The travel expenses that MEP Ryszard Czarnecki presented to the European Parliament during his 20 years of service at the institution amount to a total of 203 thousand euros. According to the report presented by the Polish newspaper Gazeta Wyborcza, many of these trips were made on vehicles with invented license plates or registered to people who claimed to have never met Czarnecki. Many of the trips started from the city of Jasło, in eastern Poland, where the MEP claimed to reside, despite having lived for years in Warsaw, 340 kilometers closer to Brussels.
The cause
In 2020, the European Anti-Fraud Office questioned 100,000 euros reimbursed between 2009 and 2018, and obtained the entire sum back from Czarnecki. The leniency that European prosecutors showed in closing the case was not replicated by their Polish counterparts: “The reimbursement does not resolve the issue; at most, it can have an impact on the sentence or a possible obligation to pay compensation,” said Rafał Kawalec, spokesperson for the regional prosecutor’s office in the eastern city of Zamość.
Czarnecki argues that it’s not his fault, blaming the staffers who filled out the expense forms and calling the claims “lies and complete nonsense.” “Once again, as I’ve emphasized for the last four years, I failed to fill out the travel reimbursement forms that prosecutors and by extension the media are reporting on,” he told Politico. “I failed to enter the data in question. I’ve said that repeatedly. It’s bad faith not to acknowledge that.”
For Czarnecki, this is not his first brush with embarrassing situations. In 2018, he became the first vice-president of the European Parliament to be removed from office after comparing fellow Polish MEP Róża Thun to a Nazi collaborator.
The case becomes political in Poland
Czarnecki has served as an MEP for various parties, but in his last three terms he switched to the Law and Justice party (PiS), which sits on the ECR benches alongside Giorgia Meloni’s Brothers of Italy, and which governed Poland from 2015 until last year. People’s Party Prime Minister Donald Tusk argued that the MP’s behavior was emblematic of the style of PiS politicians, who were allowed to go unpunished when prosecutors were tightly controlled by the government and did not pursue politically sensitive cases.
“Of course, when the relevant rulings are issued, we will have to draw the appropriate conclusions,” PiS chairman Jarosław Kaczyński was the only one to say. As reported by Politico, Czarnecki claims he is being unfairly targeted: “I returned all the funds requested by the European Parliament three years ago,” he said. “I see the whole case as political,” he added.
