Ex-Polish official extradited from US after fraud conviction

WARSAW: A Pole who fled to the US after being found guilty in a massive Communist-era fraud case has been extradited and has arrived in Warsaw, Poland’s justice minister said Saturday.

Dariusz Przywieczerski fled Poland to avoid incarceration after being found guilty in 2005 of involvement in a scheme to illegally trade in foreign debt at a state agency controlled by the communist secret service.

He had been sentenced to three-and-a-half years in prison.

The fraud involving the Foreign Debt Servicing Fund, known as FOZZ, cost the country’s treasury an estimated 350 million zlotys in the late 1980s (83 million euros at today’s exchange rate).

Several others involved were given prison sentences.

The 72-year-old was arrested in October 2017 in Florida, where he had been residing, after Poland sought his extradition.

Justice Minister Zbigniew Ziobro said Saturday that “very influential men” were part of the scam “including people linked to the Soviet secret services as well as simple bandits and gangsters”.

Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki has called it “the mother of all affairs” of corruption.

FOZZ, which was closely controlled by the secret services in the early 1990s, was set up by the central European nation’s last Communist regime to buy back Poland’s external debt.

But the organisation’s bosses moved the funds earmarked for the debt buy-up through fictitious offshore companies, described by prosecutors during a marathon trial nearly two decades ago as “a parade of swindlers”.