MP Ryszard Kalisz and committee members; photo - PAP/Tomasz Gzell
Kalisz says in the 266-page report, published Tuesday, that the interior minister of the then conservative-led cabinet, Zbigniew Ziobro, should also stand before the State Tribunal, for breaking Poland’s Constitution during a corruption investigation involving former Democratic Left Alliance (SLD) MP and construction minister Barbara Blida.
Blida was reported to have shot herself with a pistol through the heart in her bathroom, as officers raided her home looking for evidence that allegedly implicated her in a coal mining corruption scandal in Silesia, southern Poland.
Kaczynski and Ziobro of the Law and Justice party "used criminal law in the pursuit of the exclusion of large groups of citizens, creating a system of exclusion [from public life] of individuals assigned to certain groups, particularly in relation to Barbara Blida,” Kalisz writes in the report, which will be approved or amended at a meeting on 19 July.
The draft report alleges that “political and ideological” forces lay behind the events that led to the suicide.
Jaroslaw Kaczynski, the leader of the PiS party and the prime minister of an anti-corruption-orientated government at the time of Blida’s death, dismissed Kalisz’s report yesterday.
“I am getting myself ready to be sent to Siberia […] next to Khodorkovsky,” Kaczynski joked, referring to the imprisonment of former Russian Yukos billionaire Mikhail Khodorkovsky on what many see as trumped up charges.
Zbigniew Ziobro, now a PIS member of the European Parliament, accused the SLD’s Kalisz of “electioneering” before the general election this autumn, and described his suggestion that he should stand before the State Tribunal as “humorous”.
“Kalisz wants to capitalise, politically, ON the death of Barbara Blida,” Ziobro added.
Coal mafia
On 25 April 2007 at 06.05 in the morning officers from the Internal Security Agency (ABW) raided Blida’s home in Siemianowice Śląskie as part of an investigation into the so called Coal Mafia, involved in a series of corrupt deals during the 1990s in the mining industry in Silesia.
Blida was suspected of accepting and soliciting bribes alongside 13 other individuals.
While officers searched her home Blida asked to be allowed to go to the bathroom, which she was escorted to by a female officer. As the officer turned her back on the politician, Blida took a gun from the somewhere in the bathroom and shot herself once through the chest.
Blida’s party, SLD, immediately demanded the resignation of Zbigniew Ziobro as interior minister and accused the Law and Justice-led coalition - which had come to power in 2005 on a ticket of ending what was perceived as wide-spread corruption involving the previous SLD government - of pursuing a witch hunt against their party members and associates.
Critics of the former Law and Justice-led government, headed by the late president Lech Kaczynski’s twin brother, Jaroslaw, accused it of trying to make Poland into a semi-totalitarian state where police powers were increasingly abused. (pg)