conference on Monday, saying that Marek Bbelka was trying to help the government not influence it and the sacking of Rostowski last year was merely a coincidence.
“This is an attempt to bring down the government by illegal means,” Tusk told journalists amid speculation that either Poland's secret services were involved in the taping of ministers or that a foreign power was involved.
Belka had met with Minister Sienkiewicz to discuss the security of Poland's notes and coins but the conversation turned to finance policy and how the central bank would step in to prop up the economy and cover public debt if Rostowski was removed.
In the talks with the interior minister, Belka was also heard to complain about some members of “that fucking Monetary Policy Council” with whom he was having conflict with.
"Irrespective of how nastily they expressed their opinions, they were talking about how to help the country, not how to harm it and about joint actions in times of crisis," PM Donald Tusk said, as opposition MPs called for the resignation of the government in what is the biggest scandal to hit his centre-right Civic Platform-led coalition since it came to power in 2007.
Despite appointing Marek Belka, a former prime minister for the Left Democratic Alliance (SLD), Donald Tusk has no power to remove the constitutionally independent head of the central bank.
“I don't care who wins elections, though it cannot be said I am a supporter of [opposition party] Law and Justice,” Belka told TVN of his independence at the central bank.
Belka told TVN that he will be discussing the matter with President Bronislaw Komorowski on Tuesday.
Belka is scheduled to end his six-year term at the National Bank in 2016. (pg)