The case, heard at the Warsaw-Praga District Court, involves more than 60 defendants and alleged losses of over PLN 3 billion (EUR 710,000, USD 825,000).
SKOK Wołomin was a cooperative savings and credit union based in the eponymous town near Warsaw. It formed part of a nationwide network of such institutions that offered basic banking services to their members.
According to prosecutors, between 2006 and 2014 an organised criminal group used SKOK Wołomin to obtain huge loans and credit facilities on the basis of falsified documents and sham collateral.
The indictment, prepared by the Regional Prosecutor’s Office in the western town of Gorzów Wielkopolski after a decade-long investigation, runs to 29 volumes and more than 5,500 pages. Because of the number of defendants and lawyers, the hearing is taking place in the largest conference room of the Warsaw-Praga court.
According to the prosecution service, the alleged scheme involved a group whose purpose was to secure loans and credit from SKOK Wołomin in the names of other people.
Individuals who agreed to take part were given forged employment certificates and fake income statements, along with property valuations that did not reflect real market prices. These people, often referred to in Polish as słupy, or straw men, formally applied for loans that were in fact controlled by the group.
The group is said to have bought real estate specifically so it could be used as loan collateral. Its value was then artificially inflated through property appraisals that, according to prosecutors, did not reflect reality.
On the basis of this documentation, the group allegedly obtained very large loans and credit lines from SKOK Wołomin, often for sums above PLN 1 million until 2013, and then up to that limit after a regulatory inspection.
That inspection was carried out by the Polish Financial Supervision Authority (KNF), which oversees banks, insurers and credit unions.
Prosecutors say the group tried to hide the scale of the problem through rolling over the loans. Installments on earlier debts were paid using money from new loans obtained in the same way, which, in their view, made it harder to detect the fraud and misled KNF about the true financial condition of SKOK Wołomin.
Investigators say that once the money had been drawn down, it was moved on again to accounts in Poland and abroad held by individuals and companies.
The transfers were made under fictitious descriptions, which, according to prosecutors, was intended to conceal the real beneficiary of the funds. The total value of the loans and credit facilities covered by the investigation is put at more than PLN 3 billion.
The SKOK Wołomin affair has generated a series of connected cases around Poland. Prosecutors say that in various side strands of the investigation close to 1,000 people have been charged. More than 600 have already been convicted in final judgments, including many of the straw men who lent their names to fraudulent loans.
At Monday’s first hearing, prosecutor Agnieszka Leszczyńska, who represents the state in the case, appeared with most of the accused, their defence lawyers and representatives of those who say they were harmed, including the receiver of the bankrupt credit union.
After about an hour of formalities, Judge Tomasz Ładny opened the trial proper and the prosecutor began reading out the indictment.
The main defendant in the new trial is Piotr Polaszczyk, a former officer of Poland’s Military Information Services (WS), a military intelligence and counterintelligence body that was dissolved in 2006. He later sat on the management of SKOK Wołomin.
Piotr Polaszczyk. Photo: PAP/Paweł Supernak
Polaszczyk has already faced several other proceedings related to the affair.
In a separate case before the same Warsaw-Praga court, which began in 2020 and recently reached the stage of closing arguments, Polaszczyk is accused of laundering PLN 358 million linked to SKOK Wołomin. He has also been convicted in another high-profile case connected with the affair.
In March this year, the Warsaw Regional Court upheld an earlier verdict that found Polaszczyk guilty of ordering an attack on Wojciech Kwaśniak, then deputy chairman of the Polish Financial Supervision Authority, who was supervising a KNF inspection of SKOK Wołomin in 2014.
Kwaśniak was severely beaten by hired thugs. The court handed Polaszczyk a final sentence of eight years in prison.
His defence team argues that the version of events accepted by the courts is illogical and has lodged a cassation appeal with the Supreme Court.
The new trial focuses on the core fraud allegations is expected to last many months, given the number of defendants, witnesses and documents involved.
(rt/gs)
Source: IAR, PAP